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Hey, Mr. Bass Man
Jazz, rock, funk, classical -- you name it and musician/composer Dave Anderson can play it. In fact, the bearded bassist often tops off an LPO concert with a club gig.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
By Chris Waddington
From the open door of the Spotted Cat, an electric bass line floated into the night, punctuated by the clink of bottles and glasses, and washed by psychedelic droning from a pedal steel guitar. The bass player -- a burly, bearded guy with a ponytail -- unfurled musical phrases like a flamenco singer, stretching across bar lines, going someplace deep and primeval.
Even on club-crowded Frenchmen Street -- home to a nightly smorgasbord of New Orleans sounds -- the music stood out as something remarkable. For those in the know, it meant one thing: "Symphony Boy" had left his white tie and tails at home and had come downtown to jam with his club-scene buddies again.
Dave Anderson is "Symphony Boy" -- principal bassist of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and a composer whose complex, notated works have gradually earned him an international reputation. Chamber players from New Zealand to New York perform his bass duets and other small-scale pieces. His 1998 "Bass Concerto" was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra -- considered one of the world's finest classical ensembles -- and also was played by the LPO and in Houston. His 1995 quintet for winds and strings gets a belated New Orleans premiere this week in two free concerts presented by Musaica, an ensemble formed by LPO players after Hurricane Katrina.
"I don't pay attention to the supposed barriers between musical genres," Anderson said. "Music is music. It's good or it's bad."
That's not just talk from Anderson, a jovial, beer-drinking 45-year-old who grew up in Cleveland, where his father played bass trombone with that city's orchestra. Since moving to New Orleans in 1996, he has played with blues guitarist Walter "Wolfman" Washington and with Brian Stoltz of the Funky Meters, with jazz artists including Bobby McFerrin and Dave Easley, and with roots rockers such as The Radiators.
In his Metairie family room -- Katrina flooded him out of Gentilly -- Anderson drove home the point by picking up the 200-year-old double bass he plays with the LPO. First, he bowed the brooding chords of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir," making that rock anthem sound like a Bartok transcription of a wailing gypsy tune. Then he snapped the strings so they slapped the bridge in the swinging manner of a jazzman, pointing to a classical score, by David Del Tredici, that called for the same style of playing.
"My composing comes out of my improvisations on bass. And my improvising reflects my work with rock bands, jazz bands and classical groups," Anderson said.
Musicians of all stripes have good things to say about Anderson.
"How many guys have added to the literature for their instrument as a classical composer and can sit in on a funk session and not look lost?" asked Reggie Scanlan, bass player with The Radiators. "Dave can play anything and do it beautifully -- and nobody but other players seems to know about him. That hometown obscurity is why I call him a 'typical great New Orleans musician.' "
Klauspeter Seibel, the German conductor who led the LPO for close to a decade, called the bassist "one of the greatest assets among the LPO musicians," and described his playing as "very sensitive and full of emotion, from extreme tenderness to greatest force."
Seibel conducted the local premiere of Anderson's "Bass Concerto" and remembered it fondly: "You know, the instrument doesn't have too big a variety, but I remember Dave's piece takes every chance. As he is such a good bass player . . . he was not shy to include virtuoso as well as lyrical parts. . . . His great feeling for rhythm helps the classical music as well."
As a child, Anderson listened to his father rehearse classics in the basement, helped him tape Sunday broadcasts of the Cleveland Orchestra, played electric bass, and got to know the rock 'n' roll of the James Gang "because Joe Walsh went to my high school," he said. His dad got him thinking about composition by pushing him to transcribe Brahms and Mahler songs -- the lyric vocal parts -- for his bass.
"Compared to most of the string instruments, there isn't much classical repertoire for the double bass," Anderson said. "I had to start writing to keep myself interested. And it happens that the past 20 years has seen a huge expansion in bass technique, in part because classical bassists started to look more closely at the innovations of jazz players."
In the mid-1980s, Anderson studied with jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius, the force behind Weather Report's most popular work.
"Jaco showed me new fingerings and talked about harmonies, but he really made me see that jazz and classical music weren't separate -- and that I could play both," Anderson said.
Pastorius drove the young bassist to study the loping funk grooves of New Orleans legend George Porter and also taught him the benefits of active listening. "Ear training for jazz is much more advanced than it is in classical conservatories," Anderson said.
That ear training, essential to an improviser, also has come in handy for Anderson as a composer. "It takes absolute virtuosity to play some bass parts in symphonic music, but a lot of the time, I'm just holding a simple pedal. That means I've been able to listen to the entire orchestra and think about compositions -- how the counterpoint unfolds, how the varied sonorities of the instruments blend -- instead of sweating over some complicated passage for bass," Anderson said.
Bassist Sidney King has known Anderson and his music for 20 years. The two men became friends in the bass section of the Louisville Orchestra -- a group famed for its interest in contemporary composers. Since then, King has commissioned several compositions from Anderson, including the "Quintet for Oboe, Clarinet, Violin, Viola and Double Bass" that will be played in New Orleans this week.
"Over the years, Dave has developed a personal musical language," King said. "He'll fit jazz and rock influences into a classical piece, but it's never a pastiche. He has distilled his influences. His work is appealing, accessible -- the opposite of work from academic composers who are writing for peer review by other university professors. Dave's music can be serious, but he's not afraid to be fun."
The titles of Anderson's bass duets reveal something about his sense of humor. Works such as "Blew Cheese" and "Parade of the Pigs" hardly sound appropriate for an academic résumé. On a live recording of the duets that features Anderson and King, you can hear roars of audience laughter mixed with the applause.
And it doesn't stop there. Friends report that Anderson once outfitted the LPO bass section in T-shirts from Wagner's Meat -- yes, you've seen the slogan -- during a dress rehearsal for a Richard Wagner opera. On another occasion, he drove up and down Canal Street playing his latest composition from car speakers: a thundering rap soundtrack composed from audio samples of flatulence.
King sees Anderson's compositions, his crossover playing and his light-hearted approach to art as part of a broader trend.
"We've been living in an age of specialization -- in all areas, not just in music. You have to stick to one thing to get ahead. But I'm seeing more and more classical musicians break out of that," King said. "I play in a flamenco group. I see violinists and cellists sitting in with bluegrass bands and rock groups. For composers, it's open season -- they are listening to everything, the same way that Bartok tapped into Hungarian folk music or Stravinsky brought elements of jazz and tango into his unique musical language."
It has been happening in New Orleans, too -- and not just with classical players, said pedal steel player Dave Easley, a frequent collaborator with Anderson.
"If I compare Dave to a jazz bass player like Jim Singleton, I hear more similarities than differences," Easley said. "Jim trained as a jazz player, but he loves 20th-century classical composers like Bartok and he has started a string quartet to play his original tunes.
"New Orleans is a great place for cross-pollination, in part because it's the right size city. In a really big place, you'd have enough blues players or jazz players. Everyone can become a specialist. A small town can't support anything unusual because there aren't enough players. New Orleans is just right. Here good musicians meet each other -- and need each other."
For Anderson, New Orleans has been a perfect place to pursue his eclectic interests. He often goes straight from LPO concerts to music clubs, sometimes rushing so much that he ends up wearing white tie and tails when everyone else is in T-shirts and sandals.
"You can't do that in most towns," Anderson said. "When I evacuated after Katrina, I landed a great job with the Minnesota Orchestra, but Minneapolis closes up too early to play two gigs a night. I had to get back here as soon as I could. I was going crazy away from New Orleans."
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