After a short stint on trombone, Alphonso Johnson took up the electric bass in 1968. His early gigs included time with Horace Silver, Woody Herman (1972), Chuck Mangione (1973), and Chet Baker. Johnson rose to fame while touring and recording three albums with Weather Report (1974-1976). This was followed by stints with Billy Cobham (1976-1977),... [+] Read More

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Late one stormy night Frank Zappa and Charles Mingus had a naughty tryst. Their offspring was nursed by the Sugar Hill Gang, baby-sat by Radiohead and bullied by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bill Laswell. It hurts. All of it.

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Doug Wimbish was one of the 1980s' most versatile bassists, able to move from pop and mainstream rock session work to heavy metal, funk, and experimental music over the course of the decade; he continued in this vein through the 1990s before finally releasing his first solo album, Trippy Notes for Bass, in 1999. Wimbish is perhaps best known as... [+] Read More

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A founding member of the enormously influential Krautrock group Can, Holger Czukay was one of the pivotal underground figures of his era; over the course of his long, expansive career, Czukay successfully bridged the gap between pop and the avant-garde, pioneering the use of samples and exploring the significance of world music on Western... [+] Read More

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Although some may be tempted to call multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and composer Jack Bruce a rock & roll musician, blues and jazz are what this innovative musician really loves. As a result, these two genres are at the base of most of the recorded output from a career that goes back to the beginning of London's blues scene in 1962. In that... [+] Read More

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Jaco Pastorius was a meteor who blazed on to the scene in the 1970s, only to flame out tragically in the 1980s. With a brilliantly fleet technique and fertile melodic imagination, Pastorius made his fretless electric bass leap out from the depths of the rhythm section into the front line with fluid machine-gun-like passages that demanded... [+] Read More

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Australian-born composer and producer Paul Schütze is among the most focused and prolific artists of the contemporary experimental electronic scene. Releasing album after album of sprawling, icy, often difficult ambient and electro-acoustic music, Schütze's work has most often been grouped with post-industrial ambient/isolationist artists such... [+] Read More

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The driving force behind "Neo Geo" -- a cutting-edge fusion combining Asian and Western classical music with other global textures and rhythms -- pioneering electronic composer Ryuichi Sakamoto was among the most innovative artists to emerge during the 1980s. Born January 17, 1952, in Tokyo, he took up piano at the age of three, and regularly... [+] Read More

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Steve Swallow has long been many jazz critics' favorite electric bassist for, rather than playing his instrument in a rock-oriented manner, Swallow emphasizes the high notes and approaches the electric bass, to an extent, as if it were a guitar. He originally started on piano and trumpet before settling on the acoustic bass as a teenager.... [+] Read More

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