From the Bass Up

Edgar Meyer forgoes classification to become a musician's musician.

by Mark Jordan

t is 8 p.m. before Edgar Meyer's schedule slackens enough to allow him to sit down and talk with a nosy reporter. But despite the hour and the long day of studio work and composing that preceded it, the Nashville-based double bassist is affable and even talkative.

"I'm stretched too thin, but I'm doing great," Meyer says. "People should have my problems."

Those problems include a career as one of Nashville's most in-demand session players, a grueling concert schedule, and a growing reputation as a gifted composer. Meyer is what one would call a "musician's musician," a proficient technician and innovator who is not only capable of crossing the boundaries between musical genres, but actually relishes it. He is at the same time a member of the prestigious Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the bassist for the bluegrass super group Strength in Numbers, which also includes mandolinist Sam Bush, dobro player Jerry Douglas, Bela Fleck on banjo, and violinist Mark O'Connor. He is a frequent collaborator of classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma and first-call studio musician for the likes of Garth Brooks and Lyle Lovett.

"I've been really lucky so far," he says. "Ninety percent of what I do is ultimately designed around just staying interested, just looking for things that would be fun to do ."

But, he adds, "You're also looking for that balance where you're not overextending beyond your means."

It's a miracle Meyer hasn't hit that breaking point yet. Through the end of this year, Meyer will try to pack in a career's worth of projects. This Saturday, Meyer will be at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre to perform with the Grammy-winning Emerson String Quartet a piece he wrote especially for them.

The day after his Germantown performance, he will travel to New York to perform a new piece by Richard Danielpour with vocalist Jessye Norman and Ma. And in the coming months, he is also scheduled to finish editing a recording of his quintet with the Emerson Quartet, record an album with Bela Fleck and mandolinist Mike Marshall, compose music for a collaboration with violinist Joshua Bell, and complete his contribution to The Storyteller, a narrative piece for orchestra that will also feature a work by Wynton Marsalis.

And in November, he is going with Ma and noted bluegrass fiddler Mark O'Connor -- the two musicians he recently collaborated with on the best-selling Appalachian Waltz CD -- on a trip that will seek to study, through music, the "migration of music and culture in general along the silk road."

All this work has left him little time to spend with his wife Connie Heard and their 4-year-old son George. But for Meyer, the urge to follow his muse, whether it take him to Nashville or China, to bluegrass or chamber music -- is too great to resist.

Meyer was born in 1960 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, birthplace of the atomic bomb. Meyer's father was also a professional bass player. Unlike his son, however, the elder Meyer specialized in jazz and popular standards before developing a passion for classical music while in his late 20s. Consequently, Meyer recalls his childhood being always filled with the melodies of Bach and Basie.

Meyer first took up his father's instrument when he was 5 years old, and through his teens they often performed together. For college, Meyer attended Indiana University to study under the noted bassist Stuart Sankey. It was there that he started to develop his unique approach to the bass, which saw him veer away from the instrument's traditional role of keeping the basic rhythm.

"I like music where everybody has a dialogue," Meyer says. "I like the bass to be an equal member of all that, to be part of the conversation. It's not impossible to do that from a rhythm-section point of view. A really great bass player in a rhythm section can achieve what I'm talking about. But my way of doing it is to bring out more of a vocal side of the instrument, using a lot more bowing and not focusing as much on the rhythm side of it."

To develop his more expressive style, Meyer draws not so much on other bass players for inspiration as on other instrumentalists, including vocalists like Stevie Wonder and James Taylor. "There are probably 10 or 20 bass players who have had a big influence on me, but there are probably 400 or 500 other instrumentalists who have," he says.

Meyer's ambitions for the bass have necessarily led him to take up the composer's pen as well. The instrument's traditional role as accompaniment has meant that few works have been written expressly for it. Faced with this, Meyer began composing simply to have something to play. This led to Meyer's commissioned work for the Emerson String Quartet, a piece Meyer finds difficult to translate into words. "Well, it's in four parts," he hesitatingly explains. "I don't know how to describe it. It's just something that draws on everything I've ever heard or done."

That's quite an ambitious piece of work.

Music Notes

edited by Mark Jordan

Crossroads Update
Location, times, and panelists have been finalized for the seminars at this year's Crossroads exposition. Both panels will be held in the Mark Twain Theatre of the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Friday, April 18th, and will be free to the public.
The first panel, "Music Biz 101," will meet at 2 p.m. and will include: Brandy Sabistor, creative director for Polygram Records; Michael Alago, vice president at Geffen Records; Debbie Southwood-Smith, A&R director at A&M Records; music attorney Fred Davis; Susan Henderson, vice president of Warner-Chapel publishing; Amy McKeehan, creative director at Sony Music; and Ricky Peterson, a producer/arranger who has worked with Prince, George Benson, and David Sanborn.
The second seminar, "Running Your Own Label," will meet at 4 p.m. and will include: Bob Breeves of Magnatone Records; J.D. May, general manager of Dead Reckoning records; Kevin Goodrum, general manager of Caroline Distribution, Johnny Phillips of Select-o-Hits distribution; Jeff Peakman, A&R director for Roadrunner Records; Brad McDonald, A&R coordinator for Ichiban Records, and independent engineer and former Paisley Park Studios manager Tom Tucker.
The Crossroads showcase itself will take place this Friday and Saturday in the clubs on Beale. Admission each night to all the showcases is $10. For more information call Crossroads at 526-4280 or see the special supplement elsewhere in this issue.