Barre Phillips - Basse Barre '1968/2021

Tracks list

       Phillips' 1968 recording of solo bass improvisations Basse Barre in
France on Futura Records, is generally credited as the first solo bass record.

“I play everything based on what my ear suggests I play, with no objective
editing. And my ear is fed by a pool of accumulated musical experiences stored
in my memory, mental memory and muscle memory. My active role is to do the best
I can to play on my instrument what my ear is suggesting.”
 
Bassist Barre Phillips, who was born in 1934 in California but has lived in the
south of France since the early 1970s, has been at the forefront of successive
revolutions in improvised music. He initially followed an academic career to the
age of 25, until one day, as he puts it, he “just flipped” and
decided that he would pursue his passion for music “come hell or high
water”.
 
Ornette Coleman set him on his jazz path around 1960 and he was soon working the
extremes of the “New Thing”, playing improvised chamber music with
Jimmy Guiffre and freely expressive “fire music” with Archie Shepp.
In London in the late 1960s he played with John Stevens’ history-making
Spontaneous Music Ensemble and with the South African musicians around Chris
McGregor. He then co-founded the powerhouse group The Trio with John Surman and
Stu Martin, which appeared on Mountainscapes. Phillips’ first recording
for ECM, however, was the 1971 duo album Music for Two Basses with Dave Holland,
the first duo for basses issued on any label (“a fine record by two
masters of the instrument”, BBC).
 
After further recordings for the label with Surman, and with Terje Rypdal, and
the solo bass album, Call Me When You Get There, Phillips experimented with
music for bass, percussion and tape on Aquarium Rain and mediated between Evan
Parker and Paul Bley on Time Will Tell and Sankt Gerold, the latter a live
album, taped at the Austrian mountain monastery. John Fordham, writing about
this album in the Guardian, praised Phillips for “on the one hand
swirling, smoky bowed textures and on the other great tension between his
precision of pitch and buzzing-bee abstractions”. The bassist also
collaborated with Joe and Mat Maneri on two ECM discs, Tales of Rohnlief and
Angles of Repose, the second of which was recorded at the ancient chapel of
Sainte Philomène, which adjoins Phillips’s home in Puget-Ville.

Tracklist:
1 01. Barre Phillips - Journal Violone (Pt. 1) (18:39)
1 02. Barre Phillips - Journal Violone (Pt. 2) (19:07) 

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