FEATURE:
Four Strings to the Heartstrings: Saluting a Bass Genius
The Wonderful Carol Kaye at Eighty-Five
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I am not going to put too many…
PHOTO CREDIT: Robbie Augsperger
of my own words into this feature, as I think there is a lot of biography and interview extract that I want to include. Today (24th March) is the eighty-fifth birthday of a musician who is not as highly regarded as she should be. Carol Kaye is one of the most prolific and influential bass players in history. There are over ten-thousand recordings with her bass on that spans over five decades. Whilst more prominent and up-front bass players are spotlighted, it is rare for session musicians to get celebration and the attention they deserve. Paul McCartney revealed that Kaye was an inspiration regarding his bass playing on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – Macca was taking guidance from her work on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. There are no bass players like Kaye, and it is hard to say just how far her influence and D.N.A. spreads. I think she herself never expected to be remembered because Pop was considered quite temporary and disposable. There is a list of songs Kaye worked on, and there is a feature where Kaye selected her favourite ten recordings – quite a feat narrowing over ten-thousand songs down to ten! If you are not sure who Carol Kaye is and where she came from, here is her biography from Kaye’s official website:
“Carol Kaye was born in Everett, Washington to musician parents, Clyde and Dot Smith, both professionals. She has played and taught guitar professionally since 1949, played bebop jazz guitar in dozens of nightclubs around Los Angeles with top groups (also in Bob Neal's jazz group with Jack Sheldon backing Lenny Bruce, with Teddy Edwards, Billy Higgins etc.), accidentally got into studio work late 1957 with the Sam Cooke recordings and other big recordings on guitar for the 1st 5 years of studio work in Hollywood.
In 1963 when a Fender bassist didn't show up for a record date at Capitol Records, she picked up the Fender bass (as it was called then) and augmented her busy schedule playing bass and grew quickly to be the no. 1 call with record companies, movie & TV film people, commericals (ads), and industrial films. She enjoyed working under the direction of Michel LeGrand, Quincy Jones, Elmer Bernstein, Lalo Schifrin, David Rose, David Grusin, Ernie Freeman, Hugo Montenegro, Leonard Rosenman, John Williams, Alfred & Lionel Newman, etc. as well as the numerous hits she recorded for hundreds of recording artists.
Beginning in 1969, she wrote her first of many bass tutoring books, "How To Play The Electric Bass" effectively changing the name of Fender Bass to Electric Bass and began teaching 100s of Electric Bass students, many of them now famous themselves.
Her tutors are endorsed by such notables as Professor Joel Leach, 10-year winner of the Pacific Jazz Festival Awards with his famous Cal-State Northridge Jazz Bands, and Plas Johnson, jazz/blues studio sax legend ("Pink Panther"). She stepped out to perform live with the Hampton Hawes Jazz Trio in the mid 70s, has given many seminars all over the USA, and is a leader in Electric Bass education”.
I will include a few songs that feature Kaye’s bass, and one can see the sheer range of artists she worked with! I think even today, female bass players are not as proffered and highlighted as much as one would like. There are some great female bass players around, and many owe a debt to Carol Kaye. I hope, on her eighty-fifth birthday (24th March), more people dig her work and look at the wonderful women of bass right now.
In 2018, Kaye was profiled and interviewed by Louder Sound. They paid proper tribute to a genius musician:
“Some folks have to pad their resumes, but in the case of Carol Kaye, who from the 1950s and into the 1970s was one of the busiest session musicians around, laying down distinctive bass and guitar tracks on scores of Top 10 smashes and literally thousands of recordings, even a bullet-point sampling of her accomplishments boggles the mind.
Phil Spector, The Beach Boys, Ray Charles, Simon & Garfunkel, The Monkees, Joe Cocker, Sam Cooke, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, Glen Campbell, Sonny & Cher, Lou Rawls…just some of the artists who benefited from Kaye’s low-end fretboard magic.
Next we have Kaye’s equally impressive work in film: In The Heat Of The Night, The Pawnbroker, The Thomas Crown Affair, In Cold Blood, The Long Goodbye, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and dozens more. As for the small screen, you’ve heard Kaye on themes like M.A.S.H., Mission Impossible, Ironside, Hawaii 5-0, The Brady Bunch, Hogan’s Heroes, The Addams Family – here, too, the list goes on and on.
How did you start playing sessions?
“I was a guitar player. I had been playing since the age of 13. By 18 or so, I was out there playing gigs - jazz and bebop. It was a good way to learn and improve my ear and my ability to improvise. When somebody looked at you and said, ‘Play!’ well…you had to play! [laughs]
Plus, the gigs paid well, so it put food on the table. My family didn’t have much money. I had gotten married very young, had two kids, and by the age of 21 I was divorced and was living back with my mother - with my two kids.
“At that time in Los Angeles, there were hundreds of clubs and places to play. It wasn’t like it is now. If you were good and wanted to play, you got your chance. I was a white girl with blonde hair, but I was welcome in the black clubs. If you could play, then you were welcome. And I was welcome.
“I wasn’t really looking to do sessions, because I was getting a good name in the jazz clubs. But this producer, Bumps Blackwell, came in and said, ‘You want to do a record date?’ By this time, rock ‘n’ roll was getting into a lot of clubs, so I figured I would do the session. It turned out to be for Sam Cooke.”
How exactly did you switch over to bass?
“I was playing a session at Capitol Records, and the bass player didn’t show up. So, they put me on a Fender bass - easy as that. I started creating lines that I always heard in my head, things that I thought bass players should play. I just provided what the music needed.
“This was pretty important during some of the early rock ‘n’ roll dates. A great singer like Sam Cooke, you didn’t have to do too much to what he did. But some of the rock sessions, if we didn’t add some interesting lines, the songs would’ve sounded very flat. The music needed a little help, and so did the singers.” [laughs]
What was working with Brian Wilson like? You did more than a few Beach Boys sessions.
“Brian was fabulous. What a dear, sweet man, and such a brilliant musician. He liked my bass playing. He was a bass player himself, but he was getting so busy writing material and producing that it was hard for him to think about playing, so he had to use other people.
“I was becoming known as the hit bass player. They had been hiring three bassists for sessions - a Fender player, a string player and a Dano player - but pretty quickly, people started finding out that they only had to hire me and I’d get all the sounds for them. Brian liked that idea, but he also liked my lines. He wasn’t just a sound guy, he was a concept guy.”
On something like California Girls, for example, what kind of direction would he give you?
“Brian would come in and play the song on piano. He’d sing it a little bit, but sometimes he didn’t have all the words. But he’d play through the tune and give you the idea. He’d have things written down, too. He was the one guy who had my parts written down.
“He would keep my bass sound way up in the mixes. On a song like California Girls, at times you can hardly hear anything else. He just liked my sound and the way I moved around the fretboard”.
I think every great musician deserves praise and fuss on their birthday, but the fact Carol Kaye is eighty-five almost passed me by. I was not aware of how far her brilliance stretched and the sheer breadth of her talent. Like all great session musicians, she could play a perfect bass line on a Pop song and then step into R&B and Soul. I think Kaye should be opened to a whole new generation, to show just how incredible she is. Have a listen to her songs and witness her pure genius. It is clear that Carol Kaye is…
A true legend.