"Reggae Master" Andy Bassford Interview
www.AndyBassford.com
Interview by Roger Zee (03/07/22)
Roger Zee: Who inspired you to take up the guitar and bass? Do you sing or play any other instruments?
Andy Bassford: I wanted to play the trombone. My father loved New Orleans jazz and that instrument always jumped out at me -- so mournful and happy at the same time. I feel the same way, so I guess that’s what I liked about it.
Plus the boy next door, a year ahead of me in school, played it in the band. I’d hear him practicing with the window open. The actual live sound of the instrument seemed even better than on record so I decided that's the instrument for me.
Then I got braces! I wanted to play trombone anyway even though it would've ripped my lips to shreds. But reason, AKA my mother, prevailed. She appeared ahead of her time in many ways. She came up with the idea that bowing the violin would improve my poor motor skills.
At least that's the story she gave me. So I picked up the violin and got pretty good at it. But it felt like homework. I did it but didn’t feel emotionally invested. Violin came closer to what I wanted but not it.
The late Charles Palmer, my violin teacher and single most important musical influence, suggested I switch to viola because there's always a big demand for that. And it soon became clear I wouldn't make a great violinist. This all worked much better for me because the viola, tuned the same as a tenor banjo, sounds much less shrill and I grew up with hyper acute hearing.
I really liked the viola. But it still didn't feel right. Meanwhile the guitar grew huge due to The Beatles and other UK groups. I pretty much liked anything with guitar in it. My babysitter owned one and she let me play it. Much to my surprise, I found out that my left hand already worked well on it. Despite the different tuning, I quickly figured all the notes and played right away.
But I struggled using the pick. It’s still the hardest part for me. Born mostly left handed, I switched to righty at age three after I broke my arm. But my left hand still always works better than my right.
In spite of all this, I became instant friends with the guitar. Plus, it seemed popular and I wasn’t. My best friend played in a band and I went to a couple of their rehearsals. They sounded good and very together for their age. Apart from the volume, which killed me and still does though I’ve learned how to handle it, it amazed me how powerful electric instruments sound around you. These kids my age played the music that they liked. And that interested me VERY much!
The bass player, a year older than everybody else, went off to college and the band needed a replacement. I took a paper route and in six weeks earned money for a bass and amp. My parents matched it and so I became a bass player. It also came fast. By then, the band had already broken up but my friend and I started our own. He played keyboards, sang, and wrote songs. So we became The Doors clones.
Then I saw B.B. King on TV. The guitar teacher at the music store where my mother worked knew my interest in music, told her about the show, and she passed it to me. I turned it on in the first verse of "I’ve Got A Mind To Give Up Living." B.B. sang and Lucille sang back. Then King took a solo. By the end of the first chorus, I became a guitar player. I just didn’t own a guitar!
I didn’t tell anybody about it for a long time. But I knew what direction my life would take. The first step required getting a guitar. My friend’s father solved the problem very shortly. The family split up and he needed to sell some things. He played a little bit and kept a few instruments around including a one pickup Harmony electric and a beginner National lap steel. He asked me if I wanted the guitar and said he’d sell it to me for five bucks.
You never saw poor motor skills disappear so fast. I raced home, emptied my piggy bank, and put a five dollar bill in his hand before he could change his mind! He threw in the lap steel and a Goya fuzz/treble booster in the deal for free. I still own the steel. I already owned the bass amp so became all good to go. I hooked up the guitar, booster, and amp and started annoying everyone within earshot. Doing so ever since...
I play electric guitar and bass well. Acoustic guitar pretty well. And I can figure out anything with strings on it good enough to perform a simple part on a session. I've got my grandfather’s tenor banjo and at one point I played it pretty well. I played upright bass in music camp one summer and after the guitar, it’s my favorite. If I couldn’t play guitar that’s what I’d do. But that thing requires a lifetime commitment and I already fell in love with guitar.
The cello's the only instrument that gives me trouble. That's because you need to hold it with your legs with the bow at a different angle. I know how it works though. All stringed instruments basically fall into two types. Your right hand uses a bow or it doesn’t. If not, you use pick, fingers, or some combination.
Once you know how to tune it, it’s just a matter of putting enough time in with the thing so you know where the notes go. The fretted instruments play much easier than the unfretted ones as far as I’m concerned. But my son Liam, with perfect pitch, seems to play all of them without much trouble.
I do sing and on occasion sang lead vocals the whole night. But I wanted to sing like B.B. King. However, the first time I opened my mouth and tried to do it, I felt so embarrassed I just quit. I sang in choirs, and I’ve sung lead or background in the bands I joined depending on what they needed. Some people enjoy my vocals and I occasionally really enjoy it myself.
