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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
I was chided the other day by a bass player for referring to the bass guitar. This turns out to be a point of contention in the bass community. Militant bassists insist their guitar-shaped instrument actually has nothing to do with the guitar. To them, the double bass belongs to the violin family and the electric bass is descended from it. Ergo: not a guitar.
Thundercat’s preferred term is unknown to me. He’s a bass virtuoso from Los Angeles with a fretting hand so rapid it seems to have a life of its own, unconnected to the genial figure plucking the strings with his other hand. At the first of four sold-out nights at Koko, in London, he played runs that sprinted like Olympic athletes and solos that scattered notes like a millionaire on a gifting spree. Oh, and he sang while playing bass too: a notoriously difficult accomplishment, like doing cartwheels while reading Finnegans Wake. Or so bassists would have us believe.
His career, if that dull word can be applied to such a free-spirited musician, has followed a mazy bassline of its own. There was a teenage stint in a boy band that had a minor hit in Germany. Then came membership of skate-punk outfit Suicidal Tendencies and psychedelic soul singer Erykah Badu’s troupe. He came to wider notice in 2015 on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, playing with other luminaries of LA’s jazz fusion scene. His solo albums have brought him his own following, as shown by the packed London venue where he appeared with two accompanists.
Dennis Hamm was on keys and Justin Brown played drums. Between them stood Thundercat with his electric bass, which — whisper it — looked uncannily like a guitar. A custom-made Ibanez model, it has six strings like a typical electric guitar. He used it in the manner of a jazz musician, switching between rhythm-keeping and improvisational solos. (Among his tattoos is a portrait of a musical ancestor, Jaco Pastorius.)
Opener “Innerstellar Love” was cosmic jazz-soul with busy bass notes bubbling like lava. “How Sway” had intricately rapid drumming and zany bass and keyboard runs up and down the scale, a series of digressions anchored to a steady time signature. The tempo slowed for “Overseas”, a breezy number about absconding with a lover. “A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II)” had an abstract hip-hop beat bearing the fingerprints of its producer Flying Lotus.
It was Lotus who originally persuaded Thundercat to start singing in his music. At Koko, he had a slightly hoarse high tenor but there was an easy charm to his vocals that belied the difficulty of doing them while performing his complicated instrumental work. Ad-libbed chats between songs had a freewheeling charm too — although they also had the unfortunate side-effect of encouraging chatterers in the audience.
An inane background hubbub sabotaged a guest spot from Cinematic Orchestra singer Heidi Vogel in a hazily psychedelic number. But the action was mostly too profuse to allow for distraction. The trio of musicians played with spontaneity and high skill. Hamm’s keyboard solos occasionally had the sound of an electric guitar. Meanwhile, Thundercat grooved and harmonised as though playing bass and lead guitar simultaneously. He stretches those six strings as far as they’ll go.
★★★★☆
