Three Bassists: Moore, Essiet & Israels by Rob Scheps

Glen Moore Chuck Israels

Three Bass hiT By roB scheps

Essiet Okon Essiet

Chuck Israels is from Portland. Glen Moore is from Arizona, and Essiet Okon Essiet is from Omaha and based in New York. All three made their mark excelling in different styles of jazz.

Glen Moore is a founding member of the band Oregon with Ralph Towner and Paul McCandless. Moore plays bass, viola, piano, and flute. He plays a Klotz bass with a dragon head that has a rich full sound and his own style of unusual tunings. Good humor and storytelling pervade his playing. His solo CD, Nude Bass Descending a Staircase is a quartet affair with Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, and Arto Tuncboyacian. He is featured on over 30 records with Oregon. He has performed in intimate duos with Nancy King and Rob Scheps for many years. After decades of living between Portland, Oregon and New York City, Glen and his wife reside in the Arizona desert, where he continues working in a music shed that she built for him. RS: How did you come to music as a child? GM: I grew up listening to the radio and records. At the end of WW 11 there were many great singers with big bands. My mother, Lillie grew up in a musical house. I learned the lyrics of the songs from the thirties which she sang as she danced around the kitchen of my house. When I finally began playing jazz bass, I already knew the bridges to most of the songs that were jazz standards. When we enlarged our house and bought a piano my younger sister Roberta started lessons with a neighbor woman. I began playing the piano and soon I would sit in the piano room in the dark and make up little songs. My parents decided that I should have lessons as well. RS: Did you study music theory? GM: I did not really study music theory until I began playing the Bass in college with very talented piano players. I listened to recordings and copied the playing of Ray Brown, Red Mitchell and Paul Chambers. When I heard Scott LaFaro and Bill Evans, I began music theory in earnest to learn to reharmonize standards. And I had the friendship of Ralph Towner whose piano and guitar playing were an enormous influence. RS: Do you compose music? GM: I began composing by making little etudes to use materials I was learning. This is still how and why I compose. RS: How many songs have you composed? GM: I have composed dozens of songs often times as answers to questions from students. RS: Do you have a publishing company with ASCAP or BMI? GM: I joined ASCAP and eventually GEMA. RS: Have you worked with women musicians? GM: Yes, I have, my very first gigs were with a very talented accordion player named Niki Stewart. I worked with a pianist Serena Wright in college at the University of Oregon. I played with singer Nancy King and made several recordings with her as King & Moore. I performed with singer/pianist Terri Spencer; pianist Jessica Williams; violinist Hollis Taylor; pianist Joanne Bracken; singer Flora Purim; singer Jay Clayton; singer Lorena McKennit; singer Susan McKeown; saxophonist, Jane Ira Bloom; singer Annette Peacock and I taught several young women who became very successful. Most of these students were already quite advanced by their school music teachers. In 1984, at the New Westminster, BC high school jazz camp I taught: jazz trumpeter Ingrid Jensen; singer/pianist Diana Krall and pianist Renee Rosnes. At Portland State University I taught bassist/singer Esperanza Spaulding who had been in several great programs since the age of 5 in Portland, Oregon. Two of my very

persistent students in Portland, OR, Tina Frost and Laura Quigley, have been quite successful. I also had the opportunity to teach Joan Jeanrenaud in a class I gave in Bloomington, Indiana. Joan became the original cellist with the Kronos Quartet. RS: Are you aware of the challenges women face in the male-dominated music industry? GM: I am very aware of the challenges that women face in a male-dominated world. I treat men and women the same. RS: What advice do you have for younger men and women entering the world of music performance? GM: I show them everything I can about the music they are interested in and introduce them to techniques that can enable them to enlarge their perspective. Accepting the challenge of different styles is very important. I played with a folk singer at the Woodstock Festival and it led me to life changing opportunities.

Essiet Okon Essiet: His name shows his Nigerian lineage but he was born in Omaha and raised in Portland, after a peripatetic childhood that accustomed him to frequent travel. Today, Essiet lives in New York but he is a world citizen. Early important gigs with Don Moye and Abdullah Ibrahim set the stage for his tenure with Art Blakey’ s Jazz Messengers, perhaps his most visible gig. Since then, Essiet has toured the world with jazz greats Gary Bartz, Donald Brown, Victor Lewis, and George Cables, staying in demand in NY and beyond. He leads his own band, IBO, which made a cd entitled “Shona”. His life partner is excellent drummer Sylvia Cuenca - they frequently work together in each other’s bands. RS: How did you come to music as a child? EE: My mom, Arit was my first influence on my musical path. She loved music and wanted me to play violin so at the age of ten I started taking lessons and four years later, I switched to bass. RS: Do you compose music? EE: Yes, I compose. I’ve written more than thirty songs. RS: Do you have a publishing company with ASCAP or BMI? EE: Most of my songs are on BMI but I have a few on ASCAP. RS: Have you worked with women musicians? Are you aware of the challenges women face in the male-dominated music industry? EE: I’ve worked with many female musicians. My fiancée’ is an accomplished world-renowned drummer, Sylvia Cuenca, whom I’ve worked with many times. I’ve had discussions with her about the challenges females face in the music industry and am well aware of the hardships they face. RS: What advice do you have for younger men and women entering the world of music performance? EE: I tell young up and coming musicians to never stop learning, don’t give up, have a burning desire for the music and just have fun with it and life in general.

