TT 399: Peter Erskine on Marc Johnson's Bass Desires SECOND SIGHT + Gary Peacock GUAMBA

The great drummer shares stories and photos

I bought the two albums Marc Johnson’s Bass Desires Second Sight and Gary Peacock Guamba brand new as a kid when they were first released; they have remained in my personal pantheon of favorite records ever since. Both albums are peak ECM and peak integration of rock music and studio technology into an improvisatory acoustic jazz context.

Second Sight: Marc Johnson, John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Peter Erskine

Guamba: Gary Peacock, Palle Mikkelborg, Jan Garbarek, Peter Erskine

A couple of years ago I read Peter Erskine’s memoir No Beethoven: An Autobiography & Chronicle of Weather Report and learned that these two albums were recorded literally back to back in March 1987 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo.

Peter is friendly and approachable, and last month graciously consented to being interviewed about these two albums over Zoom. Vinnie Sperrazza transcribed the conversation, but in the end my voice was not required. Peter approved the edit.

The unexpected bonus are the photos. Incredible! Peter had his camera along and snapped many candid shots. Unless otherwise indicated, all photos are by Peter Erskine.

After Peter’s comment, I review the two albums track by track with an emphasis on Peter’s contribution.

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BY PETER ERSKINE:

When conversations about recording would occur with Manfred Eicher, he would often ask, “Will you be doing a tour with Thomas Stöwsand?” 

Thomas Stöwsand and Manfred Eicher had a peculiar relationship. Thomas used to work at ECM before going out on his own as a booking agent. I don’t recall what the story was, but there was some disagreement between Thomas and Manfred. However, they kept it under control because there was a flourishing ecosystem: they managed to make both things possible, recording and touring.  

Going into those March 1987 recordings, Bass Desires had done a Stöwsand (or “Saudades,” the name of his touring company) tour of Europe, and we camped for a few days in Austria in the small village of Schwaz, which is not too far from Innsbruck.

Schwaz was very close to where Stöwsand had his home, and he would put the musicians up in a hotel that resembled a student hostel. If there were down days on a tour, he’d route us back through Schwaz to save the band and the tour money, so you weren’t paying too much for a hotel. It was completely unglamorous, but the scenery was astonishing— you look out your window or step outside and you were in the Alps. It was a nice place to be. I remember Ralph Peterson was there, I forget what band he was touring with, but we were all vying for access to the laundry machine. There was also a local jazz club in Schwaz, the Ermitage, where all of the ECM artists played.

(Anna and Thomas Stöwsand at the Ermitage in Schwaz)

The end of the tour was designed so that it would end in Oslo for the recording of the second Bass Desires album. Getting up there was not the easiest thing in the world but that was the Stöwsand method. The bands were most often ECM acts, and we would route ourselves to Oslo, usually at the end of a tour.

We should go back in time and talk about the origins of Bass Desires.

(By the way, that’s my tune, “Bass Desires” on the first record. One of the first things I did using my brand new Macintosh 512k was to create a database for storing Simmons electronic drum programming, as well as play around with a rudimentary sequencing application that did things like perform retrograde inversions of tone rows while allowing for multiple lines to be programmed and heard. “Bass Desires” is a simple round with a dash of a mid-’60s Wayne evocation thrown in for good measure. The primary purpose of the tune was to provide a “time/no changes” blowing environment, and it became the band’s set opener. Naming it “Bass Desires” was merely an opportunistic cheap trick, and the band and Manfred fell for it!)

Marc Johnson and I had already been working a lot with John Abercrombie as a trio.

But Marc also wanted to put a band together where he would be the leader, with compositions that had, for lack of a better term, an odd sort of “Texan” influence. And in fact, somewhere there’s a tape of the very first Bass Desires gigs with his buddy — who was from Texas — playing harmonica and singing. 

Marc booked two nights to try out this concept at the restaurant The Silver Lining on 46th St. in New York, that’s Restaurant Row.

The first night was John Abercrombie, John Scofield, Marc, and myself, and the second night was Scofield and Frisell, Marc, and myself, plus this harmonica player that guested on one or two tunes. 

