The Bass Library

Apologies if a similar thread exists - I couldn’t find one.

Just picked this up on Amazon. Hugely looking forward to reading it. One of my all-time heroes

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Pretty much the only comprehensive book I can find on Jamerson.

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It felt like this was a punchline to a joke for something along the lines of “World’s Shortest Lists”! Lol.

Joking aside, do you mean books by bassists talking about bass, or biography type things about bassists themselves and their lives?

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@chris6 I am also a Jack Bruce fan. I look forward to your review.

And who better to write the forward than Eric Clapton.

I hope he talks about the time Bruce and Baker (who hated each other) were trying to drown each other out by playing louder and louder, and Eric says he just quit playing, and nobody in the audience even noticed.

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Band drama! Us musicians are such divas!

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I guess this is where I drop my monthly endorsement of Soul Fingers: The Music & Life of Legendary Bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn

It’s a lot like the Jamerson book-- bio/photos for about 30 pages, and then a large collection of his song transcriptions. Duck’s basslines are much more beginner-friendly than Jamerson’s fwiw. It has a ton of simple but classic grooves with full song notation + tab + audio examples, highly recommended.

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Which I still haven’t started weeks after I bought it :roll_eyes:

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I guess If I thought asbout it more berfore posting I should have just called it something like Bass Library - no reason why we can’t discuss any books related to bass: Biographies, History, Instructional etc. That’s always been my problem - post first, think second :rofl:

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24 Hour Party People was amazing, but this might be even better…

I should definitely get that, and the other two parts:

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I just struggle to read books nowadays. I think it’s the impact of the digital age on me.

Happy to watch a video about bassists though. :slight_smile:

Probably not a good thing though. I know there is value in books that I’m just not accessing.

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I know exactly what you mean @JT
I tend to listen to podcasts or those audio book things .
I used to read so much but I’ve certainly let that slip

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I think I probably read more now than I ever have, but sadly it’s never books :slight_smile:

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I think its a particularly serious problem with the younger generation who have grown up with smartphones and tablets from the cradle, having never got into the habit of reading. I know I’m an old fart but I had a classical grammar school education where Latin was still taught and I put the level of illiteracy on social media down to people’s lack of reading. I try not to comment because anyone who does is invariably put down for being a pedant but the loss of language skills really is very sad.

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I get fascinated by topics like this. I’m on the older side too and it frustrates me sometimes when talking to my kids. But I can also put on another hat and see text speak and talking in fragments a possible evolution of language, or at least a justifiable offshoot. It can be more efficient for example. One of my hobbies is designing language for AI, so I get quite enthralled in it all. :slightly_smiling_face:

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For some reason this reminded me of when Microsoft put Tay on twitter and within like 12 hours it had gone Full Nazi.

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I’m thinking of getting the book “My Cross to Bear” by the late Gregg Allman. I’m a big fan of the Allman Brothers Band and am currently working on a cover of one of their songs.

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I made it about 75% through "Acid for the Children" but never finished it. I found it to be so poorly written I had a hard time enjoying it. I read enough of his life story to develop a disdain for him.

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More focused on the instruments, but these seem to have info on bassists too.
Has anyone read either of the below books?

re: reading actual books… I am a terribly slow and distracted reader, and I am sure this has been made worse by the internet. I run a saxophone website that is focused on CONN viintage saxes and we posted our first article that was an indepth study of a 3-saxophone rig someone invented in the 20s. The info was never presented in any other way to this detail, including multimedia. You have to be someone really interested in it to read it, which is fine, however, Google analytics tells me people spent less than 6 minutes on average, impossible to read it all. Why? well it is hard to read long things online, this is a researched area, including font color and eye strain (which is why the font color of ‘black’ is now grey on most things.
Here is the link BTW in case anyone has interest in something other than a bass, haha.
https://connsortia.com/billy-trues-one-man-band-a-most-innovative-conntraption/

For me though, I have made a consious effort to read more paper books, and I am loving it.
Once you carve out the down time and turn off all the other screens, it becomes a really nice escape.

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I like Victor’s teaching style. He is so open and even spiritual about music. Very free about it. One thing he says a lot and in this book is “you are never more than a half-step away from a “correct” note”.

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Now that’s one I might invest in @kerushlow

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