Herd of Cats (2006-2013)
I first met Lowell Moulton at the CCMC winter retreat in Aptos, CA, in February, 2006, a gathering that went from Friday evening to Sunday morning. It was my first CCMC event and, not having had the benefit of attending a week of summer camp yet, I found myself so far out of my comfort zone that I bailed after dinner on Saturday. But at dinner on Friday I happened to sit next to Lowell at a table that I soon found out was filled with jazz aficionados. Apparently they always sought each other out soon after arriving at the retreat. CCMC is dedicated to all genres of acoustic music, jazz being one of them.
So Lowell and I started talking and as soon as he found out I played bass he asked me if I played jazz, and I said I didn’t and probably couldn’t because I couldn’t sight read music. Lowell, in what I came to understand later was his default encouragement mode, said, “Well, you can play the 2 and the 5, can’t you?”. Yes, I could do that. “Then you can play jazz,” he said. He invited me to exchange contact information before the weekend was over, and since he lived about 20 minutes from my house travel would be no impediment. It also turned out that we were sleeping in the same bunkhouse that weekend and his bunk was near to mine, so before I bailed on Saturday evening I left my contact info on his bunk. About a month later he contacted me and invited me to his house to play jazz with him and his friends.
I felt pretty intimidated about trying jazz, but I had learned to play bass by learning scale and chord structure, so that I always knew what notes I could play in whatever chord was active at any point of a song, and I soon found out that it was a skill that would serve me well in this style of music. These guys played jazz standards using “real book” charts and one benefit of that approach is that the chords are written out above the staff, so I was able to figure out what notes would work in real time using my standard approach. The only catch was that the chord changes came really fast, often two per measure, so I had to think fast. It was really good brain exercise.
Lowell became one of my best friends ever, and without his encouragement I’d have had a tough time becoming proficient at playing these jazz standards. In fact, everyone in this band was encouraging and accepting of my approach, and of them became good friends. I’ve never been interested in learning the exact bass parts that are on a recording, preferring, most of the time, to work out parts myself using my default process. There are, of course, certain songs that demand playing a certain bass part, but usually that’s not imperative. So most of what you’ll hear of my bass parts on these recordings are my own interpretations. And many of the songs we played were ones I’d heard most of my life and not paid a lot of attention to, so one of the joys of my jazz experience was to realize how great the songs are, and how well they are written. What a treat!
When I joined I was the fifth member and after a while we added a singer, Darrell Batchelder, a friend who is married to a friend I met in first grade. The first collection on this page was recorded on my Zoom H2 digital recorder in Lowell’s living room on 5/22/08 and includes vocals on most of the tracks. These are live “warts and all” recordings with no overdubbing after the fact. What you hear is what we were, not perfect, but pretty competent and having fun. Sadly, Lowell passed away in 2013 of pancreatic cancer. I will always miss him and his constant encouragement and infectious enthusiasm.
Lowell Moulton — Guitar
Gary Wohl — Piano
Rick Takahashi — Drums
Paul Fifield — Bass
Darrel Batchelder — Vocals
Phil Hirschberg — Sax (but absent on this first collection)
Recorded live in Lowell's living room.