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Making Peace With Oteil

Oteil Burbridge
By Bryan Beller | August 2007

My recent move to Nashville from L.A. has had some unexpected benefits, like being closer to the Birmingham, Alabama, home of legendary bassist Oteil Burbridge. Oteil and his band the Peacemakers were recently on a short regional jaunt that took them to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where I witnessed them tear the stage in half for an Earth Day concert at Middle Tennessee State University. The show was free, the sound was spectacular, and the audience vibe was great. New York, L.A., and San Francisco, eat your heart out.

Regular Bass Player readers might be familiar with Oteil's signature blend of southern grease and masterful jazz bebop, and his supernatural ability to sing along with bass solos most could only dream of simply playing. I've been listening to him for over ten years, and it was still mind-blowing to see it up close and personal.

Oteil plays three roles in his band. The first is traditional: the groove-holding bassist. The second is as a featured soloist. The third? He's the lead vocalist! That's a new development (the Peacemakers' former singer left the band last year), but a logical one considering Oteil's vocal prowess.

How does he do it all? The answer may surprise you. "Though I do handle all the vocal duties now, when we play live I usually have my keyboardist Matt Slocum handle the bass lines on the more difficult stuff," Oteil explains. "It's just too much to think about. Plus, I don't want to dumb-down my bass lines just because I have to sing."

As we take a look at a typical Peacemaker bass line, with its tight and tricky syncopations, you can understand Oteil's decision. In Ex. 1, the groove from "Thank You" [The Family Secret, Memphis International], the blues-scale notes are just the beginning of how Oteil makes it happen. Feel is everything on this one. Make sure your right hand is back near the bridge pickup for the right tone on those staccato notes, which should be placed ever-so-slightly behind the beat (with the four consecutive 16th-notes in bar 2 even more laid-back). When employed correctly, even the notes on the B string should bark with enough clarity and color to sit with some breathing room inside a 16th-note.

Ex. 2, an excerpt from the Oteil's solo on "Get Ready," from The Family Secret, is a great showcase of Oteil's intense scatting/soloing technique. Over an F13 to Eb6 chord progression, he starts high with a flurry of chromatically offset positional "boxes" (see the tab) before landing briefly in the F tonality (G-F-D-C-F of bar 2, beat three). Then he plunges down a long, dense, Eb altered line that could be interpreted many different ways (what's up with that B natural in bar 3, beat three, I wondered?), and ties it up with some nifty whole-tone stuff (bars 4 and 5). Finally, he works his way to the 9 (A) of the G13 chord that ends the example. Sing that? It's hard enough thinking it, let alone playing it. So what was he thinking?

"I'm using tritone subs and playing those changes 'inside'. For instance, where there is an F13, I'll keep the chord the same on top and change the bass note to the tri-tone B; then you have a B7#9 chord. Then you simply use the appropriate scale for that chord." Ah, suddenly that B on the descending run makes a little more sense, and the Db-Eb-F-G-A whole tones in bars 4 and 5 sound good and nasty with a B floating ominously underneath.

That still doesn't explain how Oteil could sing along with such a thing. Would it surprise you that it involves practice? "You do two hundred gigs a year and you get lots of practice! Start playing and singing melodies to songs that you already know. Make it easy at first, and then progress to the more complex stuff."

The "more complex stuff" comes from Oteil's love for "what is essentially jazz harmony over R&B grooves," citing Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire as compositional influences. Oteil's advice for players who want to understand where he came from and employ it in their own playing is simple: check everybody out, not just bassists. "Let everything else besides bass influence your playing. Drummer Elvin Jones is as much an influence on me as Bootsy or Jaco. Now I listen to Howlin' Wolf, Ralph Stanley, Reverend James Cleveland, Freddie King, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, and George Jones, as much as the jazz, latin, classical, or funk music I grew up listening to."

Considering how much he's bringing to the table, hopefully he'll understand our focus on just him for a while.