As a member of Bob Marley and the Wailers, he was one of reggae’s original creators.
Bass is about connection—within the music, among the players, and between the musicians and the listener. Even if you can only hear a song’s bass line, say, in a noisy, crowded room, or through an adjoining wall, you might be able to recognize the song—and conjure up all the memories and emotions of how that song speaks to you. Simply through bass. In the musical conversation between rhythm and harmony, bass bridges the gap, gluing everything together. And chances are, as the bass player in your band, you’re not only providing that musical groove glue, but you may also be holding the band together practically and interpersonally. And the whole time, you’re making everyone and everything feel and sound good.
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.
Bassist Julie Slick and reader Dan Hanson join PG staff members in sharing about the fresh listening experiences they’d love to revisit.
What band or artist do you wish you could hear again for the first time?
Julie Slick
A: Remarkable sensory experiences are like time travel, and for that reason I hold a very special place in my heart for Massive Attack’s Heligoland. I first heard its single “Paradise Circus” at Andrea Pellegrini’s mastering studio outside of Florence, Italy, during my first year as a nomad. I fell in love instantly.
Current obsession: Emma Ruth Rundle. I met her during one of those nomad years on an excursion to L.A. We became friends before I’d even listened to her music, which is probably a good thing because I totally would have fan-girled out over her incredible art, which is inspiring, impassioned, and pure.
Photo by Allan Wan
Luke Ottenhof - Assistant Editor
A: Frightened Rabbit blew the doors off of indie rock for me. Their most popular work is folksy, anthemic indie rock, but the imagination in composition, and especially in Grant Hutchison’s percussion and timing, really made me reconsider what a great song could consist of, and how far outside the lines you could color while still producing a sing-along, dance-along alternative-rock record. I’d love to experience that realization of possibility again.
Current obsession: I’ve been learning about the labor organizing efforts of music workers through the past century, in particular the massive AFM strikes of the 1940s, when musicians fought back against labels hoarding the profits from the latest technology: recordings. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Connor Wade - Digital Experience Manager
A: I wish I could experience Annie DiRusso’s music again for the first time. After a chance introduction scrolling TikTok, her grungy indie-pop tracks have consumed my life. Songs like “Don’t Swerve” helped me through the pandemic, and I’m excited to see what this Nashville-based songwriter does next.
Current obsession: I’ve been digging up some of my favorite songs from Arctic Monkeys after hearing about a friend’s recent experience seeing them live. This obsession is very nostalgia-fueled, as their first full-length came out during my high school years, but it’s been inspiring to realize how much they unconsciously influenced my playing.
Dan Hanson - Reader of the Month
A: Mountain. Leslie West’s guitar sound reverberates with me to this day! A Les Paul Jr. with a P-90 pickup through a Sunn PA amplifier! His fat tone, sustain, and vibrato were shockingly perfect! His delicate volume-swell ‘violin’ sections in his solo “Dream Sequence” were indeed dreamlike!
Photo by Frank Schwichtenberg
Current obsession: The 1962 duet album Undercurrent with Jim Hall (guitar) and pianist Bill Evans: I’m not a jazz-musician by any stretch...but their instinctive, intricate musical conversations gently force you to just listen and absorb the beauty of the music and not think about how they’re doing it.
The Toronto bassist talks inspiration and influence.
One of my favorite bassists is also the one person on earth that I have the most bass gigs in common with. He has played in more bands that I have also played in than anybody else, and most of these bands—from Dapp Theory to Rudresh Mahanthappa to Steve Coleman—were not easy situations to step into. However, in every single case, I have listened to him and thought, “Damn … he sounds great!”
Rich Brown is an all-around bass virtuoso who is everybody's first call across the Canadian border. I had the great honor of chatting with Rich recently. This interview features excerpts from that conversation:
When did you first start playing music, and in particular, when and why did you take up the bass?
I took guitar lessons when I was around eight, and I dreaded going to those lessons every single week. But my dear mom urged me to keep at it. She would make me practice for 15 minutes before I could go outside and play with the other kids.
My interest in the guitar waned until one day at the age of 13 when I turned the TV on and saw a video on MTV called "Unchained" by Van Halen. When I saw how much fun those guys were having on stage and realized how good the music made me feel, I knew I wanted to be a musician.
I taught myself to play by listening to Van Halen, Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Mark Knopfler. But years later, in high school, I found that there were a million guitar players and zero bass players. So I made the switch thinking, “How hard can it be to play bass?” The answer was, VERY!
I started by playing along with albums by the Police, and I would spend my days playing along to the songs on the radio, most of which were simple pop tunes. One night when I was 17, I tuned into a jazz program that had announced that a bass player named Jaco Pastorius had just died. I had never heard of Jaco, and the two hours that followed completely changed my life. The first song they played was “Continuum,” and by the end, I realized there was a higher level of musicality on the bass. So, I made it my mission to get to that level, and to this day, I'm still on that mission.We are all the sum of our influences. I've found that learning from as many sources as possible makes me a more multifaceted player.
Jaco has been a common denominator for many bass interviews! Almost everybody has had a Jaco moment. However, you don't just sound like Jaco. What are some experiences that contributed to you developing your own sound?
One of my first important musical experiences was playing in a Rush cover band in high school. I had so much fun working with those different rhythmic cycles. It was my introduction into playing so-called "odd-time" signatures. But I live in Toronto. A city that the UN once recognized as the most multicultural city in the world. I've been blessed with many incredible opportunities to work with amazing musicians from disparate parts of the globe. Over the years, these experiences helped to shape my sound and broaden my perspective as a bass player.
One of the most formative experiences has to be my time with Dapp Theory, led by pianist and composer Andy Milne. I was very inexperienced when I joined, and I learned a lot about my tone and the various bass sounds required to play that music. I had to get a good slap tone together and a solid, well-defined bass tone with enough warmth in the high register for melodic solos. Just having those three sounds available to me on one instrument allowed me to feel comfortable within any project.
How did all that exposure prepare you for some of the musical situations that you play in today?
I feel like certain aspects of my playing have truly benefited from working with musicians of different cultural backgrounds. I got into bands that played a lot of Brazilian and West African music back in the ’90s. Playing with those projects taught me a great deal about time, groove, note placement, and note length. I also worked with bands that played Egyptian, Turkish, and South Asian music. With those groups, I learned a lot about melody and note ornamentation. There are beautiful melodic inflections unique to each of those cultures that floor me to this day. These inflections are subtle but deeply effective, and I try to learn and incorporate them as much as I can.
We are all the sum of our influences. I've found that learning from as many sources as possible makes me a more multifaceted player. Gaining a deeper understanding of the different styles around the world gives me some new insights into my approach to all forms of Western music.
YouTube It
There’s a wealth of content on Rich’s YouTube page, but his cover of Floating Points and Pharaoh Sanders’ “Promises” on an 18" bass might be the most eye-catching.