John and John were kind of getting in each others’ way. And they loved each other— but in terms of this band, and this was the only time we tried it, it was good but there was no real epiphany, it was just, “Wow, that was fun.” 

The next night with Frisell it was, "Holy cow, this is actually something, this is interesting.” Because Frisell, just instinctively or intellectually or musically, just magically knew what to do, and it brought out I daresay some of the best John Scofield at that time; I think John enjoyed what it brought out, and we all did, it just seemed unique and great. 

(John Scofield and Bill Frisell)

So Marc somehow interested Manfred Eicher in doing the first record, perhaps Manfred jumped at the chance to get Sco on ECM. We went into the Power Station for two days and tracked. 

Before recording we played up in Boston one or two times. We might have already done some sort of an East Coast tour, because I remember we played down at Blues Alley, and we played at a club in Philadelphia. 

(Erskine, Frisell, Scofield, Johnson. Photographer unknown)

The Philadelphia gig was memorable. We drove over the Francis Scott Key bridge in a terrible rain storm in a large white rental van, and we were nervous. Here’s Bass Desires, we start singing “Beer Barrel Polka”:  “Roll out the barrel...." to lighten the mood and calm our nerves. It was windy, the road seemed slippery, we’re in this rental van, none of us are feeling particularly great at the moment, and here we are singing polkas. 

We arrive okay, we’re playing in this club and we’re doing “Resolution,” the bass solo moment comes up — and all of a sudden, we hear a bit of a scuffle. A guy yells, “Fuck you!” and then a woman screams. It turned out later that someone was trying to hit a guy, but instead punches the guy’s girlfriend in the face.

All hell breaks loose. We look up: it’s total pandemonium and the bouncers are rushing in to try to contain this situation. 

So Marc shouts at the band, “Beer Barrel!” Sco and Frisell play “Beer Barrel Polka,” and the crowd starts clapping on 1 and 3. This sort of occupies everyone of good intent so that the bouncers can get the bad actors out of the club. 

I look out there while we are playing “Beer Barrel Polka,” and there’s this guy, facing us, not quite dancing, kind of bouncing, and he has this odd expression on his face, and then my eyes kind of glance downward, and he has exposed himself, and his appendage is sort of moving in time to the music. He gets grabbed by the bouncers and pulled off the table. Well, enough of that, the band hurriedly gets offstage where we proceed to lock ourselves in the dressing room. 

We are asking ourselves, “What in the world just happened?” Then, there was a polite knock and someone pleading, “Please, please come back and finish. We don’t want you to leave Philadelphia thinking that we’re all like this.” We went out and played a bit more.  

So, Bass Desires did a few gigs, but when we recorded the first album we were playing a lot of the tunes for the first time in the studio. By the time of Second Sight, we had lived in the band longer, had played the repertoire quite a bit on the road, and had  developed our sense of sound and approach. There was a fun vibe in the band.

(Scofield, Erskine, Frisell — photo maybe by Marc Johnson)

(John Scofield enters Rainbow studios with Manfred Eicher in the background.)

The Oslo ECM sessions were done at Rainbow Studios. Jan Erik Kongshaug had transformed a small cinema into this recording space. And there were these very large windows. Maybe before it became a cinema, it had these large windows, and they were restored when he converted it into a studio. 

It was the first time I’d ever worked in a recording studio that had that much sunlight coming in. Of course, sunlight or daylight in Oslo in the wintertime is pretty limited, and it casts peculiar shadows because we’re so far north. But somehow that was all part of the charm and the magic. We all stayed at a very modest hotel, part of the Best Western chain.

There were no assistants at the studio. Jan Erik unlocked the room in the morning, he made the coffee, he ran the date, he answered the phone if a call came in, he did the maintenance on the machines, he set up the microphones. A one-man operation. 

(Jan Erik Kongshaug)

The drums were a kick, because Jack DeJohnette had gifted the house drum kit to the studio. It was a Sonor rosewood drumset, and it was the ECM kit.  In my trap case would be fresh drumheads, cymbals, stick bag, and pedal.

