[Dixielandjazz] Tuba & String Bass Players

[Daniel S. Augustine]

    Right on, Steve.  Good info.
    But there are a lot of other currently active tuba players who double on string bass.  One of the best is Matt Perrine of New Orleans, who has played and recorded frequently with Tim Laughlin, as well as with Bonerama and the New Orleans Nightcrawlers.  He has some great solos on Tim's CD "The Isle of Orleans" (http://www.timlaughlin.com/music.htm).
   He actually plays a sousaphone, and when Tim's band played at the Austin Traditional Jazz Society concert a couple of years ago, he borrowed my old decrepit Conn 20K sousaphone for the concert.  He's also got a solo CD out called "Sunflower City" (2007) and his latest project is "Bayou Roads Suite" 
(http://threadheadrecords.bandcamp.com/album/matt-perrine-sunflower-city-bayou-road-suite).
    Take a listen to him playing "Stars and Stripes Forever" with piano player Tom McDermott at http://www.myspace.com/mattperrine.  Or, here's a YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiNz0qWxdXE
    But he's also a monster on string bass, which he played for most of the concert with ATJS.

    There's another guy, named Buddy Apfel (a lot of you know him), can play walking bass on tuba and you'd swear it was a string bass playing.  Take a listen to him playing with Jim Cullum on the CD called "Look over Here . . . Happy Jazz" (1976).   They play a hot version of "Wrought Iron Rag" and Apfel effortlessly switches between sounding like a tuba in 2-beat sections and sounding exactly like a walking-line string bass behind solos.  While i'm not quite as good at this as he is, i myself on tuba play a 4-beat walking-bass in swing tunes and elsewhere where it seems to work better than 2-beat.  A lot of tuba-pickers can do this, just as a lot of string-bass players sometimes play a 2-beat style in certain tunes ("Big Bear Stomp" doesn't work for me in a 4-beat style, for example).

    Dan
(in Austin, Texas, where yesterday it was 110 degrees F.)
----------------------------------------
From: Stephen G Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
Date: August 28, 2011 10:25:15 AM CDT
To: ds.augustine at mail.utexas.edu
Cc: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Tuba & String Bass Players

Currently Ben Jaffe plays both instruments with Preservation Hall.

And there is Jim Self in Los Angeles, a superb musician who plays tuba, string bass, electric bass, bass trombone, cimbasso, contra  bass trombone, Steiner EVI (electronic valve instrument) and FLUBA which is best described as a tuba sized flugel horn. He is a musician's musician with a huge list of Hollywood (and other) credits

And there was "Pops" Foster who played tube on Mississippi Riverboats with Fate Marable's orchestra, but is best known today as one of the GREAT jazz string bass players. I saw him play tuba for one song at a loft party in NYC in the early 1950s

And there was John Wood, an original member of the Buck Creek Jazz Band who recently passed away. Wonderful 4/4 tuba player whose approach to the instrument was influenced by his earlier training as a string bass player. He played a string bass line on Tuba and IMO was one of the top tuba players on the festival circuit for many years.

Also "Chink" Martin Abraham of the NORK.

Slightly off topic, there is a wonderful article about the expanding role of Tuba in Film Music. Tuba players on the list should have fun reading all 17 pages of it. Especially the vignette about tuba parts characterizing Jabba The Hut in "Return of the Jedi" - 1983. See:

http://www.bassethoundmusic.com/articles/YubaMeetsJabba.pdf

It also states on page 1 that the primary double for for studio tuba players in film music during the 1930s, 40s and 50s was String Bass.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

***--------------------------------------------------------------------***
***  Dan Augustine  --  Austin, Texas  --  ds.augustine at mail.utexas.edu
***   "If I owned Texas and hell, I'd rent out Texas and live in hell." 
***          -- General Phillip H. Sheridan (1831-1888), after
***              visiting Galveston back before air-conditioning
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