Darryl Jones: the Bass Player interview

Darryl Jones talked shop with Joel McIver for a lengthy interview with Bass Player. On playing with The Rolling Stones:

At one rehearsal, I figured out what Bill had played on Respectable, and I started playing it, and Mick was like 'Where are you going?’ I said, ‘Well, this is what Bill played on the song’ and he said ‘No no, don’t play that. Play what you hear.’

"So neither I nor they are that precious about that stuff. The first time I rehearsed with them, I asked Keith, ‘Hey man, did you play bass on this song?’ and he said ‘Yeah’. I said ‘So what’s the bassline?’ and he was like, ‘I don’t know, man. You’re the bass player, you tell me what the bassline is

On playing with Miles Davis:

Every once in a while he’d say ‘Play this’, but he’d never play the same thing twice, which always led to a certain built-in amount of variation into what was going on.

The other thing that he would do, after you’d been playing that for a few months, was to say ‘You know the bass-line you play on such-and-such a song? Don’t play that any more. Find something else!’ You’d think ‘Shit. It took me weeks to figure out what was working with that song’. But that was his way of pushing you to come up with new ideas and a different approach.

» darryljones.com