The renowned U.S. born jazz bassist Barre Phillips has died. The musician, who had been resident in France from 1968 to 2021, died in Las Cruces, New Mexico on December 28, 2024 at the age of 90.
Born in San Francisco, California on October 27, 1934, Phillips studied briefly in 1959 with S. Charles Siani, Assistant Principal Bassist with the San Francisco Symphony. During the 1960s, he recorded with jazz legends such as Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Giuffre, Archie Shepp, Peter Nero, Attila Zoller, Lee Konitz and Marion Brown.
Phillips’ 1968 recording of solo bass improvisations, issued as Journal Violone in the US, Unaccompanied Barre in England, and Basse Barre in France on Futura Records, is generally credited as the first solo bass record.
Barre made several more albums in the same format, including Call Me When You Get There (1984) and End to End (2018) for the ECM label: the same imprint responsible for similarly ground-breaking titles by other innovative bassists such as Gary Peacock, Dave Holland and Arild Andersen. Phillips’ 1971 record with Dave Holland, Music from Two Basses, was probably the first record of improvised double bass duets.
Phillips came to Europe for the first time in 1964 with George Russell’s sextet and returned later in the decade, staying first in London before eventually making France his home base. Evidence of his early collaborations with British or British-based musicians can be found on John Surman’s How Many Clouds Can You See?, Mike Westbrook’s Marching Song, and his two sessions with Chris McGregor’s sextet (Up to Earth) and trio (Our Prayer), all recorded in 1969.
During the 1970s, Phillips was a member of the well-regarded and influential group ‘The Trio”, with saxophonist John Surman and drummer Stu Martin. They recorded a self-titled debut with also and Conflagration! – the latter title with an augmented line-up. Thereafter he played with a variety of partners, from Derek Bailey to Robin Williamson, and was a regular member of his friend Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra. Two ECM albums with Paul Bley and Evan Parker, Time Will Tell (1995) and Sankt Gerold (2000), are favourites.
In 2016, Barre Phillips called Manfred Eicher to say that he’d like to record a final solo album, to document “the last pages of a journal that began fifty years ago”. The result was End To End, a fine account of the art of solo bass. However, his last release was ECM’s Face à Face, a duo recording with the electronics of György Kurtág Jr, released in 2022.
Additionally, Phillips worked on soundtracks of the motion pictures Merry-Go-Round (1981), Naked Lunch (1991, together with Ornette Coleman) and Alles was baumelt, bringt Glück! (2013)
Paying tribute to Barre Phillips in a Facebook post, leading Canadian jazz critic and author Mark Miller recalled that “I described Phillips’ solo performance at The Music Gallery in Toronto in1984 as ‘modestly theatrical but musically visionary’… [Superficially, the performance was an exercise in everything you can do with a bass but were afraid to try, but more radically it redefined the instrument as an orchestra in and of itself.’”