This article is written by Toru Hoshino, a jazz bassist and instructor based in Japan who teaches online lessons to students worldwide. In this article, he recommends an album made up of nothing but three basses.
This time around, I want to recommend an ensemble album played entirely on three basses.
Can you picture it? An instrument that normally just holds down the backbeat quietly in the background, here singing melodies, harmonizing with itself, doing whatever it wants. Just the concept alone is a genuinely striking thing to hear.
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“Super Bass” — Ray Brown with John Clayton & Christian McBride
The title “Super Bass” feels almost too on the nose. This is a leader album from Ray Brown — a bassist so foundational to bebop and modern jazz bass playing through the 1940s and ’50s that people still say “if you’re going to play jazz bass, listen to him first.”
His powerful one-finger plucking technique, backing up an endless list of legendary musicians from Charlie Parker to Bud Powell, was defined by note attacks and evenness so precisely consistent that it elevated every great performance he was part of.
This album brings Ray Brown together with his student John Clayton, and with Christian McBride — a bassist who, without much exaggeration, stands at the very top of the jazz scene today.
The Limitless Possibility I Hear in This Instrument
The double bass is an unglamorous, unassuming instrument — heavy to haul around, and one that can take years just to nail consistent intonation on. And yet, right from the opening track, “SuperBass Theme,” it explodes into three-part harmony and unison lines.
Tracks 2 (“Blue Monk”) and 3 (“Bye Bye Blackbird”) take familiar standards and rearrange them with total freedom, constantly making you think, “wait, it’s going there?”
And by the time you get to track 4, “Lullaby of Birdland,” the arco playing evokes a chamber-music quality that gleefully defies whatever expectations you walked in with.
This is an instrument that, here, takes on the role of the beat, the melody, the harmony, the strings, and the rhythmic percussion all at once. The sheer conviction of hearing a bass do all of that — and the cohesion that comes from twelve strings across different ranges playing in concert — is a sound that almost nobody has had the chance to actually hear before.
An Album Every Bassist Needs to Hear
When students ask me, “Is there some incredible bass album I should check out?” — this is one of the two I always point them to, the other being “Portrait of Jaco Pastorius.”
If your only frame of reference is rock or pop, you probably picture a “standard band lineup” — a guitarist, a keyboardist, a drummer, and so on.
“An album with nothing but three basses? What is that supposed to be?” is a completely fair reaction. But at its core, music is simply one way of giving shape to freedom through sound.
I’d love for as many bassists as possible to hear this album, feel that jolt straight to the brain, and let it get their right brain spinning.
I hope this gives you something great to add to your listening list — and once an album like this gets your ear excited about what the bass can do, channeling that into your own playing is exactly where having a second set of ears helps.
Want Personalized Feedback on Your Playing?
This is exactly the kind of thing that’s hard to fix alone — and where having a teacher makes all the difference.
At Line on Bass, I offer an online lesson service where you send me a video of your playing, and I give you specific, detailed feedback — every single day if you want.
Students from around the world are using this to fix exactly these kinds of issues and steadily improve their jazz bass skills.