Bass player with soloing skills wanted for Jazz/Fusion Project

Portland OR

Description

Our format is two guitars, bass and drums, and everyone has an incredible amount of freedom in the music. Among the influences on the project are artists like Allan Holdsworth, Bill Connors, Pat Metheny, Return To Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Brand X, Steve Khan, and Tribal Tech, with a little King Crimson and Yes thrown in for good measure. Some of our favorite bass players are (in no particular order), Gary Willis, Jimmy Johnson, Stanley Clarke, Anthony Jackson, Michael Manring, Jaco Pastorius, Percy Jones, Tom Kennedy, John Pattitucci, Alphonso Johnson, and Victor Wooten. As you can see from the variety on that list, we’re not looking for a specific style of player, and we’re not looking for someone to just come in and reproduce existing parts but are counting on you bringing your own tone, technique and ideas into the mix. We need someone highly skilled, who understands theory and harmony, with serious jazz chops and the ability to improvise freely when soloing, as there are bass solo sections in half the songs we’re currently playing. Our music is an eclectic blend of jazz, fusion, and progressive rock sensibilities, and our approach to it involves structured base compositions that we explore with fresh ideas and fire each time they are played. The Soundcloud page linked below is for my other band, Between Dimensions (I’m the rhythm guitarist/composer in both projects), and while those base compositions were also composed by me and approached the same way we are approaching the new project, with everyone in the band composing their own parts and collaborating on the arrangements, we’re playing entirely new material in the new project, leaning in jazzier directions, and are not trying to reproduce the sound of the other band at all. That said, just as the Soundcloud songs do, we juggle some time signatures and tempo changes in the new project, but always organically in service of the music, so although the songs are quite complex at times, they don’t come across as overtly mathy. I have a fully loaded professional recording studio where we play once a week in SE Portland near 55th and Johnson Creek Blvd., and while our primary goals involve having fun and recording and releasing CDs via Bandcamp, we’re game for playing live whenever we can convince someone to let us. If the project interests you, shoot me an email (with some links to things you’ve recorded, if you can), and then let’s talk. My other band’s page: https://soundcloud.com/betweendimensionspdx Brian