But from 1981 through 2010, I played behind some of the greatest singers who ever lived. And any group I played in contained three to six people who sang better than I did. It didn't seem incredibly important to me to do it myself. A lot of my Jamaican friends don’t even know that I can!
RZ: Tell me about some of the musicians and groups you've gigged and recorded with.
AB: Too many to even think about. As far as the famous ones, I’ve played, recorded, or both with nearly every singer and musician of the classic Reggae era. I spent the most time with Dennis Brown, Jamaica’s favorite, and Toots and the Maytals. I played on Wailers records but they haven’t come out.
I also performed in a band called Lloyd Parks and We The People, the Jamaica equivalent of the Apollo Theater house band. We backed everybody who didn’t have their own band, which seemed like most of them. I’ve also played with the Skatalites, Ernest Ranglin, Peter Tosh (last show he ever did), Burning Spear, Melody Makers, Yellowman, Super Cat, Shaggy, Gregory Isaacs, Chronixx, Beres Hammond, and Marcia Griffiths (the Electric Slide lady) and Judy Mowatt of the I-Threes.
I did sessions with both Sly and Robbie and the Wailers musicians accompanying other artists. I currently work with Monty Alexander, a Jamaican Jazz piano legend who’s stuck around since the 50s. My other regular gig's with Derrick Barnett, one of Jamaica’s greatest bass players, now living in NYC. Derrick came up a little before I me and comes from a very similar background. We compared notes one day and Jimmy Cliff's the only prominent Reggae artist of the 20th century that neither one of us worked with. I don’t know how we missed him.
Non-Reggae artists would include Aretha Franklin. Only one night, but I sight read the gig and got asked back so it counts. Sting with Shaggy, Willie Nelson via overdub, Bonnie Raitt, Rihanna, LaVern Baker, Jennifer Holliday, Bobby Keyes, Graham Haynes (son of Roy Haynes), and Natalie Merchant. Plus a lot of great players who played with Monty on special occasions like Houston Person and Arturo Sandoval. Also Ron Wood, Peter Wolf, and Steven Seagal who sat in with Toots. I played on remixes of Marvin Gaye and Alicia Keys too but they haven’t come out.
Know I’m forgetting some of them. If you ask me about a specific person I can usually remember but not always. Can’t guess the amount of sessions I've done. Did my first one in 1976 and lost count in the late 80's. I recorded 600+ songs in the five years I stayed in Jamaica, 1980-1985. As a very wild guess -- between 3000 and 3500 songs. A whole lot of people did more, but I stayed busy.
RZ: What specific instruments/amps/mics do you currently use?
AB: I own a ton of guitars and amps, including some nice old ones: a '50's ES 125, a 1964 Strat, a 1966 Tele, a1968 SG, and a 1966 or 1968 335 (not clear from the serial number). Nothing a collector would kill for because I’ve played and modded the hell out of them but guitar players and engineers love them.
I love Fender and Gibson style electric guitars. I like the Fender scale length and control setup but I love the fuller midrange of a Gibson. It sounds closer to a viola than a Fender. Gibsons take up a different space in a band/track than Fenders do.
If you notice, every guitar hero with a Strat in a trio plays really loud and cranks the amps to get the fullness. A Fender can be heard through anything and really shines in a horn band, or with a lot of modern keyboards. But if you’re in a rock/blues trio with a Gibson, you get comparable fullness at a much lower volume. I’m not usually a loud player though there are moments.
Never got on with Gretsch for some reason. Ibanez and PRS make great guitars but I’ve never met the right one. Just about everything I own's some variant of Fender or Gibson. I've got a ton of Telecasters.
As far as amps, I’m mostly a Fender guy. Around town, I use an old Boogie Mark II-A a lot. On the road, I take a blackface reissue Twin or Princeton. I like most Marshalls but I just don’t get along with the JCM 900. With Toots, most of the time I used a JCM 800 and one 4 x 12. It’s a great clean amp and covers the stage better than a 1 x 12, or even a Twin, at the same volume.
I love Vox AC-15s and AC-30s. On gigs when I’m the lead instrument, I usually bring the AC-15. I also love Ampegs, all of them. They show up a lot when I play lead. Just not the greatest Reggae rhythm amp.
I own a Danelectro DS-100, basically two 3 x 10 Bassman circuits and output transformers that go into three speakers each, for a total of 6 x 10 in one cabinet! They only made it one year. It’s very similar to the amp Jack White uses and sounds amazing cranked. But it’s also the amp on a lot of classic reggae records. The very same amp!
It’s bulky for NY local use though and a bit fragile. It shows up on special occasions like the Rihanna session. The top end's very different from a Fender. It pushes a lot of air and surrounds vocals beautifully. Someone should make it again.
