Barre Phillips (1934 - 2024)

Photo by Didier Bonnet / ECM Records

By Martin Schray

Sometimes you play music and it wasn’t planned to release it as an album. That’s what happened with the first bass solo album in jazz. Barre Phillips, the man who made that record, was asked by a friend of his, Max Schubel, to record some bass sounds. Schubel wanted to use these sound for “mixed music between tape and live“. Phillips agreed and played for probably about an hour and a half without any breaks. Schubel was swept off his feet and said that he doesn’t want to mess with that in an electronic studio. Instead he wanted to release the music on his label. Phillips later said in an interview that if I had known that someone hadn’t done that already, he probably would have refused to publish it since he had considered it to be much too pretentious. That’s how the story behind Journal Violone (Opus One, 1969), which was the prelude to a series of many solo works by Barre Philipps and of course to hundreds of solo albums by other bass players. It is sad news that this pioneer and maestro of modern music has now passed away.

Barre Phillips was born in San Francisco on October 28, 1934. Musically, he couldn’t be pigeonholed from the outset. After studying Romance languages and literature at Berkeley University, he moved to New York City in 1962, where he had double bass lessons with Frederick Zimmermann, the first bassist of the New York Philharmonic. However, he also put out feelers for the jazz scene early on and especially Ornette Coleman introduced him to many players of the new thing. In 1963, he appeared in a third-stream project by Gunther Schuller with Eric Dolphy at Carnegie Hall, but almost simultaneously he recorded a concert by Larry Austin with the New York Philharmonic as a soloist under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. From 1964 he was a member of Jimmy Giuffe’s trio. In the mid 1960s he came to Europe for the first time with George Russell’s sextet. Between 1965 and 1967, he worked primarily with guitarist Attila Zoller and saxophonist Archie Shepp. In 1967 he went to Europe permanently, moving to the south of France in the early 1970s, where he stayed for more than 50 years. In Europe, he worked with virtually every musician who had a name in the jazz scene, from Mike Westbrook to Rolf and Joachim Kühn and Michel Portal to the style-defining The Trio with John Surman and Stu Martin. Later he played with Derek Bailey and Gunter Hampel as well as Jeanne Lee, and since 1986 he has also enjoyed working with Barry Guy, especially with the bassist’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra. In the 1990s, Phillips recorded with Ornette Coleman, Evan Parker and Paul Bley. As to free jazz there’s hardly any great name who hasn’t worked with him: Peter Brötzmann, Peter Kowald, Joëlle Léandre, David Holland and Lol Coxill and many more. However, Phillips not only played with Americans and Europeans, he also regularly recorded albums in Asia from the 1990s onwards, for example with Motoharu Yoshizawa, Keiji Haino, Kim Dae Hwan and Masashi Harada. Additionally, as a composer and performer, he has repeatedly worked for film, dance and theater productions. For example, he has written music for films by Robert Kramer, Jacques Rivette, William Friedkin and Marcel Camus, to name but a few. Ultimately, however, Phillips was one thing above all: an avant-gardist par excellence. “I was as enthusiastic about Bartók, Schönberg and Stravinsky as I was about Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman“, he said in an interview. That’s why there were always excursions into the realm of classical music. In 1992, Aquarian Rain featured a collaboration with electroacoustic composers James Giroudon and Jean-François Estager, juxtaposing Phillips’s bass with a tape collage. Already Mountainscapes (his ECM album with The Trio from 1976) contains sensitive duets with synthesizer player Dieter Feichtner, which could be considered as if foreshadowing Face à Face, his collaboration with György Kurtág Jr. from 2022. Towards the end of his life, Barre Phillips returned to the United States in early 2022, he settled down in New Mexico.

There are many records of Barre Phillips’s immense output that must be recommended. Of course the above-mentioned Journal Violone (Opus One, 1969), a ground-breaking album indeed. Also, other solo albums are worth being mentioned, Call Me When You Get There (ECM, 1984) and his last one, End To End (ECM, 2018), 50 years after Journal Violone. Phillips has released excellent bass duos as well. You can’t go wrong with Music From Two Basses (ECM, 1971) with Dave Holland (the first album for two basses ever recorded), Die Jungen: Random Generators (FMP, 1979) with Peter Kowald, Arcus (Maya Recordings, 1991) with Barry Guy and Oh My, Those Boys (NoBusiness, 2018), a recording from 1994 with Motoharu Yoshizawa. The Trio’s Mountainscapes (ECM, 1976) is a marvelous recording, as well as Sankt Gerold (ECM, 2000) with Paul Bley and Evan Parker. Very personal recommendations are his albums with Joe and Mat Maneri Tales of Rohnlief (ECM, 1999) and Angles of Repose (ECM, 2004), the second of which was recorded in the old Sainte Philomène chapel adjacent to Phillips’s Puget-Ville home. If you want to see what a great team player he was, you might listen to the Gunter Hampel All Stars’ Jubilation (Birth, 1983) or to the very early The Horizon Beyond (Emarcy, 1965) with Attila Zoller’s Quartet (Zoller on guitar, Don Friedman on piano and Daniel Humair on drums). My personal favorite is Michel Portal / John Surman / Barre Phillips / Stu Martin / Jean-Pierre Drouet: Alors!!! (Futura Recods, 1970).

A true giant is gone. The gap he leaves behind is enormous.

Watch Phillips playing solo in a church at Kaleidophon Ulrichsberg: