Electric bass had appeared in jazz as early as the 1950s, notably through Monk Montgomery’s pioneering use of the Fender Precision Bass, but it became far more prominent through Miles Davis‘s turn toward electric music at the end of the 1960s.
For a few years afterward, many of the jazz players adapting to the instrument were upright bassists first, treating the electric as a doubling instrument rather than a specialty in its own right.
That changed quickly. Within a decade, a handful of players had developed techniques, tones and vocabularies that had no real precedent on the double bass at all, from Jaco Pastorius‘s singing fretless harmonics to Stanley Clarke’s percussive slap attack, and electric bass became a genuine solo voice rather than a functional necessity.
These ten musicians, presented roughly in the order they came to prominence, cover that whole arc: the early doublers who made the first transition, the virtuosos who defined the instrument through the 1970s and 80s, and the session musicians whose basslines shaped records far beyond jazz itself.
Miroslav Vitouš
Vitouš co-founded Weather Report with Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter in 1970 after several years working with Miles Davis and Chick Corea in New York, and the band’s self-titled 1971 debut leaned heavily on his acoustic upright playing rather than electric bass, giving the record a softer, more open sound than the funk-driven direction Weather Report would later take.
That difference in direction became the reason Vitouš left the band in 1973: Zawinul wanted a harder R&B-inflected pulse, and drummer Greg Errico later said Vitouš “loved funk” but simply “wasn’t a funk player.”
His replacement, Alphonso Johnson, was recruited by Shorter specifically for the electric bass feel Vitouš couldn’t supply, a clean illustration of how quickly the instrument’s demands were changing.
Steve Swallow
Swallow had already built a serious reputation on upright bass, working with Jimmy Giuffre, Art Farmer and Gary Burton through the 1960s, when he switched decisively to electric around 1970 after trying a cherry-red Gibson EB-2 at a trade show and reportedly playing it all night in his hotel room.
He carried an upright player’s habits over to the new instrument in a way that became his signature: Swallow plays electric bass with a pick, but favors the upstroke as his dominant motion, since a downstroke has no real equivalent on a bowed or plucked double bass.
His work in Burton’s group, including 1968’s A Genuine Tong Funeral, a Carla Bley-composed suite, established him as one of the first electric bassists taken seriously in a straight-ahead jazz context rather than a fusion one.
Michael Henderson
Miles Davis reportedly spotted Henderson playing bass behind Stevie Wonder at the Copacabana in early 1970 and told Wonder on the spot that he was taking his bassist.
Henderson, a Detroit session musician with no jazz background at all, stayed with Davis for nearly seven years, anchoring the deep electric funk grooves of Jack Johnson, On the Corner, Get Up with It and the live double albums Agharta and Pangaea.
His playing was deliberately simpler and heavier than the busier upright-derived electric bass style other fusion players were developing at the time, closer to James Brown’s rhythm section than to jazz’s harmonic tradition, and it gave Davis’s mid-70s bands their distinctive, relentless low end.
Alphonso Johnson
Johnson replaced Vitouš in Weather Report and appeared on three albums, Mysterious Traveller in 1974, Tale Spinnin’ in 1975 and Black Market in 1976, the last of which found him sharing bass duties with the arriving Jaco Pastorius before Pastorius took over the role entirely.
His warm, fretless tone on a Fender Precision became an acknowledged influence on later fusion bassists including Darryl Jones, and he was also an early adopter of the Chapman Stick, a touch-tapped instrument that few jazz players had picked up at that point.
After leaving Weather Report, Johnson built a long career as a session and touring musician with artists including Santana and Phil Collins.
Stanley Clarke
Clarke helped form Return to Forever out of Stan Getz sessions in early 1972, and by 1976’s School Days, his best-known record as a leader, he had developed a slap technique built on hooking his fingers under the strings and snapping them against the frets for a hard, percussive attack rather than the smoother thumb-and-pluck style other players favored.
The title track, which opens the album, became a concert staple he still plays decades later. Clarke also popularized the piccolo bass, a smaller-scale, higher-tuned electric bass he used on several School Days tracks, giving him a genuinely distinct upper register no other jazz bassist of the period was working in.
Jaco Pastorius
Pastorius joined Weather Report in 1976, but he’d already announced himself that same year with his self-titled debut album, featuring Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and the Brecker Brothers, which earned two Grammy nominations.
His signature sound came from a 1962 Fender Jazz Bass he’d stripped of its frets, reportedly with a butter knife, and filled with epoxy, an instrument he nicknamed the Bass of Doom; Fender later issued an official signature model based on it in 1999.
Pastorius turned natural and artificial harmonics into a genuine compositional device, most audibly on “Portrait of Tracy,” and by his own account introduced himself to Joe Zawinul after a gig by simply stating that he was the greatest bass player in the world. Within a few years, a large part of the jazz world agreed.
Anthony Jackson
Jackson developed the concept of a six-string “contrabass guitar,” tuned in fourths from low B to high C, starting in 1974, and had luthier Carl Thompson build the first one for him the following year; he later moved to Fodera, which issued an Anthony Jackson Signature Model in 1984.
Unlike most players on this list, Jackson built his reputation almost entirely as a session musician rather than a bandleader, playing on more than 3,000 recording sessions across five decades.
His bassline drove the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money” to number nine on the pop chart in 1974, and he’d already scored his first number one record two years earlier on Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones,” proof that the same low end could move between soul, jazz and Steely Dan’s famously exacting studio sessions without losing its identity.
Percy Jones
Jones co-founded the British fusion band Brand X in 1973, playing on Masques and several other of the group’s records into 1980 before periodically reuniting with them decades later, and switched from fretted to fretless bass around 1971, a change he later called a genuine creative breakthrough.
Self-taught and unable to read standard notation, he built a style around harmonics, glissando and vibrato played with a three-finger right-hand technique unlike almost anyone else’s approach to the instrument.
Outside Brand X, Jones became a first-call session player for Brian Eno, appearing on Another Green World and Before and After Science, as well as for Phil Collins and Steve Hackett, carrying his distinctly vocal fretless tone well outside jazz-fusion circles.
Marcus Miller
Miller became the primary songwriter, producer and bassist behind Miles Davis’s 1986 comeback album Tutu, co-writing and producing the title track and playing synthesizers and saxophone on it in addition to bass, a level of creative control few sidemen were ever given on a Davis record.
His main instrument through that period was a modified 1977 Fender Jazz Bass, upgraded with a new preamp by luthier Roger Sadowsky in 1979 and refitted again after damage in 1983.
Miller also composed music for David Sanborn, including “Chicago Song,” and served as Sanborn’s musical director for his late-1980s television show, while continuing to work as Davis’s chief collaborator on the albums that followed Tutu.
Victor Wooten
Wooten has anchored Béla Fleck and the Flecktones since the band formed in 1988, and developed his signature “double thumbing” technique as a child after his older brother Regi showed him how to strike the strings with his thumb in two directions, letting him double his speed without doubling the motion.
Combined with hammer-ons from his left hand, the technique lets him play rapid triplets and quintuplets that would otherwise require far more physical movement, a genuine technical innovation on top of the slap-bass vocabulary Larry Graham had pioneered a generation earlier.
Wooten’s jazz credentials were confirmed in 2008 when he formed SMV, a bass supergroup with Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller, putting three generations of the instrument’s greatest innovators on a single stage together.