As to my other instruments, I own one steel string acoustic, a 1970 Martin that looks like it survived a war but records beautifully. Also a really nice Ibanez 12-string from the 80's. It’s the one you hear on "Rivers of Babylon" on my album, "The Harder They Strum." In addition, I've got a lap steel, a tenor banjo, a ukulele, and a few other things including a Squier 51 that Flip Scipio put two Gold Foil pickups on. I use that a lot lately. I also possess a ton of Squiers and a great Epiphone Les Paul that they gave me when they gave me an endorsement deal. You hear that on the Toots songs on my album. Just got a new Squier Paranormal Tele for my birthday.
RZ: Talk about your home studio.
AB: I've got an old version of Cubase and a new Fireface interface running on a PC. I use a Rode mic and a bunch of SM 58s and a 57. Yamaha speakers. Mostly what I do at home is record guitar parts for other people.
I’m not an engineer but I hung around it a long time and so picked up an idea of what they do. I rarely produce full tracks at home for other people. Though I can and do so. I don’t want a parade of people trooping in and out. I’m pretty introverted. If you want me to produce anything big, we’ll go somewhere else to do it!
RZ: What and how do you practice.
AB: That varies wildly. If I’m learning material for a gig, that’s what I do. If I’m recording a lot at home, that’s what I do. These things emphatically don't fall under practicing. That's a whole separate animal.
I always work on Jazz -- both feel and vocabulary, along with the technique required to execute that vocabulary. If I find fifteen minutes, that’s probably what I’m doing. I’ll never get a Jazz career because it’s too late for that. I also don’t think it’s what I was put here to do, or I’d be doing it. But I want to be able to keep up at the highest level if that’s called for.
Because I play with Monty Alexander, I stay in contact with Jazz for every gig, both through him and the musicians he calls. So I know the standards. I learned how to read before I played guitar so that’s in there. I don’t practice sight reading because it’s not called for.
But I do transcribe music a lot. For any gig I do, I make my own charts out by hand. That process feels almost as good as practicing reading and a lot more fun. When I see a rhythm figure, I probably already wrote it out a few times so I recognize it.
Apart from that, my practicing falls into two categories. I practice to fix a professional deficiency I’ve realized exists because something felt hard for me on a gig. Fingerpicking always reigns high on that list along with what I call EAS -- English Arpeggio S***. A great example of EAS -- The Beatles’ "She’s So Heavy." Stately arpeggios at Pink Floyd tempos. I can play that stuff but really struggle for some reason.
Another thing's an altered chord I’m used to playing in one of two positions, but realize on a gig that I’m really not sharp on the other possibilities. The other category's stuff that I can play a bit but suddenly really inspires me. I went through a Sacred Steel lap phase for a couple of years. Non-reggae Caribbean guitar and African guitar's another rabbit hole.
I really like 80's Metal, but I’m only adequate at it because I lived in Jamaica then and didn’t need to play it. I’m a much better 70's rock guitarist than 80's or 90's. But when you do a lot of studio work, you find yourself doing bad imitations of the real thing. I can fake just about anything for a song if I can technically play it. But I don’t live there and know that better than anyone.
RZ: Do you teach music privately?
AB: Yes! I teach private students of all levels. Also school-age children at Mind-Builders, a legendary Bronx arts center. I absolutely love teaching. Fell into it by accident and it just kept growing of its own accord. I don’t advertise. When people believe I can teach them something, they find me somehow. Often it’s because they saw me play live with somebody. Or I performed on a record they like. Reach me either at Mind-Builders or my website at
AndyBassford.com.
RZ: How has the Pandemic affected you? What's on the horizon?
AB: The pandemic's awful for everybody and remains so. Friends who mostly play gigs without a regular school job or remote recording clientele found themselves absolutely devastated and still not recovered. It’s horrible. Living stuck at home didn’t bother me per se. Introversion's a superpower in a pandemic.
Financially, I survived OK. My album actually paid my rent during the lockdown. But I slid to a complete stand still from 100-170 gigs and sessions a year -- which I’ve done since the late 70's. You would think that I would immediately get going on other things. But I really didn't. Only practiced and did my remote stuff. But I couldn’t really get much else done. I slept a lot, which I needed, and reflected, which I probably also needed.
As far as what’s on the horizon, nobody knows. The current reality -- people want things to start up again. So they plan stuff and call you. But then something happens and they cancel everything. Then they start planning again. I think that will remain the short term story.
When we started working again in the Spring of 2021, a lot of people had been forced to leave NY and so couldn't take part. Another thing that happened, at least in my circle, people stopped playing gigs for really bad money just because they wanted to play Jazz or something. Always problematic because it keeps our wages down. And yet we all did it. In absolute terms, musicians’ income declined noticeably since 9-11 and took another hit in 2008.
