Veteran pianist Dave Bass will probably never fully outrun the part of his bio where a wrist fracture necessitated a shift away from music for a few decades, during which time he became a prominent attorney and ultimately Deputy Attorney General with the California Office of the Attorney General.
But the nearly 15 years since he began recording again – and the decade in which he’s been back to music full time – are actually far more interesting. While he started out with a bang, introducing the Dave Bass Quartet featuring Ernie Watts, he’s shifted engagingly in the 2020s to the trio format, with stellar results. On Trio Nuevo, his fourth trio collection in four years, Bass closes the set with a wink back at that quart album with a dramatic and frolicsome, piano pounding rendition of “Gone.”
After three volumes of recordings with his original trio of bassist Kerry Kashiwagi and drummer Scott Gordon, his latest compositional journeys led him to refigure his creative path with the new rhythm section (hence, Trio Nuevo) of Tyler Miles (bass) and Steve Helfand (drums). The fresh adventure begins with a fast-bustling, chaotic and offbeat reflection on “These Times” that the pianist calls his “most forward-thinking composition to date.”
Along the way, he balances soulful, improvisation-filled mood swingers like “August” and “December” with two pieces based on classic material - an imaginative, high-energy twist on “My Melancholy Baby” (re-worked as the percussive, high-flying “Baby Melon”) and the elegant meditation “One Look,” inspired by Gershwin’s “Embraceable You.” Bass began sharing his lifelong obsession with Bach on two pieces from The Trio, Vol. 1.
He continues with what is surely the most fascinating piece on Trio Nuevo, a delightful, rhythmically unpredictable exercise titled “Three Views on Bach,” which approaches “Partita #2” with free improvisation, a faithful melodic section and a later part that mixes both approaches. The so called “covers” that Bass and the trio enjoy making their own include “As Time Goes By,” Charlie Haden’s “Sandino” (prominently featuring Miles’ plucky basslines), a dramatic spin on Denny Zeitlin’s perfectly titled “Offshore Breeze” and Andrew Hill’s angular, 13-bar romp “Duplicity.”
- Jonathan Widran (The JW Vibe)
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DAVE BASS TRIO NUEVO – Tiger Turn Records
Dave Bass, piano/composer/arranger; Tyler Miles, double bass; Steve Helfand, drums.
Fourteen years ago, when Dave Bass recorded his first albums, he was working with singers and horn players including Phil Woods, Conrad Herwig, Ernie Watts, Ted Nash, and Ignacio Berroa. These initial recordings found their way to the top of the Jazz Week Radio Charts. When Dave Bass released an album called “Gone” featuring vocalist Mary Stallings, the stellar reviews continued. Other albums followed like “No Boundaries” in 2019 and “NYC Sessions in 2015, that was named one of the “Best Albums” of that year. In 2021, Bass switched up and adopted the trio format.
“I think playing in a trio is one of the most challenging situations for a musician,” Bass said in his press package. “But it’s also perhaps the most satisfying configuration, because you can really develop kind of telepathy with other musicians,” he concluded.
It’s a joy to listen to Dave Bass. He is so tender and emotional when he plays. His mastery of technique paints each tune he plays with vivid colors. Bass was soaking up the creative lifestyle of San Francisco, playing a lot of Latin music and jazz, while gigging until the mid-1980s. At that point, a horrible accident changed his life and upended his career as a popular and prolific pianist. This horrible injury to his wrist caused him to desert his love of piano and choose a legal career. In 1992, he joined a prestigious law firm and in 1996, Dave Bass accepted the position of Deputy Attorney General in the California Office of the Attorney General. This led him to join the Civil Rights Enforcement taskforce.
Bass hadn’t even considered playing piano again until, in 2005, while attending a friendly house party friends at the get-together encouraged him to play solo piano, once the hired band took a break. It was the first time he recognized that his broken wrist had healed. The attorney was surprised that he still had the talent and ability to play piano and entertain.
On this album you will enjoy his innovative and well-played original music as well as his arrangements of old standards like “As Time Goes By.”
His stunning, creative, reconstruction of the legendary classical composer, Bach, is both complex and jazzy. Bass calls this project “Three Views of Bach,” and his arrangement is absolutely beautiful. He breaks down his concept of Bach’s style into three sections. The first is a free improvisation on Bach’s harmonies. The second part is a fairly faithful rendition of the Bach original technique, and the third part is a combination of both.
The Dave Bass originals stand out like original pieces of art. On the tune called “August” his bassist, Tyler Miles, begins this arrangement. Bass flies around the 88-keys like a busy hummingbird on this dramatic piece of music, then cuts the time, changing the tempo and inviting Miles to take an engaging solo on bass. At the very end of this tune, drummer Steve Helfand takes a flashy solo. They end the song in the same dramatic way they began it. Another original I enjoyed was “One Look,” a blues-based tune propelled by the swirling brushes of Helfand on drums. On the Bass original, “Baby Melon,” the trio swings hard. Dave Bass has a special touch on the piano that invites the listener into his music with wide open arms and a generous heart.