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Chuck Israels is a seemingly ageless at 84. He garnered worldwide recognition with the Bill Evans Trio, succeeding Scott LaFaro upon his passing. He stayed for six fruitful years. Other credits include John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Billy Higgins, Kenny Dorham, Stan Getz and Cecil Taylor. Chuck founded The National Jazz Ensemble, a model for Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Band. He is a prolific, clear-headed arranger, writing the whole book for his current project, a 9-piece big band. He is based in Portland, OR, his adopted home, after long stints in Boston, NYC, and retiring from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. He is an articulate sage whose wisdom is tempered with a youthful inquisitiveness. Chuck stays active as a bassist and bandleader.

RS: How did you come to music as a child? Did you study music theory? CI: I come from a musical family. My stepfather, Mordecai Bauman was a fine baritone and an early performer of Charles Ives’ songs. Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson (my kid brother, Josh’s godfather) were often in our home. I played the cello in my Jr. high school and high school orchestras and in chamber music groups with Jerry Rosen (3 years my junior) who became associate concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, Ruth Laredo, later a well-known pianist specializing in Rachmaninoff’s music, and Bill Rhein, who went on to become associate principal bassist in the BSO. I played guitar and banjo too, as a kid, and took up the bass when I went to MIT in 1954. I studied music theory in high school and later at Brandeis University. My education as a composer / arranger happened later, after I left the Bill Evans Trio in 1966 and began studies with composer, Hall Overton. RS: Do you compose music? CI: Yes. RS: If so, how many songs have you composed? CI: Haven’t counted. More than 20 — fewer than 50. Many hundreds of arrangements and some compositions that go beyond the description of “song”. RS: Do you have a publishing company with ASCAP or BMI? CI: ASCAP. RS: Have you worked with women musicians? Are you aware of the challenges women face in the male-dominated music industry? CI: Yes, a few. Too few. And I’m well aware of both the great challenges and the far more rare, occasional advantages seen by those who are perceived as “different” from the norm. A few women musicians I’ve worked with have been singers, and they’ve been more easily accepted. Some have been extraordinary musician/performers: Billie Holiday, Joan Baez, Rosemary Clooney. There’ve been some fine women instrumentalists too. They generally have a harder time. RS: What advice do you have for younger men and women entering the world of music performance? CI: I’m not sure I am in position to give much advice. Playing music, what kind of music you choose to play, and whether or not you choose to depend on it for a living, are all such personal choices that I’m not convinced my choices, in the very different environment in which I made them, offer useful examples.

Educationally, culturally, and politically, the world, is so different from the one in which I grew up that the forces acting on individual choices have changed significantly. If one chooses to follow a path governed by durable aesthetic values, the contemporary price is a steep one. ~ Rob Scheps

Alex Layne (1949-2019) Alex Layne was born in New York in 1949. His musical career as a bassist began in 1959 at Count Basie’s Night Club in Harlem. After attending the High School of Music & Art, the 20-year-old landed a job with Steve Pulliam and the club’s house band. Layne graduated with honors from Bronx Community College and studied music major Queens College. He studied privately with bassists Stuart Sanky, Ron Carter, and Alvin Bhrem. From Basie’s Night Club, Layne went on to be a major player on the New York scene. He performed with Coleman Hawkins, Max Roach, Freddy Hubbard, and Cedar Walton. However, the bulk of his career was with top vocalists Billy Eckstein, Carmen McRae, Gloria Lynn, Johnny Hartman, and Miriam Makeba.

His knowledge of music theory and its application to solo and group performance is of the highest order. He is a formidable performer as a soloist and a member of a jazz rhythm section. His skills are evident on the upright double bass and the electric bass guitar. Layne played in several genres including folk, blues, and rhythm and blues. Josh White, Jimmy Witherspoon, Little Anthony, and Imperials, are some of the artists that he performed with. He was employed by the Jazz Foundation of America, performing in schools, hospitals, and nursing homes. He worked with his own group in prominent jazz clubs in New York. Chick Corea (1941-2021) The music world is saddened by the passing of one of the true jazz giants, Chick Corea, who died this week at the age of 79. Corea, who continued to astound audiences for more than half a century with his unique jazz-rock fusion, was one of the most renowned keyboardists in music history. Having cemented his standing playing and recording with Miles Davis in the 70’s, Corea also worked with such legends as Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Mongo Santamaria, Sarah Vaughan, and countless others.

As a bandleader himself, most notably of his band Return to Forever, all of his albums earned critical praise with several considered classics soon after their release. During his storied career, Corea, who was named a Jazz Master in 2006 by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon jazz musicians, skillfully displayed his talent on nearly 90 albums and amassed an almost record-breaking 23 GRAMMYS. He will be missed and remembered with fondness by all of his fans.