{"id":573,"date":"2011-04-04T15:39:40","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T13:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doublebassguide.com\/?p=573"},"modified":"2011-04-04T15:39:40","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T13:39:40","slug":"quote-ray-brown-on-string-action-and-sound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/doublebassguide.com\/?p=573","title":{"rendered":"Quote: Ray Brown on string action and sound"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>A student of the Brown effect since his middle teens, McBride met the maestro around 1990, when Brown came to hear him play duo with pianist Benny Green at the Knickerbocker, a raucous piano bar-and-grill on University Place in Greenwich Village. At the time, he recalls, he was focused, as I wrote, on the unamplified, raise-the-strings approach to bass expression which, as McBride puts it, &#8220;seemed to be the new religious experience for young bass players coming to New York.&#8221; Ray said, &#8220;Why are you young cats playing so hard? You don\u2019t need your strings up that high.&#8221;<\/em><em>Before I responded, something said, &#8220;Shut up, and listen to Ray Brown. Don\u2019t say one word.&#8221; Benny and I saw him at the Blue Note a few nights later, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Ray seemed to be playing the bass like it was a toy. He seemed to be having fun. Playing jazz, he had that locomotion I heard in the great soul bass players, like James Jamerson and Bootsy Collins and Larry Graham. He wasn\u2019t yanking the strings that hard, and he had the biggest, fattest, woodiest sound I\u2019d ever heard, and I could tell that most of it was coming from the bass, not from the amp. At that point, I slowly started saying to myself, &#8220;It\u2019s not about what they think. It\u2019s about what\u2019s best for the music that I\u2019m trying to play. It\u2019s about trying to get the best possible sound out of the instrument.&#8221;<\/em>from:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jazz.com\/dozens\/christian-mcbride-selects-ray-brown\" target=\"_blank\">www.jazz.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A student of the Brown effect since his middle teens, McBride met the maestro around 1990, when Brown came to hear him play duo with pianist Benny Green at the Knickerbocker, a raucous piano bar-and-grill on University Place in Greenwich Village. At the time, he recalls, he was focused, as I wrote, on the unamplified, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,4],"tags":[105,118,104],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/doublebassguide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/doublebassguide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/doublebassguide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doublebassguide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doublebassguide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/doublebassguide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/doublebassguide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doublebassguide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doublebassguide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}