[Dixielandjazz] Swingin' Unplugged

[Don Mopsick]

SWINGIN' UNPLUGGED

By Don Mopsick

Electric instruments-especially the electric guitar-have become so
universal and ubiquitous in the post-WWII rock-dominated world of pop
music that a word had to be invented to denote the old-school way:
"unplugged."

Decades ago, an ad agency for 7-Up came up with the ingenious and
successful "un-cola" campaign, and proved that defining things
negatively in terms of what they are not can appeal to the impulse to
stand out from the crowd, go your own way, and march to the beat of a
different drummer.

As a mid-Boomer, I saw my first electric instruments at age 12 when my
big brother Mike came home with a Fender Stratocaster guitar and a
Precision Bass. Both of these instruments are solid-bodied, meaning that
they have no acoustic sound of their own-they must be plugged into an
amplifier to be heard. Mike let me fool around with the P-bass. In the
quiet of our living room, without using the amp I could hear the tiny,
plinky sounds the P-bass made well enough to learn how to get around on
it.

I also played the trumpet in the junior high school Band, two hours per
week during the school day, but after school I played bass guitar in a
rock and roll "garage band" with its heady promise of raw sexual power.
In theory at least, plugging in an electric guitar converted one's
testosterone into electrons, which were then broadcast directly into the
brains of nearby females via an irresistible magnetic beam.

It turned out that we were the first generation of musicians steeped in
the dual worlds of loud, electrified rock 'n roll and softer, subtler
unplugged jazz, folk, and classical music.

Jazz had discovered the electric guitar in the late 1930s with Charlie
Christian, and Miles Davis embraced rock rhythms and all-electric
combinations with his seminal 1971 albums Bitches Brew and In a Silent
Way. Since then, electrified rock elements have been important
contributors to whatever commercial success jazz has had in recent
years. These days, the average listener is likely to encounter a live
"jazz" performance not quite up to the volume of a heavy metal band, but
very loud nonetheless.

As a young adult professional musician, I went through what I thought of
then as reinventing myself as a  "jazz bassist." In my work I used both
the solid-body electric bass guitar and the bass fiddle. According to
the fashion of the time, I explored every known method of amplifying the
fiddle. My aim was to produce a sound at least loud enough to compete
with the other players who would show up to the job with *their* amps
and gear. I didn't know it at the time, but I was contributing to an
endless "arms race" of upwardly spiraling volume levels.

The results were rarely satisfying. In all of my experimenting, I never
found a pickup or amp that sounded as good to me as the unplugged bass
fiddle did in my practice room at home. The more gear I bought, the more
frustrated and disappointed I became. In 1990 Jim Cullum called to offer
me an audition with his band in San Antonio with the stipulation that
the bass position involved playing strictly unplugged. That immediately
got my attention. Then, a phone conversation with bass legend Bob
Haggart convinced me that this was the way to go.

Our friend Marty Grosz, acoustic guitarist, singer, raconteur and guest
on Riverwalk Jazz, has a lot to say about how electrifying stringed
instruments changes the way they function in a jazz setting. "With an
amplifier, your sound is not coming out of you, it's coming from behind
you out of a box." Furthermore, he says, the string height of electric
instruments is usually so low that the player feels very little
resistance under his fingers. Marty says, you've got to have that
"fight" or a certain amount of stiffness, to create a pulse that swings.

During 14 happy unplugged, amp-less years with the Cullum band, I've
come to learn that creating swinging rhythm involves some physical as
well as mental effort. I realized why jazz performances captured on old
78-rpm disks often swing more and sound more alive than on more modern
ones: The pre-electric player had to learn how to draw a living sound
and swinging pulse out of a hollow wooden instrument by moving and
controlling a resonating air column with sheer muscle power and
musicality. 

Now we're getting somewhere!

Today my music room closet is full of pickups, cables, amps, pre-amps,
equalizers, etc., gathering dust. I should probably get rid of all of it
on eBay, but it's nice to know it's all there in case I have to "go
electric" again. But by then it will all probably be way obsolete, and
I'll have to start over from scratch.

Naaah!

Copyright 2005 by Pacific Vista Productions