Quote:

Just read it -- back to the question: In the early sixties the Chantays used an electric piano.

Here it is on the Lawrence Welk show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j09C8clJaXo

Guido



Wurly 100, just like Ray.

Unfortunately, they didn't actually PLAY it in that "performance" -- what you hear is the studio recording, likely the record. That was common for TV presentation due to the perceived "problems" the old school TV audio engineers had with electrically amplified musics back then.

As with the acceptance of something new among musicians and audiences, new technologies often must wait for a new generation in order to ultimately be able to properly exploit them. I remember when three less-than-one-hundred-watts-each combo amplifiers was considered to be, "TOO LOUD" by a generation that loved to listen to an all-acoustic bigband easily generate twice as much in the way of SPLs.

At that point, prejudice becomes hopelessly entangled with perception, as it always does. The prime reason that I'm always saying that there is really no worse witness than the so-called eyewitness...

At the beginning of the 50's, Lionel Hampton started using the then-new fender Precision Bass in his bigband. Well, it really wasn't Lionel's first choice, but Wes Montgomery's brother happened along to fill the Bass slot and being a Guitar Player, took advantage of the real reason that Leo and the boys back at Fender developed the P-bass in the first place -- because a guitar player who happened to play with The Texas Playboys off and on told Leo Fender that if such an instrument were readily available that he, as a guitar player, could get more gigs by being able to double on bass. That player had apparently seen the earlier Rickenbacker solid body bass, and wanted one like it. Leo named it the "Precision" bass because it incorporated FRETS on the neck, which implied a preciase note aelection with less need for things like the Simandl fingering of the fretless acoustic bass violin.

Anyway, Lionel went on tour with that Fender Bass in the lineup instead of the "standard" upright acoustic bass, leading to the typical kind of questioning, denouncement and overall stupid writings of critics that always goes along with anything new or different.

One of the jazz critic writes of that era, Downbeat magazine or maybe Metronome, I forget, did review of the band with this new-fangled "electrical bass" instrument and wrote that it was able to play a full octave lower than the acoustic bass fiddle. He was dead wrong, of course, but forgiven IMO, as nobody in the jazz world had ever heard such clear sinewave bass notes before, along with the sustain that was hitherto a matter of chance.

And then there was a veritable plethora of hatred unleashed upon the use of electric bass in what these so-called "OPEN-MINDED" jazz musicians perceived to be "correct". Again it took the next generation to fully grasp the implications of that new technology, fuller sound, less cost at purchase, easier to learn to play, lighter in weight, smaller in size, important when considering portage problems -- and suddenly the upright acoustic string bass fiddle became the rarity with a bigband. For a time. Then it enjoyed a resurgence, of course. Ronny Reagan's Law applies there as well. If it moves, Tax it, if it continues to move, Regulate it and if it stops moving, Subsidize it. <g>




--Mac

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