Bass player extraordinaire dies

To jazz lovers, the death of American bass player Bob Cranshaw earlier this month deserves to be mentioned for two reasons.

The first is that he was a phenomenally good double bass player, backing many of the greats including Sonny Rollins, with whom he played for five decades, Lee Morgan – he played on Morgan’s classic Blue Note albumSidewinder, Donald Byrd, Dexter Gordon, Joe Henderson and Eddie Harris.

Sometime in the 1970s, he was hit by a taxi in New York and sustained a back injury which meant carrying around the double bass was painful, so he switched to the electric bass guitar, starting a trend which rapidly saw it become used by jazz groups, particularly for those moving into the jazz funk and jazz rock fusion fields. Cranshaw never sold out to the jazz funk trend, but he could be funky as well as straight, and as effective in big bands as in small jazz groups.

He also played bass on the TV series Sesame Street, and was the original bassist on Saturday Night Live’s houseband.

The second reason is that from the early 2000s he was working as a jazz advisor for the US Musicians Union. Throughout his career he was known as a considered, progressive liberal guy and knew that for every successful jazz performer, there were scores who hadn’t made it, and were living close to or under the poverty line. He worked hard at the Musicians Union to find ways of distributing the money made by the successful to help the less successful.

So farewell Bob Cranshaw, both a great musician and an idealist, striving to help his less well off brothers and sisters in the jazz world.

Paul Hensby