The low end took the melody.

The moment

Ask what a bass is for and most rock answers will be a variation on "the low frequencies." Emmett Chapman's Stick and the fretless players who followed him never accepted the job description. The Wikipedia lineage I read this week is essentially a list of people who promoted the bass to lead voice: Tony Levin, playing Stick with Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Yes and ABWH; Trey Gunn, carrying it through Fripp's bands, David Sylvian and UKZ; Alphonso Johnson, holding down the low end for Weather Report and Santana while soloing like a frontman. That is the tradition this edition hangs on, and it is not a museum piece — Levin's own site currently advertises a new album, *Bringing It Down to the Bass*, with Vinnie Colaiuta, Larry Fast, Alex Foster, Robert Fripp and Steve Gadd aboard, plus a Stick Men tour of the West Coast.

The living edge has moved to two labels. RareNoise released Jo Berger Myhre's *Live Manoeuvres*, an album the label says "originated from solo bass improvisations" before the analogue effects grew a band around them, and Fractal Sextet's *Sky Full Of Hope*, which puts Colin Edwin — the Porcupine Tree years behind him — inside a touch-guitar sextet. MoonJune, running out of Toledo since 2001, has been the bass-forward label home for two decades: this week I pulled PAKT — the group carrying Percy Jones' name — and Stick Men's *Crack in the Sky* with Dewa Budjana from its catalogue. Two labels, one bet: that listeners will follow a melody no matter which register carries it.

What the rest of the week's listening says is that the bet pays outside the microgenre too. The Jazz Word spent October reviewing records where the bassist is the story — Larry Grenadier moving between harmonic foundation, melodic commentary and rhythmic development on Matt Slocum's trio album, Randall Pharr taking "a melodic bass solo that preserves the performance's emphasis on tone and lyrical expression" on the Whiteman/Toomey live set. The Prog Mind heard Eivør's "Drekafljóð" and wrote that it "features an incredible bass groove that will attach itself to your soul" Even the archive picks here — "Elephant Talk," "Mysterious Traveler" — are less the founding documents than the proof of concept. Listen to the week in order and you can hear the whole argument: the low end is not accompanying anymore.