The Czech flatback weighs about twenty-two pounds without the case, and with the case it is an object that has opinions about stairwells. My apartment on East 21st, the one I kept for twelve years starting in 1988, was on the fourth floor of a building whose elevator worked intermittently and whose stairwell was roughly the width of the bass itself. I carried that instrument up and down those stairs after every gig for the better part of a decade, and I can tell you that a stairwell at two in the morning, when the building is quiet and the bass is resonating against the walls on the way up, is the finest concert hall I have ever performed in. The sound is completely honest. There is no audience, no room sound, no engineer making adjustments. Just the instrument and whatever is actually in the notes.
The first thing a stairwell teaches you is that you have been faking certain things. Not dishonestly — musicians fake things in performance for the right reasons, because a gig is a social occasion and the audience needs to be brought along, and sometimes you paper over a technical problem with energy and confidence and the room never knows. The stairwell knows. The notes you were not quite sure about will ring longer and more conspicuously than any note you played with conviction. You start to hear the seams in your own playing the way a tailor hears a bad hem — not as a catastrophe but as a thing that needs work.
The electric bass is a fine instrument. I am not making an argument against it. I am only saying that it does not require you to commit the way an upright requires you to commit. The note on an electric is there whether you believe in it or not. — Ray Petrov
People ask me, still, why I never switched to electric. The question usually implies that the upright bass is a kind of principled self-punishment, which I understand but disagree with. The electric bass is a fine instrument. I am not making an argument against it. I am only saying that it does not require you to commit the way an upright requires you to commit. On an electric, the note is there whether you believe in it or not. On an upright — especially on gut strings, especially on an old instrument with all the idiosyncrasies that come with decades of use — the note requires you to earn it. Every night, for every note. The stairwell will report back.
There is also the physical fact of it, which I think gets under-discussed. Carrying twenty-two pounds plus case up four flights of stairs at two in the morning after a three-hour gig is not romantic. Your back hurts. You are tired. The case bangs the wall on the third landing every time, in the same spot, leaving a mark that is still there, I imagine, in that building right now. But the carrying is part of the music in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has not done it. You know what you have done by the time you get upstairs. You know the instrument's weight and dimensions and moods in a way that is physical rather than intellectual. That knowledge is in your hands when you play.
Sometime in the late nineties I started thinking of the walk home — the subway, the blocks from the station, the stairs — as part of the gig itself. Not a commute, not a chore, but a kind of decompression chamber between the performance and the night's end. By the time I got to the third landing I had usually figured out what I thought about how the set had gone. The stairwell was where the judgment happened, while the notes were still close. The bass humming against the walls was the last instrument in the hall.
I live differently now — a ground-floor place in Gowanus, which my knees appreciate and my sense of ceremony mourns slightly. The bass goes into a corner when I get home and the room is quiet. I miss the stairwell some nights. Not the physical difficulty of it, which I have no romantic attachment to — difficult for its own sake is just difficult. What I miss is the conversation on the way up: the instrument telling me what the night had been, which notes had landed and which hadn't, what needed practice and what was starting to find its shape. The most honest review you will ever receive is the one you give yourself in a stairwell at two in the morning, and the bass, if you have been listening to it all night, will help you get it right.
There is a younger bassist I have been working with lately, a talented kid out of the New England Conservatory who plays with real depth for someone his age. He uses an SUV-sized rolling cart for his bass. I have said nothing about this. He will figure out what he needs to figure out, at whatever pace the instrument decides is right. But I noticed, at our last rehearsal, that he was the last one out the door — standing in the hallway, bass in hand, listening to something the rest of us had already walked away from. I recognized the expression. The stairwell finds you eventually, one way or another.