(The “ECM kit”)

I’m gonna quote Jon Christensen, the wonderful drummer, who said, “Everyone asks me, ‘What is the magic of the ECM sound?’ But there is no magic. It’s a good-sounding room with an excellent piano and good reverb.” 

The reverb at the time was a Lexicon. Manfred used that Lexicon, and when I toured with Jan Garbarek for a while, Jan would bring his own Lexicon, it was simply part of the sound. 

We didn’t have much isolation in this large room with the sunlight coming in, although there were gobos. They would put the guitar amps in an iso booth. Marc or Gary or any other bassist would always be to my right, and we were separated by a thin but solid gobo with clear glass or plexiglass panels, so we could see each other. 

(Marc Johnson at Rainbow studios)

In the case of my ECM trio albums with John Taylor and  Palle Danielsson, the piano had the lid open but facing away. That’s what determined a lot of the playing choices, because if you played too loud it just didn’t sound good, and if you played too much it didn’t sound good. 

The first tune on Second Sight, “Crossing the Corpus Callosum,” was a longer jam with an edit. It was one of the last things we recorded, it might have been the end of day two, might have been the end of day one. I seem to recall it was, “Well, let’s just record something.” 

We did this on a few ECM albums, you would just start playing, and you’d come in and listen. And you hear the band kind of noodling around, and we’d all look at each other and say, “Whoa, that was pretty cool!” Then Manfred would just rewind a multi-track tape and then he’d drop his arm at the right moment and say, “We’ll start here.” 

On these kinds of improv pieces, Manfred would chose the start point, how long it should be, and when it should end. He had a genius for creating these pieces of music.

(Scofield, Eicher, Kongshaug, Frisell, Johnson)

I played the drumbeat that starts “Crossing the Corpus Callosum” just like that, but I did it — as I seem to recall — as an immediate tempo change from the previous texture. Whatever we were doing, I just went someplace new. But, still, there was a creative momentum already at work when I went to that new beat.

By that point, Marc and I had spent a lot of time in this particular laboratory with Abercrombie, figuring out what we liked and what we didn’t like. We were playing enough festivals where we would observe other rhythm sections and say to each other, “That’s cool,” or “That’s not cool.” 

(Marc Johnson wearing a T-shirt advertising the kind of cymbals that Peter Erskine plays)

We were developing this sense of kind of elastic time. Marc and I understood and trusted one another’s playing completely, so if one of us went in one direction the other could go with it, but a lot of times, that would be an invitation or opportunity for the other player to not go there. It created a real interesting tension/release dynamic, a sort of tensile fabric playing opportunity. We were stretching the time, and it felt natural to do so. 

And that’s what we were trying to do. We were sort of like actors trying to figure out how to achieve maximum honesty in a scene. We had a lot of fun, but we also took it really seriously. I loved playing with Marc cause we were both really interested in that; every time we played, there was a palpable sense that we’re in a laboratory here, figuring out some very interesting stuff. 

Then the next day, working with Gary Peacock, I felt like the rug got pulled out from under me.

(Manfred Eicher and Gary Peacock)

It felt so different, playing with Gary than with Marc. Of course, the Guamba band was also a two-day studio band, we never played a gig. 

Manfred was in such a good mood after we’d done the Bass Desires album…

…and I walked in the next morning to the Peacock session thinking,  “I totally know what to do.”

But then, as I’m listening to myself, it turns out I sound like the worst possible imitation of Jack DeJohnette and Jon Christensen. I just can’t believe the choices I’m making, and how wrong everything feels all of a sudden. 

 (I tell this story in my memoir No Beethoven.) 

Had that been my first encounter with Manfred, I’m sure he would have kicked me out into the snowy streets of Oslo. But we had done such good work the two/three days prior, and that’s when he came up to me privately and said, “It’s going to be fine. You’re not listening. Just listen.” 

That was not only helpful, it was a real turning point for me. Because it wasn’t a matter of listening to myself, “What should I play,” but rather a matter of listening to what was around you. "What to play” becomes a non-factor. The question answers itself.

