Arild Andersen – the Miles Davis album that changed my life

And the first jazz record that really did it for me – it was only the second or third record that I got – was Seven Steps To Heaven. I thought ‘What? How is this music made?’ Especially Herbie Hancock – how he was voicing those chords. I was playing guitar at the time – and the guitar couldn’t do it, I couldn’t copy it! Normally you play in thirds before you get more advanced, and Herbie was playing a lot of fourths. I didn’t know how to find those chords on guitar. I could only read chord changes even later, when I started to play bass; I couldn’t read the lines. But I figured out he was playing fourths, I think I read it somewhere, and I could hear it was based on a different way of thinking. The whole feeling of the album, I hadn’t heard anything like it. A lot of it’s a quartet with no saxophone. And of course Miles!

I was probably 16. I was living at home, making a little money in a quartet with piano, bass, drums at dances and so on; playing American dance music like ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’, ‘Honeysuckle Rose’, anything from the films or radio. Actually, it was around then that I was just starting to play a bit of bass. My changeover from guitar wasn’t a big choice, it was more that the bass player was fading out because he wanted to play cello. When we played at weddings – four sets – I would play bass on the last set, because he had blisters because he only practised cello! There was no mic, no pickup, no nothing – you had to work hard! I liked playing it; so then we just started to book trios without him. I borrowed his bass and finally bought it for 500 [Norwegian] crowns – that’s about £50. I still have it and it still sounds good. When Larry Grenadier came to Oslo last year to do a recording for ECM he borrowed it!

Miles’ next album, Four and More, is still my favourite record, I think. That band, those tempos and those solos! The swing of Tony and Ron, that pushing. For years, I would practise with Four and More, playing along with ‘Walkin’’. I would turn the bass down and play with Miles. They rush him like crazy – they’re really going faster! I used to practise that once a year to see if my chops were up. You always think Miles is so laid-back, so cool, but on that record he slides on top of the beat like crazy! He and Tony were both on it! Seven Steps came a little earlier – it didn’t change my playing so much because I didn’t know how to copy it. But it opened my mind more – just the feeling of the music, it was somehow more mysterious.

Both those records and of course others were part of my education, because I never went to a music school. I had to learn as I went along by playing with people better than me. I was lucky to be in a rhythm section in Oslo with Jon Christensen and different piano players. When Americans came to town, touring as soloists, we would play with them. We had Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Phil Woods, Hampton Hawes. I accompanied all those guys; and you learn so much from playing with them. I wish I had been better at that time! But that’s what made me better – just to be on stage with these kinds of masters. Sonny Rollins, Chick Corea and Stan Getz. To feel that strength they have on stage, that presence – you somehow pick up something that isn’t just about scales and notes. It’s to do with coming over to an audience – not by flirting but to really be there and play the thing. That’s what you can’t get in school.

On the other hand, I wish I’d learned reading and playing piano and everything in school because that would have made things easier for me – I can get by, but my sight-reading is still not great. Before we had pick-ups, they didn’t expect you to play in unison with the saxophone. It was okay to read the big letters; and let the piano player play the numbers! But from the beginning of the 1970s, with pick-ups, more and more people [in the band] were audible; and then they said, ‘Oh, it would be nice if the bass could play in unison with the saxophone here!’ So then what was expected of you as a bass player was to play as fast as a saxophonist!

Arild Andersen’s latest album Mira is out now on ECM

Miles Davis SEVEN STEPS TO HEAVEN Columbia 1963 PERSONNEL :: Miles Davis (t), George Coleman (ts), Victor Feldman, Herbie Hancock (p), Ron Carter (b), Frank Butler and Tony Williams (d). TRACKS :: ‘Basin Street Blues’, ‘Seven Steps To Heaven’, ‘I Fall In Love Too Easily’, ‘So Near’, ‘So Far’, ‘Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home’ and ‘Joshua’.