Together with his younger brother, drummer Carlton “Carly” Barrett, Fams created and established much of the hypnotic pulse and infectious vibe that characterizes reggae rhythms.
It’s hard to think of any player who embodied this idea of bass as connection more than Aston “Family Man” Barrett. Though (like most bass players) he’s not exactly a household name, he truly should be: As the long-time bassist, arranger, and coproducer of Bob Marley and the Wailers, his musical innovations and memorable lines are exceedingly familiar to anyone who has ever heard reggae music. “Fams,” as he was known, died in February of this year at 77, leaving a long legacy of reggae mastery.
Indeed, as Family Man was one of reggae’s original creators, he helped birth the bass-heavy Jamaican genre into existence from its stylistic precursors, ska and rocksteady. Together with his younger brother, drummer Carlton “Carly” Barrett, Fams created and established much of the hypnotic pulse and infectious vibe that characterizes reggae rhythms. Family Man’s feel was firm yet relaxed, his tone deep, dark, and plush. It was with these bottom-heavy colors, coaxed from a Höfner “Beatle” bass in his early years, then from his flatwound-strung Fender Jazz bass, that Aston Barrett crafted snaky, syncopated hooks and short melodic phrases that bolstered the vocal melodies while playing against the bouncing backbeats of the rhythm guitar and organ.
Before building his first bass from plywood and a length of 2“x4”, Barrett’s first musical love was singing along to American soul artists on Jamaican radio. “When I’m playing the bass, it’s like I’m singing,” Fams told music journalist Bill Murphy in a 2007 Bass Player magazine interview. “I compose a melodic line and see myself like I’m singing baritone.” You can hear his vocal-like bass stylings in songs like “Is This Love” and “Waiting in Vain.” These and many other Barrett bass lines serve as countermelodies, animated motifs that play against each song’s main vocal melody. Family Man’s parts are often easy to sing along to, so it’s easy to imagine Fams singing them in his head.
“Fams not only kept that intragroup connection strong, but he also went beyond the bass, creating and composing many of the intricate, interconnecting parts you can hear in any Bob Marley and the Wailers recording.”
The Barrett brothers played in several early reggae bands before joining the Wailers full-time in 1972, including famed producer Lee “Scratch” Perry’s house band, the Upsetters. In 1969, when the original Upsetters lineup couldn’t make a U.K. tour due to a scheduling conflict, Aston and Carlton’s band the Hippy Boys became the new Upsetters. In this group, they backed a pantheon of early reggae artists, including the Wailers, a vocal trio with Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer. The Upsetters eventually became the core of the Wailers’ rhythm section. Tosh and Bunny Wailer left the band in 1974.
It was years before, though, well before he had children (and he had a lot of children) that Aston Barrett began calling himself “Family Man.” This reflected how he saw it as his role to keep the band together. As the Wailers’ bandleader, arranger, and co-producer, Fams not only kept that intragroup connection strong, but he also went beyond the bass, creating and composing many of the intricate, interconnecting parts you can hear in any Bob Marley and the Wailers recording. But his primary musical connection was with his brother, Carly. Among other reggae conventions, the Barrett brothers pioneered the “one drop” rhythmic style, in which the bass and drums skip the downbeat—dropping the one—as you can hear in the bass and drum parts of songs like “Trenchtown Rock” and “One Drop.”
I met Family Man at the photo shoot for that 2007 Bass Player cover story, and again in 2012 when Phil Chen and I interviewed him onstage during the weekend he received his Bass Player Lifetime Achievement Award. During the photo shoot, we also shot a short video interview, which you can find on YouTube, where he demonstrates the “One Drop” bass line, plucking with his thumb between the end of the neck and the neck pickup. Even barely amplified, you can feel the depth that comes from Family Man’s bass approach. In the Marley years, that huge “earth sound” came from two Acoustic 18" speaker cabinets and two 4x15 cabinets. “You need them that big to get that sound,” Barrett told Murphy, “because reggae music is the heartbeat of the people. It’s the universal language what carry that heavy message of roots, culture, and reality. So the bass have to be heavy and the drums have to be steady.”Aston "Family Man" Barrett, Bob Marley & the Wailers bassist - 2007 Bass Player mag. interview 1/2
Here's the first part of Bill Leigh’s 2007 interview with Bob Marley & the Wailers' bassist Aston "Family Man" Barrett.
How we listen to music has been changing for more than a century, but since the rise of streaming, musicians are being left behind.
At the time, most artists struggled for control and more equitable treatment by record labels, who routinely signed them to predatory deals while controlling almost every aspect of their careers. And of course, at the end of the day, these labels owned the lucrative masters, ensuring they’d get the lion’s share of any profits across multiple generations. In fact, many major labels were built by exploiting such jazz deals.
Record labels, and in fact the entire industry, are actually byproducts of technological innovations made around sound recording, at the end of the 1800s. By the time Milford met Coltrane, record players in every household, and record enthusiasts who filled their collections with their favorite artists, had become cultural bedrock. Recording artists made a small percentage, a royalty, on every record sale. For artists such as Coltrane, all these royalties accumulated to make him one of the biggest earners in jazz towards the end of his life.
