Scarbee bass how low can it go professional#

And he said to me ‘Do you know Def Leppard?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t know Def Leppard.’ At that time I didn’t know many metal people. It wasn’t really my idea, I got a call from Afrika Bambaataa who wanted to incorporate what he does with metal to make ‘World Destruction’. It seemed like a very natural thing at the time.

How did it all go so awfully wrong and end up as Nu Metal?īL: It’s hard to say. I guess when you listen back to tracks from that period like ‘World Destruction’ by Time Zone and a few years later ‘She Watch Channel Zero’ by Public Enemy, sticking militant hip hop together with heavy guitar noise seemed like the future. It sounds like it was a very exciting time to be making music. The painter at that gig actually was Keith Harring who was connected to the hip hop scene at that time. So that was the beginning of that thing and I was kind of mixing that into what I was doing with Sonny Sharrock and other situations. We played it at that gig even though it hadn’t come out because that was kind of the beginnings of progressive hip hop in New York and D.ST was part of that scene down at the Roxy with Zulu Nation and Bambaataa and everything.

I guess that must have been when you were doing Time Zone with Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols.īill Laswell: Time Zone was around that time and also right around that time was Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’ which we actually played at Montreux. So Keith Haring painted live while we were playing and when the music stopped, the painting was finished, which was kind of a trip for the audience.” It was also the first time I had ever seen live music with live painting. It was a long time ago, and probably a lot more in the avant garde! But we did play pieces that featured the turntable. Again, it was improvised but with a rhythm section. He laughs and says: “I think I was playing with Sonny Sharrock, D.ST who is a DJ and Henry Kaiser.

Scarbee bass how low can it go professional#

It’s probably fair to say that things in Laswell’s professional life aren’t as hectic as they were back in 1983, when he first played Montreux. And there are two newer members, Hawkman from Jamaica and DJ Krush. Again a lot of it is based on live drum and bass, dub and quite a lot of improv in the middle with Bernie Worrell (keyboards) and Guy Licata (drums), the frontmen Toshinori Kondo (trumpet) and “Dr Israel” (vocals/console). What came out of it was that we were all interested in continuing with it as a band. And then we played live in Greece two years ago and we sort of did it for fun. Originally the name was used on a compilation of drum and bass producers collaborating with established jazz musicians and it was always rooted in drum and bass. We wondered what people could expect from his appearance at the jazz festival: “Well, it’s kind of a new idea. He talked to us while taking a break from his rehearsals in New York. Most recently his explorations have been into low end provision and the blending of drum and bass, dub and funk as part of the Method Of Defiance group who will be playing at Montreux. He's brought hip hop and punk together with his work on the Time Zone project melded electro, fusion and hip hop as a producer on Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’ and combined jazz with punk and heavy metal as a member of Massacre and Painkiller. This involves seemingly disparate elements being thrown together in an attempt to create new sound. His natural curiosity has led to him working in what's known as “collision music”. Laswell is a musician’s musician, combining an unpretentious, can-do attitude with an aptitude for performing and producing with equally good results whether in the field of jazz, improv, dub, drum and bass, punk, electro or hip hop. At this year’s Montreux Jazz Festival one of the returning visitors was bassist extraordinaire Bill Laswell, who was playing some 26 years after his first appearance on the shores of Lake Geneva.