There ended up being a lot of space for the drums on Guamba.  On “Requiem” I do an homage to, or rather an imitation of, Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat. I had the floor tom tuned just right, and the sound of the drums in that room was beautiful.

When you worked on these kind of ECM projects, it turned out that the sound in the headphones was pretty much what the record was. You were hearing the space of the room and the reverb, and these factors helped guide your choices because if you overplayed in terms of volume or density, it became immediately apparent. 

(Jan Garbarek and Gary Peacock)

Palle Mikkelborg was fresh from his collaboration with Miles Davis, and he was feeling very strong artistically, very positive. That’s the kind of man he is, a lovely, incredibly positive spirit. And Garbarek is Garbarek. In fact, this was the first time I got to work with Jan. And they’re both Scandinavian and they’re both being exceedingly polite about everything and Gary was being Gary. It seemed like everyone was open. 

(Eicher, Palle Mikkelborg, Garbarek, Peacock)

Guamba is one of the few ECM albums with a drum machine. A year earlier I had done a recording of my own called Transition that utilized some of these sampled tuned cowbells from a Korg DDD-1, in fact I worked with Korg a little bit on the development of that machine. I felt brave enough to say to Gary and Manfred, “Let’s try this thing” with these tuned cowbells in this sequence on “Thyme Time.” Gary and Manfred were totally open to the idea, maybe there was a bit of, “‘Hey, it’s what the kids are listening to, let’s try it."

Playing with John Abercrombie and Marc Johnson was the beginning of me trying to loosen up a lot of that glue that kept me together playing in big bands and with Weather Report. I had a dependency on the licks, the stickings, the devices that we turn to without even thinking to get from one part of a song to another.

The Bill Evans trio was always a quandary for me. I formed an intimate relationship with a piece of music in that you imagine that that song exists just for you, in this case “My Foolish Heart,” from the Vanguard. That’s what I understood that band to be. 

And then I would go hear Bill Evans play in New York and it would sound like a miniature big band, and the drummers were playing louder and more “ensemble-ly” than I expected. Eventually I worked a lot with Warren Bernhardt, a wonderful pianist, and he was very influenced by the Bill thing. He had a wonderful touch, but the format had a rigidity to it that Abercrombie’s trio didn’t. 

With Abercrombie, it wasn’t only rhythmically loose, but also tonally. My small tom-tom, the one in front of the snare drum, usually 12 inches, I liked to use that for this, that, and the other. But that tom didn’t work with John! It would almost phase-cancel out some of the notes he was playing. “Wow, this part of the drum set, I can’t use with his guitar,” and that’s when I started to compose at the kit.

(John Abercrombie)

Playing with John Abercrombie might have prepared me to work with Gary Peacock. Then the real challenge was to not feel in the hot seat, like, “I have to be at least as good or better than Jack or Jon Christensen doing what they do.” 

In the end, I was finally able say, “If they were here, they would play their way. I have to figure out my way to do this.” 

Occasionally I would take photos during the tour, particularly if we made a stop for lunch or something.

(Frisell, Scofield, Johnson)

I did manage to take a few photos during the studio of both of those recording sessions.

(Peacock, Garbarek, Mikkelborg)

You don’t see too many photos of ECM record dates. It’s not that cameras were taboo, but Manfred’s general vibe didn’t particularly seem to invite, “Hey, let’s take photos of everyone standing around.”

(Sco photobombing Manfred)

But I braved having a camera, and I managed to get some nice candid shots. I also think those records have some nice candid moments in the music.

— PETER ERSKINE, March 2024

(Manfred Eicher and Jan Erik Kongshaug)

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(Notes on the two records by Ethan Iverson)

Marc Johnson’s Bass Desires Second Sight

Rock guitar is very important. Overdriven six-string is the great connector, universally beloved by a huge swath of humanity. Bill Frisell and John Scofield are sophisticated jazz musicians of the first rank but part of their sound is simply Rock ’n Roll. It was masterstroke to put them together in counterpoint, while Marc Johnson and Peter Erskine were one of the freshest and most innovative rhythm sections of the era. I like the first Bass Desires album as well, but something about Second Sight just lands in the right way.

