The instrument that saved rock ‘n’ roll, according to Quincy Jones
The 1950s are widely regarded as the golden age for rock ‘n’ roll, but according to Quincy Jones, this was only possible due to the introduction of one specific instrument.
As someone equipped with the memories of everything that transpired during music’s most transformative years and decades, Jones always knew the common threads that defined each of these pivotal moments, right down to the names and instruments that sparked each kind of reinvention. Emerging from predominantly jazz spaces, he witnessed the moments when the spaces siphoned off into distinctive factions, and the ones where everything blended together in a mush of dreamy experimentation.
But this caused friction where some wished for greater traditionalism to reign supreme, Jones sitting on the opposite fence, where the future was about embracing it all at the same time. As he once reflected to Uncut, “People were telling us not to mix jazz with rock, that myopic mentality. That’s bullshit. Miles, Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Hancock and myself used to talk about this, how you should try everything.”
He continued, “We’d talk about rock bands. I used to say, ‘How come we’re drinking on a Saturday night, and they’re the ones with the gigs?’ One by one we expanded—Herbie wrote ‘Watermelon Man’, Cannonball did ‘Mercy Mercy Mercy’, I did ‘Walking in Space’, in 1969, and Miles did Bitches Brew.”
This was likely one of the reasons he became one of the definitive leaders of the Motown movement, particularly as it would enter a fight no one likely anticipated to blow into such a rapid takedown when it came to spaces where audiences were still segregated by race. But beyond the prejudice at the heart of the obvious sociopolitical underbelly of why this ever occurred in the first place was a jostle with rock ‘n’ roll that pushed Motown to the peak of its powers, taking its frenzied core and painting it with more feeling.
And one of the major turning points – the moment that changed everything – was in the early 1950s when Leo Fender popularised the electric bass guitar. And for Jones, this wasn’t just an eye-opener but a much-needed backbone that would support his chase for eclecticism. “See, the electric bass changed everything,” he once argued. “That instrument was the one [that] changed the genre—there would be no rock and roll, no Motown, no nothing without an electric rhythm section.”
Suddenly, the electric bass became a standard not just across Motown and rock ‘n’ roll but all mainstream spaces, burgeoning from the spaces of innovative players and into the following era, pervading rock’s journey into more expansive, stadium-level spaces with a deep, grounding presence that defined its rupture into even bigger, more inventive spaces. And then, it wasn’t about keeping to one lane but breaking new ground, the electric bass leading the way and ushering others who struggled to keep up by the wayside.
Even though it took bass extraordinaires like Carol Kaye a moment to buy into some of the inventions happening before her eyes, she knew that a revolution was taking place, saying that even her lesser-appreciated Precision bass had “a certain sound that no other instruments got.” In her eyes, it wasn’t as revolutionary as what came next, but these moments were seminal in dismantling and preparing the entire scene for battle.
As she once told Bass Player: “I knew that eventually other instrument companies would make a better bass. For me, it was like a board with strings. But, back then, there weren’t choices like there are now.”