“Just like internet providers, they sold the idea to the public that information—music—was free, but the pipeline that supplied it—their networks—weren’t.”
When CDs arrived in the 1980s, they were incorporated into the existing model. Though they eventually replaced vinyl, CDs actually injected even more cash into major labels, as they reissued their back catalogues and convinced most people to repurchase their entire collections. Just as everything changed with the invention of the phonograph, it changed again with the invention of the MP3. MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 is a data compression algorithm which took the large digital files on CDs and turned them into something comparatively tiny, that could be stored on an iPod or transmitted across the internet. However, unlike vinyl, cassettes, or CDs, MP3s did not inject more cash into the now extremely large and very prosperous music industry, at first. They began undercutting record sales, as collectors began to “rip” their entire CD libraries and then share them for free via peer-to-peer file-sharing applications like Napster, LimeWire, and Kazaa. If vinyl had originally established music in the minds of listeners as a tangible product that could be bought and sold, the MP3 now did the exact opposite. Music was now intangible, and potentially free.
In early attempts to monetize on sharing, streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify began offering massive collections of illegitimately procured MP3s to stream for a fixed monthly subscription, which exacerbated the problems labels were already facing by doing away with record collections altogether. Just like internet providers, they essentially sold the idea to the public that information—music—was free, but the pipeline that supplied it—their networks—wasn’t. This approach allowed them to make billions in a very short period of time, while sharing none of this profit with the artists and record companies who owned the rights.
What followed next was a series of futile attempts by major labels to shut down streaming. They eventually realized that this would never work because the nature of the product had already shifted in the mind of the consumer. Listeners would never go back to owning a handful of records purchased from a closed network of highly curated stores at a premium. People now expected access to the entirety of recording history from their smartphone, at a moment’s notice. What ensued were backroom negotiations, where record labels agreed to grant streaming companies licenses to their massive catalogs in return for a cut of the subscription revenues.
Such deals were a temporary fix with one major flaw: Record companies didn’t advocate for their artists, who actually made the music. Since the licensing deals between labels and streaming companies were opaque, artists now had no way of knowing how much labels made from their music, and predictably, their royalties continued to vanish before their eyes.
All of this eventually brought us the current unsustainable scenario: A major artist might accrue five million streams of their hit song over a year, yielding just $11,900, according to Spotify’s rate calculator. (For reference, the federal poverty level for an individual currently stands at $15,060.) For the average artist, who may limp to 2,000 streams per month, that royalty becomes just $4.76, or a loaf of bread!
The huge inequity that this demonstrates has become one of the major hurdles that both the music industry and music rights community must solve if they wish to continue to have jobs. In this scenario, successful recording artists like Coltrane may not have been able to afford to become musicians in the first place, and Graves may have stuck to botany!
The Akai MPC2000.
The best examples of these machines, which included the Akai MPC60 and Ensoniq ASR-10, allowed users to change the pitch, reverse, chop into pieces, sequence, alter dynamics, and much more. Aside from the technology that made all this possible, the intended usage, as defined by the designers, was not all that different to earlier instruments like the Mellotron. However, what hip-hop producers did with sampling technology and all those extra parameters, was wholly different.
Depending on who one asks, the age of sampling confirmed that hip-hop’s early producers were either truly lazy or geniuses. The lazy part is the most obvious and unimaginative take—they didn’t create the music they sampled, and in many cases, didn’t credit the original composer. The genius part requires a little more open-mindedness and understanding of what was actually occurring, both from a musical and cultural perspective.
Some have argued that, aside from playing traditional instruments at a very high level, there was actually very little difference between what hip-hop producers did and what jazz musicians had been doing for many decades before. Just like hip-hop producers, jazz musicians took existing music, created for one purpose, and manipulated it, transforming it into their vehicle, for another.
In the beginning, this transformation was mostly stylistic/rhythmic, leaving the original song clearly discernible to the listener. But by the time we get to John Coltrane, we were observing jazz musicians who improvised over earlier songs by other composers, which had been transformed to the point of being unrecognizable, even to the most sophisticated of ears. Take, for example, Coltrane’s “Fifth House” (1961), which was actually based on “What Is This Thing Called Love,” a well-known Cole Porter composition written for the 1929 musical Wake Up and Dream.
In the case of hip-hop, the goal was to create interesting vehicles for emcees to rap over. One of the earliest examples was “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), where the Sugarhill Gang literally looped an entire instrumental section of Chic’s “Good Times” (1979), transforming it into the perfect vehicle for 14 minutes and 37 seconds of nonstop rapping. Later on, hip-hop producers such as J Dilla contorted the samples used in their productions to the point where, even to this day, fans still argue over exactly where they came from. The most creative hip-hop producers have drawn from far and disparate sources to find the samples they use in their productions.“Hip-hop producers such as J Dilla contorted the samples used in their productions to the point where, even to this day, fans still argue over exactly where they came from.”