-Musical Memoirs by Dee Dee McNeil
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TRIO NUEVO / These Times. August. One Look. Baby Melon. December. Three Views of Bach. Gone (Dave Bass). As Time Goes By (Herman Hupfeld). Sandino (Charlie Haden). Offshore Breeze (Denny Zeitlin). Duplicity (Andrew Hill) / Trio Nuevo: Dave Bass, pno; Tyler Miles, bs; Steve Helfand, dm / Dave Bass Music 004
Veteran pianist Dave Bass has been around for decades (he’s six months older than I am), yet this is only his seventh album and fourth as leader. He was described in the promo sheet for this CD as one who has long been fascinated by Latin jazz, yet what attracted me to this album was that the music did NOT sound like ordinary Latin jazz; on the contrary, the arrangements are more rhythmically subtle and a bit more complex than the average “Latin jazz” group. The other thing that attracted me was Bass’ playing. He is the antithesis of the many showy virtuosi we have now in jazz; on the contrary, his playing uses a fairly small dynamic range and, though he clearly has a good technique, he seems to value substance over showing off, and this is all to the good.
The opening selection, These Times, is a perfect example. As the publicity tells it, “The composition comprises written parts, including some fairly abstract counterpoint and free jazz improvisation with changing tempos.” This is clearly outside the realm of your average “Latin jazz” group; Bass uses subtlety and color in his playing, and he has a strong sense of musical construction. This piece, in particular, reminded me so much of Herbie Nichols that I was shocked that it wasn’t a formerly unknown piece by that sadly-neglected jazz master. (I was also surprised not to see Nichols listed in the liner notes as one of his influences.) Yet as he goes along, the playing becomes quicker in tempo and a bit more frenetic than Nichols although it never quite shakes that vibe. Just hearing this first piece immediately made me want to review the whole CD.
Dave Bass
Next up is the classic As Time Goes By, the only old standard on the record, which Bass, like so many of us, first heard played in the classic film Casablanca. After a rather baroque out-of-tempo introduction, Bass starts not with the initial melody but with the bridge of the tune. When he finally gets into the principal melody, he breaks it down to its barest essentials and teases it before handing it over to Miles on bass, whose solo is quite nice, alternating between improvisation and a paraphrase of the melody. To put it as clearly as I can, Bass and his trio underwhelm you in a way that is deceiving. You need to pay attention to understand all that they are doing.
Miles plays the a cappella intro to August, a piece that has a nice lilt in that rarest of all tempos (especially nowadays), a medium beat. Although Bass admits to a lifelong love of the music of J.S. Bach, I still hear undercurrents of Nichols in his playing—well, Nichols mixed with Bach, which certainly isn’t a bad thing. None of this music is on what you’d call the “cutting edge” of modern jazz, but it’s only mainstream in the harmonic sense, and even then there are exceptions and little wrinkles that Bass and Miles throw into it. I must also give high marks to drummer Steve Helfland, who knows how to break up the beat when he needs to but can also play a straight, swinging 4 when called upon. In the last chorus of August he is particularly interesting, and it is here that one sense, for the first time, a real Latin influence.
One Look is in a slow 4, a real jazz ballad of the old school, with a genuine MELODY rather than the usual string of short bitonal motifs that passes for melodies nowadays. Bill Evans would have enjoyed playing this one. There’s some nice interplay between Bass and Miles here, with Helfland mostly on brushes. By contrast, Baby Melon is a real swinger of the old school—another kind of piece you never hear nowadays, and on this track Bass plays with a more enthusiastic attack while Miles very happily walks his bass behind him. December is a somewhat dark-sounding tune written in December 2022, yet it is in this piece that you hear the most clearly-defined Latin rhythm, particularly during Bass’ solo when the tempo heats up. The tempo then relaxes for a nice, if dirge-like arco bass solo. I only wish they hadn’t opted for the fade-out ending.
Three Views of Bach sounds much funkier in the opening than I would have expected, but true to his word Bass gets into some nice two-handed single-note counterpoint in the Bachian style. Eventually, however, Bach “goes to town” as the hep cats used to say back in the day. A really nice piece. Charlie Haden’s Sandino begins as a ballad but the tempo ever-so-slightly increases as a bit of Latin rhythm sneaks in behind the soloists.
Although I was a little disappointed by Offshore Breeze, another ballad and, in this case, not a particularly interesting one, there is no question that this is a remarkable CD. The interaction between Bass and Miles is clearly the kind that can only be built up through long exposure to each others’ playing, and even here this is in evidence. Andrew Hill’s Duplicity is a piece built around rising chromatics, and this, too comes off well.
The finale, Gone, has the strongest Latin rhythm of all, a sort of jazz samba.
This is really a wonderful CD mixing mainstream jazz with imaginative subtlety and years of experience in knowing how to create solos that are compositions in themselves. Highly recommended!
