“The bass was always in the background and I was a shy kid. “I was just enthralled by the sound,” he said. But Davis also found an affinity with the bass. They encouraged him to explore his mother’s record collection and to sing the bass parts in the family’s amateur vocal group. The University of Wisconsin in Madison wanted a bass teacher, and he took the post, not just because the examples of his childhood tutor Walter Dyett, and of Martin Luther King Jr, had inspired a love of teaching in him, but because he was ready to ease the pressures of being a freelance musician.ĭavis was professor of bass at Madison for almost 40 years, during which time he established the Richard Davis Foundation for Young Bassists in 1993 to teach school-age musicians on the instrument.īorn in Chicago, his mother died in childbirth, and he was adopted and raised by Robert and Elmora Johnson. In 1977, however, a call came that transformed the second half of Davis’s life. He was also a founder member and regular participant (from 1966 to 1972) in the advanced and exciting Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. It was in the 60s and 70s that Davis’s freelance career really took off, as he worked with the multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Eric Dolphy, the cutting-edge composer Andrew Hill, in classical ensembles conducted by Igor Stravinsky, Leopold Stokowski and Pierre Boulez, and on many pop and rock recordings.ĭavis’s resilient yet buoyant bass sound graced hit songs, including Frank Sinatra’s Watertown (1969), Paul Simon’s Something So Right (1973), Bruce Springsteen’s Meeting Across the River, Laura Nyro’s Smile and Janis Ian’s At Seventeen (all 1975) and he played with pop and rock musicians such as Morrison. ![]() Then in 1954 he relocated to New York with the jazz/classical pianist Don Shirley, joining the vocal star Sarah Vaughan’s trio three years later – a revelatory experience in effortless timing that he would later refer to as like attending “the university of Sarah Vaughan”. Playing in his Chicago hometown’s dance bands in the early 1950s, he had met and played with Sonny Blount (globally celebrated later as the other-worldly orchestral revolutionary Sun Ra), and spent a year with the artistically and commercially successful pianist Ahmad Jamal’s trio. On a wider stage, Davis represented a bridge between the virtues of a classical music education inaccessible to many African-American musicians of his generation and the spontaneity, harmonic awareness and rhythmic drive of jazz.
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