The moment you happen to hear a musical sound that makes your jaw drop is often as important as the sound itself. I first heard Barre Phillips, the double-bass genius and master improviser, who has died aged 90, on a French-released solo recording called Basse Barre in about 1970.
To a young jazz fan who had until then assumed that a jazz bassist’s job was to roam harmoniously around the chord-changes, add the occasional apposite solo, and launch a thumping groove when a band turned the heat up, hearing Phillips’ originality brought realisations that had never occurred to me before.
Most notable was the insistence that an audience’s attention could be gripped simply by whatever next unexpected thought entered an improviser’s head – and could maybe even be held on to for an entire concert-length solo show – by those with the technical resourcefulness and imaginative sweep to do it.
With that album, Phillips’ gifts as a unique contemporary instrumentalist were already apparent – opening gambits of dramatic low, bowed growls like a grouchy beast prowling in a cage, percussive effects with the bow as springy as a drumstick whacked on the strings, choir-like multiphonic chords climaxing in fast-strummed showers of sound, scampering boppish runs swapping with slow passages of pure-toned lyricism. During his 20s, Phillips had figured out how to turn the double-bass into a free-improviser’s mini-orchestra.
In the US, in the decade from 1957, these skills brought him opportunities to play with the free-jazz and harmony-bending revolutionaries Don Ellis and George Russell and the crossover composers Leonard Bernstein and Gunther Schuller, and with creative bandleaders including the reeds-players Archie Shepp and Jimmy Giuffre, and guitarist Attila Zoller.
But after Basse Barre (which was recorded in St James’s church, Norlands, in Notting Hill, when Phillips was in London after a Zoller tour in 1968, and was also released in limited editions under the titles Journal Violone, and Unaccompanied Barre),
Phillips relocated to southern France for the next half century, attracted by what he felt was Europe’s warmer welcome for a creatively original bassist. The move coincided with a European experimental and free-jazz renaissance in which he played influential roles with many of mainland Europe’s leading innovators.
During those years, he was a linchpin in a John Coltrane-inspired transatlantic supergroup with the UK saxophonist John Surman and American drummer Stu Martin known simply as the Trio. He also performed with the German piano star Joachim Kühn, the French reeds-player Michel Portal and the bass virtuoso Joelle Leandre, with the German improv-sax powerhouse Peter Brötzmann, and the British improvising pioneers Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, and the composer/bassist Barry Guy.
He collaborated with adventurous musicians from Japan and South Korea, and as a composer for film, dance and theatre productions, working with film-makers such as Robert Kramer, Jacques Rivette, William Friedkin and Marcel Camus. Experimenters everywhere knew that Phillips would bring something transformative to the sound of their work that they had never envisaged.
Phillips was born in San Francisco, and took up the double bass at the age of 13 – when his junior high school’s orchestra was in search of bass volunteers, and he found himself raising an eager hand in what he would later call a “vision” of what he felt destined to do. Though his parents had enjoyed singing at the piano at home, a greater influence came from his older brother, Peter, who started a classical and jazz record collection, then a musical career. Barre quickly proved an exceptional student, and from 1959 was taught by Charles Siani, bassist with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
By that time, Phillips had already met Ornette Coleman, West Coast jazz’s rising star. In an interview with Jazzweekly.com’s editor Fred Jung, Phillips remembered Coleman’s advice about what young jazz musicians of that time should be doing: “Playing our own thing,” Phillips said. “And that was the message for me.” He initially pursued an academic career, studying Romance languages and literature at Berkeley University, California, but music came out ahead.
Coleman moved to New York and shot into jazz headlines, but on a revisit to San Francisco in 1962, and finding Phillips and his friends still playing relatively mainstream postbop to support themselves, he reminded them of the free-jazz revolution spreading across the world. “Ornette said, ‘well, you guys played great’,” Phillips told Jung. “But how come you’re playing this school music? Why don’t you play your own music?”
Moving to New York himself within two months of hearing that question, Phillips began classical bass studies with Frederick Zimmerman of the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra. But he also soon began the inspirational stretch of gigs that included work with Bernstein and Schuller; explorations of experimental improv and composing in Ellis’s weekly workshops; a 1964 European tour with Russell’s sextet; and the opportunity to perform some of the first free-jazz ever played at the Newport jazz festival in 1965 with Shepp. He also toured Europe in Giuffre’s influential Free Fall trio, and then with Zoller.
Phillips’ 1967 London trip and subsequent half-century in France in the ferment of Europe’s new-music creativity, from the 1970s into the 21st century, brought illustrious connections and landmark recordings. In London he began playing in the drummer John Stevens’s influential spontaneous music ensemble, and with many other UK free-improvisers.
In 1969 he joined Surman and Martin in the Trio, a tempestuous mix of Coltranesque free-jazz and rhythmic ideas from rock and folk. Music From Two Basses initiated the notion of two-bass improv in a dialogue with Dave Holland in 1971, and the Trio expanded into a quintet for the superb Mountainscapes session in 1976.
The bassist’s huge sound-palette made him just as flexibly creative in the most abstract settings, notably with Bailey and Parker, and he formed a productive relationship with Guy, notably in the latter’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra. In the 1990s he made the spikily lyrical Time Will Tell with Parker and the pianist Paul Bley, and the three reconvened for the warmly empathic Sankt Gerold in 2000.
His solo-improv recordings ran from Camouflage (1989) to End to End (2018), and his final release was Face à Face (2022), a typically fearless and exploratory duo adventure with the electronic musician György Kurtág Jr.
Phillips was both a prolifically productive creative artist and an enigma – but maybe the nearest he came to a revelation of his motives came in a 1970 interview with the writer Richard Williams, in which he clarified his sense of the difference between “product” (conventionally learned instrumental technique) and “process”, by which original music is made from moment to moment. “That’s my personal reason,” Phillips said. “To have something to communicate to an audience besides the product. If I can show my process to people, perhaps they can understand themselves a lot better.”
Phillips is survived by his children, David, Claudia, Margot and Hanna, stepson, Jay, and granddaughter, Zoe, and by his brother.
• Barre Phillips, jazz bassist, born 27 October 1934; died 28 December 2024
