Luckily Gary was among those people; he was constantly encouraging and accommodating. And, you know, I was lucky too that guys like Coryell and Bob Moses and Haynes were of a like mind — were more than willing to venture forth with me, and to try and make this thing work. But to this day I don't feel that I've changed idioms or changed camps in any way at all. I've just kind of doggedly stuck with the music that I've wanted to play all along and luckily found sufficient people who were okay with the electric bass to make it work.
Shortly after I'd started playing the electric I figured, "Okay I better check out James Jamerson in greater depth and I've gotta listen to Duck Dunn. So I did, I bought a bunch of Motown records and a bunch of Stax records and in the end I developed a tremendous respect and admiration for those guys, but I didn't find much in the way they played that was of direct use to me. In fact what I really found was that I had been ignoring people like Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding and that I had a tremendous amount to learn from them about phrasing and melody. I think I walked away from my period of intense interest in Motown and Stax having gained a lot of knowledge from the singers, but not so much from the bass players. Knowledge and pleasure as well. To this day I listen to the R&B singers that came out of both of those companies with immense pleasure — just loved them.
AS FAR AS WHAT'S ONQUARTET LIVE AND THE MATERIAL ON IT THAT GOES PRETTY FAR BACK, CAN YOU SAY ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR PIECES "FALLING GRACE" AND "HULLO BOLINAS" AS FAR AS WHAT WENT INTO THEM COMPOSITIONALLY IN TERMS OF THE ROCK AND POP? Yeah, well, just sort of coincidentally neither of those pieces were really much influenced by anything other than the prevailing jazz of the time. I wrote a number of pieces that were more clearly in an idiom that was influenced by the rock and pop of those days, but not those two pieces. "Falling Grace" I'd written in the mid-'60s while I was playing with Stan Getz, I believe, or maybe even still with Art Farmer and I was really strongly under the influence of Bill Evans and I think it's his idiom that that piece stands in.
It's worth noting that Gary was tremendously influenced by Bill as well and he readily acknowledges that Bill's music had a huge, huge impact on him. "Hullo Bolinas" I wrote in 1970 when I moved to Bolinas, which is a little town north of San Francisco, for a couple years. And in fact Bill ended up recording both of those pieces subsequently when Eddie Gomez was his bass player and Eddie started slipping some of my tunes under Bill's door. And he ended up liking both of those and recording them — no it's funny, those particular tunes I can't see much cross-influence at all.
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