Who are/were the most prolific bass players? Who is the most recorded, played on the most tracks, or created the most original lines?
Not looking for subjective “greatest” or “best” or “favorite” or “most influential”. But objectively most recorded.
I’ve found Leland Sklar with >2,000 albums and Carole Kaye with >10,000 tracks. Those numbers are hard to balance because how many tracks did Sklar play on each album? Anyone who equals or exceeds these two?
“Duck” Dunn? Chuck Rainey? Pino? Tony Levin? Those last two did a lot, but spent lots of time connected to specific groups or artists. So probably not in the realm of dedicated session musicians.
I’m seeing him being recorded on “over 2,200 sessions”. He is credited as the most recorded Jazz bassist. He’s also worked on popular albums like ‘The Low End Theory’.
Since a session would generally produce a full album, that puts him, Sklar, and Kaye at the top of the pile, but the different metrics make it tough to clearly rank those three.
James Jamerson has to be up there but hard to quantify:
James Lee Jamerson (January 29, 1936 – August 2, 1983)[1][a] was an American bassist. He was the uncredited bassist on most of the Motown Records hits in the 1960s and early 1970s (Motown did not list session musician credits on their releases until 1971), and is now regarded as one of the greatest and most influential bass players in modern music history.
I actually suspect Jamerson would be relatively low on the list. He had a shorter career than the others. He might win if you narrowed it down to just a 5 or 10 year span, but probably not for total career.
Pino probably has the most iconic bass lines I listen to, it’s funny how I discovered many, many songs I love was recorded by Pino. I just learned that Phil’s ballad, Do you remember? was Pino and not Sklar.
As far as sheer number of recordings, Carol Kaye for the win. She is uncredited for most of the songs she played on (as are the rest of the Wrecking Crew), but she created and recorded more iconic bass lines than anyone else.
McCartney is heralded as an historic and innovative bassist by many, many players, not the least of which are Our Trusty Bass Teacher and other renowned bass teachers such as Mark Smith (TalkingBass) and Scott Devine (SBL), to name but a few. The list goes on and on.
McCartney has always been a guitarist, and he brought that body of knowledge and expertise to the bass. Plus, by his own account, he composed some of his most memorable lines by borrowing techniques liberally from James Jamerson and many other bass greats.
This list would not be complete without adding Tony Levin. He started recording as a session musician in 1970 and is still going strong today as both a primary contributor and session bassist.
The topic is PROLIFIC bass players, not “underrated” bassists.
Objectively, the ones with the MOST recordings. We’re massaging that a bit for fun discussing artists like Pino Paladino and Tony Levin who don’t have the absolute most recordings, but who have been attached to lots of great acts for live tours.
@BeerBaron Maybe our definitions of “prolific” are different? By any objective definition of prolific, I think Tony Levin definitely meets it. Here’s a list of just the albums he has contributed to.
That’s some special sauce there.
