Yup, finally, about 5 years after our last one together, I’ve got a London gig with Michael Manring. For those that don’t know, Michael is, IMHO, the finest solo bassist ever to pick up the instrument. He’s been doing this stuff longer than I’ve been playing bass, has sold literally hundreds of thousands of records (how many solo bass players can you say that about??), and has even reinvented the instrument to make things possible that weren’t possible before.
The gig is at Round Midnight Jazz and Blues Bar, on Oct 7th, starting at 8.30. Tickets will be £8 on the door, £7 in advance – to reserve tickets, call 020 7837 8758 or email “ntmusic [theATsymbol] gmail [a dot] com”. (it’s highly likely to sell out – we played to about 130 people at the Troubadour last time he was here…)
We’ve been playing together whenever we can since we met in 1999 – we’ve never played together NOT on stage (meaning, we just get up there and play – no rehearsing, writing tunes etc. one of us starts, the other joins in). We’ll see how it goes at the gig, we’ll probably play a solo set each and some stuff together. Given how long it is since Michael last played here, it would make sense for him to do a big chunk of solo playing (he’s got a new solo album out since he was last here – Soliloquy, which you can’t listen to on Spotify or last.fm, but you can hear bits of then buy on eMusic or iTunes or CDbaby…)
It’s pretty tricky to describe just what happens or how it sounds when we play together, so this evening I edited together a 3 track EP from the last time we did a show, in Santa Cruz, California – here it is. Enjoy, download, share it, embed it on your own blog:
Steve Lawson and Michael Manring live at Don Quixotes by solobasssteve
And here’s Michael on his own on youtube:
And, for context, here’s a video of the second half of the second tune in the live and Don Quixote’s set embedded above… just the weird bit, without all the mellow ballad-y stuff before it! –
So please, come and see the gig, it’ll be fab – definitely not one just for bass-monkeys 🙂