At The Low End

I've been thinking a lot about bass players lately - both bass guitar and double bass. Not sure why my thoughts have been turning in this direction. I mean I've always had a thing about listening closely to bassists (and trying to play a bit myself) but I've found myself listening with a peculiar intensity to the low end of late. Possibly this was prompted by the reappearance of an interesting thread on bass players over at ProgressiveEars, to which I almost contributed but, probably wisely, decided it was too much trouble to do so.

In this case my contribution would have been to have raised the name of Peter Giles, the bassist on the second Crimso outing, In the Wake of Poseidon - and on the self-titled McDonald and Giles album (that could have been the second Crimson album had things panned out in that direction.) His name is missing from any of the excellent lists in the Bass Players thread, and understandably so. I say this simply because, as far as I know, he just upped and left the music scene circa 1972 and didn't really come back until becoming a key player in the 21st Century Schizoid Band in the first decade of this century.

The thing is that listening to his playing on the Schizoids' Pictures of a City - Live in New York recently I suddenly realised just how perfect he is as a player on all that early material. And then following that with the two earlier albums mentioned above just how perfectly he fits in with his brilliant brother Mike Giles (surely a candidate for the best rock-jazz drummer of the late 60s, early 70s!) Uncannily he both holds the material together in terms of rock solid in-the-pocket rhythm but can go wandering when the space allows. A good example is the titular Pictures of a City from the live album - and, fascinatingly, throughout the full performance following that incendiary starter you'd think that he acquired a new drummer brother in the shape of the mighty (and mightily under-rated) Ian Wallace.

Anyway, all this has left me considering whether I might just embark on a mini-sequence of posts to this Far Place of bass players who have made it to my private pantheon of greats. The problem is that there're just too many.

But one last point in relation to Peter Giles. In the bits and pieces of background stuff I've read on him - much coming from Sid Smith's toxic tome on Crimson - I've formed the impression that he was, and is, a very strong personality with a definite sense of what music-making has meant to him and that stepping away from the professional scene to an 'ordinary' life was far from necessarily a bad thing - for him. Maybe for anyone?