Before 2023 ends, I wanted to return to the recordings I made with Steve Talaga. As you may remember, these were a dozen or so jazz tunes that he and I recorded one afternoon in September. Nothing fancy, just playing through the tunes and recording them in one or two takes.
Americana was written in a hotel room in Detroit, where I played bass during the day while my wife trained for a new job. I thought it would be fun to have a song intended specifically for the bass. True, there are iconic bass lines like “So What” and “All Blues,” but I was thinking something that allowed the bass to come to the foreground.
What I came up with is “Americana.” It is a simple tune that uses the open strings of the bass to create a sweeping melody. It has overtones of pentatonic melodies like “Shenandoah,” hence the title, “Americana.”
