The famend U.S. born jazz bassist Barre Phillips has died. The musician, who had been resident in France from 1968 to 2021, died in Las Cruces, New Mexico on December 28, 2024 on the age of 90.
Born in San Francisco, California on October 27, 1934, Phillips studied briefly in 1959 with S. Charles Siani, Assistant Principal Bassist with the San Francisco Symphony. Through the Nineteen Sixties, he recorded with jazz legends corresponding to Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Giuffre, Archie Shepp, Peter Nero, Attila Zoller, Lee Konitz and Marion Brown.
Phillips’ 1968 recording of solo bass improvisations, issued as Journal Violone within the US, Unaccompanied Barre in England, and Basse Barre in France on Futura Data, is mostly credited as the primary solo bass report.
Barre made a number of extra albums in the identical format, together with Name Me When You Get There (1984) and Finish to Finish (2018) for the ECM label: the identical imprint answerable for equally ground-breaking titles by different modern bassists corresponding to Gary Peacock, Dave Holland and Arild Andersen. Phillips’ 1971 report with Dave Holland, Music from Two Basses, was in all probability the primary report of improvised double bass duets.
Phillips got here to Europe for the primary time in 1964 with George Russell’s sextet and returned later within the decade, staying first in London earlier than ultimately making France his residence base. Proof of his early collaborations with British or British-based musicians might be discovered on John Surman’s How Many Clouds Can You See?, Mike Westbrook’s Marching Tune, and his two classes with Chris McGregor’s sextet (As much as Earth) and trio (Our Prayer), all recorded in 1969.
Through the Seventies, Phillips was a member of the well-regarded and influential group ‘The Trio”, with saxophonist John Surman and drummer Stu Martin. They recorded a self-titled debut with also and Conflagration! – the latter title with an augmented line-up. Thereafter he played with a variety of partners, from Derek Bailey to Robin Williamson, and was a regular member of his friend Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra. Two ECM albums with Paul Bley and Evan Parker, Time Will Inform (1995) and Sankt Gerold (2000), are favourites.
In 2016, Barre Phillips known as Manfred Eicher to say that he’d wish to report a closing solo album, to doc “the last pages of a journal that began fifty years ago”. The outcome was Finish To Finish, a advantageous account of the artwork of solo bass. Nevertheless, his final launch was ECM’s Face à Face, a duo recording with the electronics of György Kurtág Jr, launched in 2022.
Moreover, Phillips labored on soundtracks of the movement footage Merry-Go-Spherical (1981), Bare Lunch (1991, along with Ornette Coleman) and Alles was baumelt, bringt Glück! (2013)
Paying tribute to Barre Phillips in a Fb put up, main Canadian jazz critic and creator Mark Miller recalled that “I described Phillips’ solo performance at The Music Gallery in Toronto in1984 as ‘modestly theatrical but musically visionary’… [Superficially, the performance was an exercise in everything you can do with a bass but were afraid to try, but more radically it redefined the instrument as an orchestra in and of itself.’”
