Sonny Rollins & Wilbur Ware on "I'll Remember April"
The inscrutable gaze I started thinking about checking out more bass players after a casual conversation with bassist and friendly neighbor Walter Stinson on the topic of pianists with better or worse "bass hearing." Essentially, the conversation reminded me that my own bass hearing isn't particularly sharp or refined; as I semi-unashamedly admit, it took me an embarrassingly long time since I started to listen to jazz in my teens even to register the vague pitch content of the bass. Part of this I'd chalk up to relatively lame earbuds and the low end-obliterating rumble of subway trains and cars—the spaces where I most often listened to music—but another part of it was, of course, plain ignorance, inattentiveness, and fixation on the horn soloist, for obvious reasons. Returning to my conversation with Walt, he also said something that struck me as perceptive and sadly true, which is that bassists can sometimes get away with having a decent beat but plain borin...