Paul Laurence Dunbar Chambers Jr. (April 22, 1935 – January 4, 1969) was an American jazz double bassist. A fixture of rhythm sections during the 1950s and 1960s, he has become one of the most widely-known jazz bassists of the hard bop era. He was also known for his bowed solos. Chambers recorded about a dozen albums as a leader or co-leader, and more than 100 as a sideman, especially as the anchor of trumpeter Miles Davis's "first great quintet" (1955–63) and with pianist Wynton Kelly (1963–68).
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Almost four hours of previously unreleased live music by legendary jazz trumpeter/composer Miles Davis and the musicians he chose to play with over the course of 20 years are featured on Miles Davis at Newport 1955-1975: The Bootleg Series Vol. 4. The four-CD collection includes performances by Davis and his bands from 1955, 1958, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1973, and...
Name any genre of music and certain bass players immediately come to mind. Rock and roll? Paul McCartney. Blues? Willie Dixon. Funk? Larry Graham. They are the ones who stick out as paving the way, defining the roll of the instrument in that particular music, and creating those classic lines that we can’t help but listen to, learn, and hope...
Author Rob Palmer gets into the world of one of jazz’s greatest bassists in his new book entitled Mr. P.C.: The Life and Music of Paul Chambers, which is out now from Equinox Publishing Limited. The 416-page hardback biography uses literary sources as well as family and friend interviews to capture Chambers’ story from his birth in Pittsburgh to his...
Author Mikko Nurmi’s The Music of Paul Chambers (Volume 1) is a new book offering a comprehensive look at the style of one of the great jazz bassists, Paul Chambers. Through the use of full transcriptions of Chambers’ work, Nurmi includes insights through analysis and theory, as well as related exercises. “It may be helpful just to see what someone...
Editor’s note: help us welcome Keith White as a new contributor on No Treble. I was checking out Mark Saltman’s column, in which he reviews the melody in Paul Chamber’s tune “Tale of the Fingers”. This is a notable melody, so I decided to analyze the tune’s structure and melody as a follow up to Mark’s great column. First, let’s...
