Date : 26th July 2004
RAU
Attendance : 12
Apologies : G.Currie, C. Mombelli.

12 Present: Martin Simpson, Wesley Chetty, Nippy Cripwell, Gerrie Lubbe, Johann Kruger, Greg Gibb, Anthea Buys, Philip Raath, Trevor Muller, Simon Marcus, Kai Horsthemke and Dave Askes

Tonight’s meeting was quickly re-scheduled after a blackout in the JHB area caused the meeting last Monday to be postponed. None of the twelve bassplayers in attendance were aware that South African bass legend Sipho Gumede had just died from lung cancer.

This was our first meeting at the venue where the South African Guitar Players Association’s Jo’burg branch hold their meetings and hopefully, it’ll be a venue that we come back to on another occasion.

It was nice to see Trevor Muller again after a long absence from bass evenings due to a gig he’s been holding down on a Monday evening. It was also nice to see Anthea Buys making her second appearance at a bass evening. The evening’s events got underway with a photo session which Martin and Johann organised . This went relatively well considering that the guys love to use this as an excuse to muck around.

Martin got up and did a quick presentation on the status of the Strings 4 Africa project. This project has recently been re-born thanks to a healthy donation of Elixir strings from Concord followed by a wonderful contribution from the late Gito Baloi’s wife Erika which has filled one and a half collection boxes. Martin went over the history of the project and brought everybody up to speed with what was happening. It’s hoped that we’ll make a donation to a worthy cause before the end of the year.

Martin handed the floor to Nippy who had agreed to do a workshop on sight reading. Nippy immediately made the point that it wasn’t exactly sight reading that he wanted to speak about but actually soaking up the geography of the chart in the 60 seconds before lauching into it.

Nippy handed us all some sheets that he’d printed for us and it was then that we realised that we were in for the ride of a lifetime. With the words 60 SECONDS TO GO, we were left in no doubt that this was going to be one of those workshops that we’ll file away in our brains and refer back to when the occasion demands.

The first thing Nippy went through was setting yourself up. A good music stand (as wide as possible) fixed at a height that allowed your bass and the music to be in your line of sight so that you didn’t have to continually lift your head – taking your eyes off the score, to be able to see the conductor. A pencil and eraser as well as a comfortable chair or stool were aslo essentials here.

Now, you have to understand, that only about a third of the guys (and girl) in the room could actually read but this wasn’t an obstacle in soaking up a lot of information.

Nippy went through the checklist of info that had to be soaked up in the 60 seconds before lift off. These included the key signature – Major or relative Minor. Time signature 2/4, 4/4, 12/8 etc etc. The feel /groove/genre – Funk, Latin, Rock etc etc and lastly, the geography of the score – which got pretty involved!!!!

Nippy went through the ‘Golden Rules’ which included playing from top to bottom, not stopping for anything, keeping the timing and groove, locking in with the drums, keeping it simple (STUPID) and grooving hard.

The grand finale was Never to look back, it’s too late – start checking out the next tune.

The most incredible thing about this workshop was that Nippy spoke shop to us in laymans terms and spiced the whole thing up with little snippets from his vast (and past) experience and all this was done without actually writing a note on the greenboard (ok, we did have music scores to follow) behind him and No Bass!!!!

All in all, this was a magical evening and it’s a pity that only 11 of us had the sheer furtune to be there to listen, but one thing’s for sure, we can’t leave things too long before we get Nippy back to give us another workshop. So many things he said made so much sense to all of us.

An evening to remember!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!