People took a ton of bad gigs out of desperation. That seems gone. Players realized that it’s not worth it. Never was, but took a lockdown to get us to notice. Now what I tend to get for a gig has gone up without my asking for it. As one of my friends put it, "Some gigs deserve to die!"
RZ: Describe your most special and/or unusual gig.
AB: Too many of them! One story on my website's about the night I went on a double date to see Culture, one of my favorite Reggae groups, at the Ritz. We arrived right before show time and found no available tables. My friend twisted my arm to try and get the band to give us a table. So I knocked on their dressing room door but the road manager wouldn’t let me in. However, Joseph, the lead singer, saw me, reached over the guy’s shoulder, grabbed my arm, and dragged me inside. He made the guitar player lend me his backup guitar. The next time my date saw me I stood playing onstage!
RZ: How do you see the future of the music business?
AB: Live music will always live on. So will the music itself. The business itself currently does incredibly well. However, the acts, and particularly the songwriters, have never done worse in my entire lifetime. I find this not only incredibly unfair, but also unsustainable.
People will do music as a hobby and the business will just recycle what they already own and exploit the people that actually interact with them. The quality of music will go down because there's no possible way a kid can make a living at it. The folks at the very bottom will remain there. The people at the very top as well. Everybody in the middle will find it impossible to continue.
This reflects on society as a whole. You make $5 an hour and live in a room with ten people. $15 an hour and you share with three roommates. $20-40 an hour and you go $100K in debt. If you own a business that can pay a few people $40 an hour, you’re someone that does business directly with Elon Musk -- or else you’re Elon Musk. Gross over simplification, but that’s the outline. Not sustainable either. It’s not at all clear now how this will all fall apart.
RZ: What advice do you give up-and-coming musicians?
AB: Leave home! It makes your chances of success better. Learn another skill that pays well enough for you to survive without music. If it keeps you close to the music business, even better!
Protect your ears. If I could, that's the single most important thing I would do over again. Get your chops together while you’re young. You won’t get the time later.
If you work for someone else, become the solution, not the problem. Never a bad idea! You can act the diva as long as you're making someone a lot of money. The minute that stops, change or get out!
Get back to people ASAP if they call you for something. Any answer's better than none even if the answer's that you don’t know. If you're late or can’t come at all, CALL as soon as you realize that's happening. If the bandleader knows, he can figure out what he needs to do to save the situation and act on it.
Over and over again, I’ve seen people blow major opportunities because they felt afraid or embarrassed to call the leader and didn’t. Sure he might not ever call you again. But he's definitely not going to call you again if he doesn’t hear from you until you finally show up. One of the obvious dumb mistakes I see people constantly make!
Remember, be the solution, not the problem! If you call, you’re part of the solution. If you don’t, you’re the whole problem. You don’t get hired because you’re an amazing player unless the gig calls for that. You get hired because you’re reliable, you do your homework, you stay sober enough to finish the gig, and you get along with everybody, including the people working the venue and the audience.
Don’t ever blow off a gig at the last minute to take another one that pays more. You can do that once in any given situation, maybe. Learn where the money lies in the business and how the business works. That changes all the time. Keep up! The pitfalls in the business appear obvious and well known. Don’t fall into any of them. No matter how crazy a given situation becomes, no one minds keeping around a designated driver even if they make fun of you.
Act nice to everybody. Apart from anything else, it’s good business. Music's a business of personal relationships. The more quality relationships you maintain, the more you’ll work and the better you’ll do.
As far as playing, there's a million things I can say but they all boil down to one thing. "Is what I’m doing now making the music better, or worse?" To answer that question, you must listen all the time. Play like you’re the arranger and the producer, not like a guitar or bass player. Listen to the whole band like you're mixing a record.
As to sessions, you get hired when they don’t have to tell you what to play. That's because most of the time they don’t know, and/or don’t know how to explain it to you. Or else they think you will come up with something they haven’t thought of. Obviously you need to play well but there's a million people who can do that.
But there's not a million people who can listen to a song one time, hear what it needs by the end of the first chorus, and start playing it. That’s how I made a career. How do you know what to play when you can’t think of anything? The song itself will tell you if you listen hard enough. That’s the secret.
RZ: Do you live with any animals?
AB: I wish! I love animals. But pre-pandemic, I traveled too much to enjoy one, or even take care of him/her properly. I grew up with cats so they're my favorites. But I’ve really come to understand that there's beauty in all animals as long as you tune into what makes them special. And never forget that they're animals. I love cats but they're wired to kill and will do so anytime they get a chance.
RZ: Anything else you'd like to add?
AB: Nobody ever got in trouble by listening. You get two ears. Learn how to use them!
YouTube - "True Love Is Hard to Find" - Bonnie Raitt and Toots & The Maytals Live 2008
YouTube - "Promised Land" - Dennis Brown Live 1984
©2022 Roger Zee
