Not Dancing For Chicken by Steve Lawson

With the CD breaking even before it was released, the sense of anticipation in the run up to a Steve Lawson CD release has been growing ever since his debut live solo bass CD, And Nothing But The Bass, hit the shelves in 2000.

Conceptually, Not Dancing For Chicken picks up where his debut CD left off - the basic premise is still all bass, all live, looped and processed in real time, only this time the 'live' performances were recorded in a studio, to facilitate higher recording quality and stereo separation.

The result of almost two years of writing (two of the tracks on the CD were written before the release of And Nothing But The Bass, and others were improvised at the beginning of September 2002), 'not dancing for chicken' is the culmination of Steve's musical journey thus far, incorporating new technology in the form of the Gibson Echoplex Digital Pro and Line 6 DL4 looping devices, and stretching to its limits the arrangement possibilities within this solo looping format. Amazingly, to the uninitiated, the looping side of the CD is not especially apparent, as right across the 67 minute disc, music takes precendent over gadgetry.

Those who have seen Steve play live over the last year will be familiar with the such tracks as 'No More Us And Them' and the percussive, tabla-sounding 'MMFSOG'. Also featured here is Steve's recent set-closing number, 'Highway 1', which at over 10 minutes long is the also the album's closer, taking the listener on a journey though sounds that have seemingly very little to do with 'bass' at all. Though as Steve says on his sleeve-notes for the CD, the whole album is, "...a set of meditations on the sound of the bass, much of which don't sound anything like what you'd expect a bass to sound like (but all of which, by virtue of their very existence, sound exactly like a bass)".

Having played to over 40,000 people in the last two months in the UK alone, and with many more dates currently being lined up for 2003, the futures very bright for Steve Lawson. And in Not Dancing For Chicken, he has the perfect manifesto for his musical mission - to take solo bass to a non-bass playing crowd. Says Steve, 'While it's great that bass players like what I'm doing, they do have a tendency to listen with their eyes rather than their ears, and judge the music on how complex it looks to perform, rather than how it impacts them as 'pure music'. These last two tours have given me the chance to really test the water regarding playing solo bass to a non-bass crowd, and it passed with flying colours!"

Indeed it did, and 2003 looks like being the year when this bass evangelist could gather the faithful and take it to the next level.

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