Johnny D's Jazz Journal

     Gene Krupa and Leonard Bernstein

     As a kid with eclectic tastes growing up in a musical family, I never thought about one genre being better or more important than another, or that musical genres needed to remain segregated, that merging them amounted to sacrilege. After playing percussion in youth orchestras, drums in various rock and soul bands, and piano in a jazz trio, I was in my mid-20s before I finally assembled a band that could play the smorgasbord of music I’d been composing since age 10.

     Perhaps I started feeling empathy for bass players many years ago when I realized that low-noters were replacing drummers in the jokes that musicians like to tell. As a drummer, I was relieved when an old joke such as, "How do you know when a stage is perfectly level? — the drummer is drooling from both corners of his mouth," was changed to make bass players the objects of ridicule. But it also occurred to me that it was a positive development for people to be thinking about bassists at all.