RJAM Bassist Jeff Denson on His Influences, Choosing Upright over Electric and Singing While Playing

"Power trio" is usually a label applied to rock bands, but for Jeff Denson's September 13 SFCM performance, that should change.

The Roots, Jazz, and American Music faculty member and bassist is working with well-known Bay Area jazz musicians Frank Martin on piano and Deszon Claiborne on drums to showcase Denson's preferred format.

"It gives me space," Denson says simply of the trio setting. (He's not wedded to pianists, either: Among his recent releases are two records with French guitarist Romain Pilon and A-list drummer Brian Blade, Between Two Worlds and Finding Light.)

Among bassists, the Big Bang of piano trios started mid-1959, when pianist Bill Evans met Scott LaFaro. It's not hyperbole to say that LaFaro revolutionized jazz bass: He played with his strings low to the instrument's fingerboard and honed a two-finger right-hand technique that allowed him to play more—and faster—than most other bassists. In Evans' trio with drummer Paul Motian, LaFaro's chops placed all three players on equal musical footing, and liberated the group's rhythmic sense away from the strict quarter-note pulse that defined jazz bass timekeeping.  

"A trio that hinted in that direction would be the Ahmad Jamal Trio with Israel Crosby on bass and Vernel Fournier on drums," Denson says. "Israel was a wonderful bassist and played melodic lines and fills in between the others, but Scott just kicked the door down. There's a whole slew of bass players that would not be who they are had it not been for his approach." (Other piano trios Denson cites: Chick Corea's Now He Sings, Now He Sobs and Keith Jarrett's long-running Standards Trio.)

But despite LaFaro's influence, Denson traces his bass-spiration back to another titan of the instrument: Charles Mingus. "My whole life is what it is because I heard Charles Mingus' 'Haitian Fight Song,'" he says. "Hearing him start out with that song's intro was a defining moment for me. I started as an electric bass player, but it was right at that moment where I figured I had to get off the fence about whether I wanted to play upright bass or not. Because you cannot make that kind of sound on an electric bass. So I thought, 'I don't care how hard it's gonna be, this is what I'm gonna do.'"

And despite his "Road to Damascus" moment with the upright bass, Denson actually traces his other great musical love—singing—to his early days playing electric bass in his high school band.

"I actually sang before I was a bass player," he recalls. "So I was singing in bands and—like in the history of almost every bass player—there wasn't another bass player, so I picked it up. And in the '90s there were all these cool bass lines in rock music, and I thought, 'Wow, that instrument sounds kind of cool. Maybe I'll try it.' And I got heavily addicted to it, I mean, immediately."

"And then naturally, okay, I'm the singer in the band, so I have to try to do both at the same time," Denson continues. "And I had varying degrees of success and failure from the get-go. But when I dedicated my life to the double bass, I put my voice and my electric bass in the closet for a long time. It wasn't until I moved to New York years later that I started singing and playing electric again."

Denson allows that he still didn't have as great a sense of independence between his bass playing and singing at that point—"Sometimes it would work, sometimes not"—but recalls a watershed moment in his musical development, precipitated by a tragedy.

"What really did it for me was a tune I composed," he says. "My dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and I wrote this poem that was kind of like, helping me deal with it, and then I wrote this music to it. But I didn't think about, 'What's it gonna be like to actually do them at the same time?' So basically I'd written this thing that I couldn't do: The tune is in five, and I'm singing a syncopated line with chord extensions, so it's not easy to hear harmonically or rhythmically."

The fix came when Denson wrote out the vocal line and the bass line on a grand staff sheet music paper. "I looked at where they connected: Where do they connect with the downbeat? Where am I playing the bass, and then where is my voice off from that? Doing that the one time opened the door: Everything was easier after that."

Denson brings a wide array of vocal influences to his music: He cites Abbey Lincoln as one of his favorite jazz vocalists, but on his 2018 record Outside My Window, he also tackles songs by Jeff Buckley, Peter Gabriel, and—showcasing his '90s rock roots—Soundgarden.

But should he pull out any of his vocal rep for his recital, don't expect to hear those songs as faithful, radio-accurate renditions. "A huge part of what I do in any musical setting is improvise," Denson says. "That's what I'm after. I do that while I'm playing bass as much as with my voice and phrasing. I really like storytellers, vocalists who bring out emotion and use the voice like an instrument. So having this independence between my bass and my voice is pretty exciting for me at this stage of my life."

Reserve your tickets for Denson's 2:00 PM performance on September 13 at 200 Van Ness here, or learn more about studying Roots, Jazz, and American Music at SFCM.