In my opinion, it cannot be refuted that both jazz and hip-hop musicians mastered this process by constantly pushing the envelope. All the while, they constantly used pre-existing art and transformed it to serve a completely different purpose, in aid of a completely different artistic statement. Theirs was a process of re-contextualization and this was central to both musics. Neither jazz nor hip-hop musicians were interested in simply “covering” popular songs, which audiences at the time already loved, in the way that a wedding band might. To go further, many of their transformations were so extreme that it would’ve probably just been easier for them to create completely new compositions. Many of them certainly possessed the ability to do so. So, why did they sample? I would argue that recontextualizing is not unique to literature, jazz, or even hip-hop. It is a fundamental technique employed by artists within many disciplines, and most likely has been for millennia.
The saying “There is nothing new under the sun” is apt. In reality, the actual nature of music is such that everything is based on something earlier. There are precious few artists who have actually created anything which could be considered completely new, and this is even more so the case post the establishment of the modern music industry. How many songs use exactly the same progression, or melody, or arrangements, or drum patterns, or bass lines? This is before we even consider lyrical content! There’s a reason why plagiarism within music is confined to a very narrow set of circumstances. Covering, reinterpreting, or recontextualizing earlier music is what most musicians have done for the vast majority of history.
Like jazz before it, hip-hop provided new leases on life for many long-forgotten songs. That also came with the additional benefit of more profit for publishers, but ironically, in the end, it was publishing that killed sampling. It just became too expensive, with some publishers asking so much for sample clearances that there was nothing left for anybody else. At first, producers tried to “recreate” samples with slight changes to get around this, but a few lawsuits later, it became clear that using samples was over.
About James’ important music: In the early 1900s, an important change took place, driven by the Black folk musics of the time. Rather than following traditional accompaniment roles reinforcing root notes, providing a rhythmic background, or punctuating dramatic moments, drummers and bassists began doing something different. Driven by new rapidly evolving repertoire, some forward-thinking virtuosos started developing bass lines and drum patterns based on short, repetitive rhythmic phrases, creating a groove culture.
Forty or so years on, this led to one of the grooviest periods in music history, when what came to be known as funk rose to prominence. I want to state clearly from the outset that I do not believe that groove as an innovation—and thus funk, or musicians such as James Brown, Bobby Byrd, and their crew—has gotten appropriate credit for what it brought to the world. I’m naming people here, but most music is a community effort. Funk was no different. It was the development of a vast collective, which involved many great musicians. But James Brown, Bobby Byrd, and their musical circle—the Famous Flames, the J.B.’s, etc.—did a whole lot to get the ball rolling!
To really appreciate the massive contribution that funk made to the very concept of groove, one really needs to only listen to music pre 1965 (including the Famous Flames’ own songs), and then compare this with what was happening by 1970. In 1965, James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” which distilled a few important groove innovations from James’ earlier songs, was a turning point. To me, this period sounds as though they traveled forwards in time to a parallel dimension and came back with the unadulterated funk! A few years earlier, they were singing songs like “Please, Please, Please.” By 1970, with the release of songs like “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” “The Payback,” and “Funky Drummer,” they were now in the midst of a whole new branch of musical evolution. This music was so different that it changed the way singers sang, audiences listened, and even the way people danced to music.
“I can remember digging through my dad’s record collection as a young kid in the early ’80s. I will never forget the day that I stumbled upon the James Brown section.”
The drums were now front and center, playing hard, delivering repetitive patterns based on a backbeat. There was little to no variation, and that was the entire point. The remade bass role now followed a similar concept of stripped-down repetition—we’re talking about bass lines that only involved two to three notes. Each musician, from the guitarist to the horn player, had specific parts, which fit together like a jigsaw. This was important enough for James to fine musicians for straying too far too often. An entire song might only consist of two sections, a vamp and bridge, and that vamp might go around for five minutes before the bridge ever happened.
I can remember digging through my dad’s record collection as a young kid in the early ’80s. I will never forget the day that I stumbled upon the James Brown section. Even back then, some 15 years after these records had been released, I knew that there was something very different that these guys were doing. It sounded like an earlier version of what I heard so many artists doing at the time, but I didn’t know to call it funk. I did, however, realize that I wanted to learn to play that way.
Of course, what James’ band did in the ’60s and ’70s also formed the foundation for what came soon after: Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament Funkadelic, Cameo, Tower of Power, the Meters, Earth, Wind & Fire, Kool & The Gang, the Ohio Players, the Doobie Brothers, Rufus, and, eventually, hip-hop. This puts James, Bobby, and their circle at the center of a lot of amazing music. But if we were to consider their contributions to groove itself, we should probably see them as the root of almost everything remotely groove-based post 1970!
At the very least, I am convinced that much of my own approach to music, and certainly to bass, was shaped by the sound they created. To this day, when I am in the studio thinking about how a kick, snare, or bass should sound, or how a groove should feel, I am thinking of their groundbreaking records, recorded almost 60 years ago! I am certain that there are a whole lot of other musicians who are doing the same, even if they are not aware.
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