“Crossing the Corpus Callosum” (Marc Johnson) Erskine’s opening rock beat just feels so good. Playing a backbeat like this is no mean feat. Some kind of phrased G minor melody gives away to textural improv. At a later point in the track, a low tom single stroke roll sounds quite a bit like a helicopter. There’s a helicopter on the cover: I have always assumed that image related to the tom roll.

“Small Hands” (Bill Frisell) A pretty even eighths ballad; the drums play spare cymbal syncopations for the first minutes, and never find a steady beat.

“Sweet Soul” (Peter Erskine) A four-bar bass line lurks between B-flat and G minor. The cross stick backbeat is strong in the middle of the texture, but the drum part around the cross stick is quite loose and improvised. A big melodic bridge is on cue. “Sweet Soul” is also the title piece of important Peter Erskine album.

“Twister” (John Scofield) Obviously connected to “Twist and Shout.” Backbeat and humor. Two guitars! The 16-bar drum break is basically “straight,” which made laugh the first time I heard it and still makes me laugh 35 years later.

“Thrill Seekers” (John Scofield)  Medium uptempo jazz. Several of Scofield’s tunes like “Thrill Seekers” feature the way Marc Johnson can pedal point, although here he walks in the solos. Sco plays down the middle with threading lines coming from every corner, Frisell is more effects and riffs, Jimi Hendrix meets Thelonious Monk. Effects continue over virtuoso bass solo. There’s quite a bit of telepathy between the bass and drums.

“Prayer Beads” (Marc Johnson) Lovely unaccompanied bass piece.

“1951” (Bill Frisell) 1951 is the year of Frisell’s birth. Amusing swinger with odd phrase lengths. Again, a bit of Monk in Frisell’s logic here, in this case as a composer as well as a player. Behind the bass solo the drums play a little bit of “bongo beat.”

“Hymn for Her” (Marc Johnson) Gently swinging waltz. Something of Johnson’s former employer Bill Evans hovers over the composition, perhaps…

Gary Peacock Guamba

Gary Peacock had left music for a while; the story goes that he returned to playing and recording thanks to Manfred Eicher.  Putting two Europeans and two Americans in the studio together is a classic Eicher gambit. Depending on how you count them, there are about a dozen Peacock albums as a leader. Guamba is one of the most distinctive from that collection and boasts some of Peacock’s best tunes.

“Guamba” (Gary Peacock) Solo prelude with an intriguing studio effect on the bass.

Almost all the rest of the tunes begin with a bass cadenza…

“Requiem” (Gary Peacock) A funeral march. In the interview above Erskine says he was thinking of Stravinsky. The drums duo with bass, then with saxophone, then there’s a drum solo. Pure poetry.

“Celina” (Gary Peacock) A lyrical 4/4 ballad with muted trumpet in the lead. Nice changes. Gary Peacock has a slipperier feel than Marc Johnson, something especially noticeable listening to the albums back to back.

“Thyme Time” (Peter Erskine, Gary Peacock) Is this the only time Peacock is heard with drum machine? It takes a certain kind of drummer to play with a machine comfortably and make it groove. The drummer needs metronomic internal time but also needs to bring humanity to the beat. In this case the feel is “swing” but also “funk,” it reminds me a bit of things on Jaco Pastorius albums like “Crisis” on Word of Mouth. Gnarly solos from tenor and trumpet.

“Lila” (Gary Peacock) Mournful melody, rubato feel, busy bass. The longest cut on the record. About halfway through a beat is found, almost a rock beat. The horns are notably comfortable in collective improvisation. Talk about quintessential ECM!

“Introending” (Gary Peacock) More groovy drum machine, with drums blowing and a horn chorale. Then bass finally comes in for Peacock’s own kind of funk. Yeah, Gary.

“Gardenia” (Gary Peacock) A gorgeous swinging mid-tempo waltz. Throughout the album, Peacock’s tunes are really strong. The waltz continues in the  blowing, but it is unusually loose, a causal listener might think it is free. There is simply acres of space in the feel conjured by Peacock and Erskine.

— Ethan Iverson, April 2024