Thelonious? No, not that one...

People always ask me about my playing and who I am influenced by. I can spout name after name of people that inspire me to play better or differently. This list however might as well be taught verbatim to a point to all jazz/funk/fusion players; Jaco, Larry, Bootsy, Stanley, Marcus...However, there is a new addition. One that I didn't even really know about 4 months ago.

Can we all please welcome the bass player with the coolest middle name in the world to my list. Fred Thelonious Baker (He just had to become a jazz musician really didn't he!?).

I find it hard to believe that Fred has done so much amazing work in the past (solo and with Incahoots in particular), but he is virtually unknown. Which is a great shame. So, as part of my musical learnings journey over the next four years I hope to bring you many Fred-isms...

To begin here are a couple of brief videos of Fred playing a couple of his namesakes tunes (apologies for the poor quality of sound and video, obviously my sony ericsson doesn't appreciate good music like I do!) I will try and get a few decent recordings from Fred at some point.

These videos were rushed during my lesson today as I hoped that if I had a record of them it would help me learn them. I hope you can appreciate the vast musicianship that these rushed perfomances contain, even though.






PS. thats my bass, but I can't make it sounds just like that yet!

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