-The Art Music Lounge by Lynn Rene Bayley
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The last time I wrote about jazz pianist Dave Bass was when he released the third installment in a series of albums entitled simply The Trio. The other members of his trio were Kerry Kashiwagi on bass and Scott Gordon on drums. This past Friday Tiger Turn released his latest album. This is yet another trio album, but the title is Trio Nuevo; and, as of this writing, it is available through an Amazon.com Web page that provides only an MP3 download. As readers may have guessed, this is a new trio album; but Bass is joined by two new players. The bass is now played by Tyler Miles, and Steve Helfand is the drummer.
As usual, Bass is the composer for the lion’s share of the tracks. This includes the latest effort of a “meeting of the minds” with Johann Sebastian Bach (who was no slouch when it came to improvising). The title of the track is “Three Views of Bach;” and, while I am not yet sure of the enumeration, I found the interleaving of Baroque and jazz riffs to be more engaging than I anticipated.
While Bass dominates as composer, there are also highly imaginative tracks based on tunes by Charlie Haden (“Sandino”) and Denny Zeitlin (“Offshore Breeze”). For those that may still be nostalgic for Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, there is a setting of Herman Hupfield’s “As Time Goes By,” which eases its way into the tune. Personally, I rather like the way in which Bass keeps the listener guessing about when the tune will actually show itself explicitly. Ironically, however, such a listener is likely to be disappointed by the time the track concludes, realizing that the tune has revealed itself only through its most telling of its fragments. This implicit approach to familiarity makes for an engaging contrast with the more explicit Bach riffs.
In other words these are tracks that are likely to please particularly attentive listeners. Some might wish to dismiss such an attitude as “snob appeal.” I prefer to call it just “having fun with the music!”
-The Rehearsal Studio by Stephan Smoliar
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Reviews from each album
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TRIO VOL 2.
“I MUST SAY BRAVO. I’M PARTICULARLY IMPRESSED WITH THE GROWING EMPATHY OF THE TRIO; THE QUALITY AND VARIETY OF THE “COVERS,” AND BASS’ ABILITY TO AVOID BOTH SLAVISH IMITATION AND NOVELTY-FOR-NOVELTY’S SAKE IN HIS INTERPRETATIONS; THE PROGRAMMATIC BALANCE CREATED BY BASS’ ORIGINALS, OF WHICH I FIND “MAY” PARTICULARLY ATTRACTIVE; AND THE LEAN STRENGTH OF THE PIANO SOLOS.”
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TRIO VOL. 1
“THE TRIO, VOL. 1 ANNOUNCES THAT DAVE BASS IS NOT CONTENT TO REST ON THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF HIS PREVIOUS RECORDINGS. HE HAS TAKEN ON PERHAPS THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE FOR A JAZZ PIANIST – THE TRIO – AND RESPONDS BY PLAYING, COMPOSING, ARRANGING AND LEADING WITH STRENGTH AND SINGULARITY. IN KERRY KASHIWAGI AND SCOTT GORDON, HE HAS PARTNERS WHO ARE WITH HIM EVERY NOTE OF THE WAY, AND THE SPACES IN BETWEEN.”
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NO BOUNDRIES
IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO SEE A LAWYER TURN HIS BACK ON THE SCALES AND GET BACK TO THE REAL SCALES, ESPECIALLY SINCE THEY WERE ONCE A JAZZBO PIANO MAN IN THE FIRST PLACE. SURROUNDING HIMSELF WITH GRAMMY WINNERS AND NOMINEES, THE SWINGING IMPROV MAN LETS FLY ON A PROGRAM OF MOSTLY ORIGINALS THAT HARKEN BACK TO THE REAL MUSIC DAYS. EASILY THE KIND OF STUFF THAT WOULD MAKE YOU PAY THE BABYSITTER EXTRA TO LET YOU STAY OUT LATER ON A SCHOOL NIGHT, THIS IS A FINE EXAMPLE OF HOW IT’S DONE. HOT STUFF WITH EVERYONE ON BOARD IN TOP FLIGHT.
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NYC SESSIONS
IN NYC SESSIONS, “A PICTURE OF A CONFIDENT AND VERSATILE PIANIST-COMPOSER EMERGES. BASS CAN SHOULDER THE WEIGHT OF A SONG, DELIVER A RHAPSODIC INTRODUCTION BEFORE FADING INTO THE FABRIC OF THE MUSIC, SUPPORT AND ASSIST SINGERS AS THEY CAST THEIR SPELLS, RUN WITH THE BATON WHEN THE SOLO SPOTS ARRIVE, AND BE A TEAM PLAYER WHEN THE MUSIC CALLS FOR IT.”
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GONE
ONE LISTEN TO THIS DYNAMIC DISC AND YOU’LL BE ASKING YOURSELF: “WHERE HAS DAVE BASS BEEN ALL THESE YEARS?”
