I worked two day jobs to take care of my responsibilities – my mother and my baby – and I taught and did weekend gigs there, and later in Phoenix. Later, I had to sell the Super 400 to pay a hospital bill when I had a baby, and I got an ES-175, and moved to Tucson. I put a DeArmond pickup on it for gigs and used a Gibson amp – I think it was a 1 X 12, and it was well-built. My teacher wanted me to have the best guitar, so he had me work for two years so I could get a Gibson Super 400. In the late ’50s I had enough experience to play with some of the finest jazz musicians in L.A.ĭid you start on acoustic or did you go with electric pretty much from the outset? I knew standard tunes, and played them jazz-style. I helped him teach, as well, and was a professional at 14, playing Goodman Sextet-type jazz gigs around Long Beach. He taught many big pros then, and got me into playing jazz immediately. My teacher, Horace Hatchett, was appalled, but he must have thought I had some talent. I started on a small, rented steel guitar, then turned it into a guitar. My mother encouraged me to start guitar lessons. My parents were professional musicians, and when they divorced, my mother and I were left with no means of support, so I went to work at the age of nine, and when I was almost 14, paid for my own guitar lessons. Vintage Guitar: What got you interested in guitar?Ĭarol Kaye: I grew up in a housing project during World War II. We started our talk with an inquiry about guitar, since Kaye was an accomplished six-string player before she moved to bass. She was born in Everett, Washington, and her family moved to Wilmington, California, when she was a child. Overall, she has over 10,000 sessions to her credit, and individual recording dates can be documented from union ledgers (an assemblage of “who played on what song” is in the works). “If you’ve listened to the radio or watched TV since 1958, you’ve heard her play,” proclaims the home page of Carol Kaye’s website (And what most popular music fans (even those who might be aware of Kaye’s prolific electric bass career) might not know is that she played guitar (acoustic and electric) on many hit songs (some dating from the late ’50s) before she settled into the first-call position for electric bassists on the L.A. And they don’t have a custom neck-through bass (with five or six strings) and a slew of endorsement deals.Īctually, the person who has done more session work on electric bass than anyone else is a 64-year-old grandmother whose primary instrument was a sunburst Fender Precision Bass with flatwound strings, and she used (and still uses) a pick. dude purveying “NAMM chops” (to quote John Pattitucci) aplenty with the thumb and fingers of both hands flying all over his instrument. Contrary to what some aspiring bass players might think, the world’s most recorded electric bassist isn’t some modern-day L.A.
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