There is a powerful undercurrent to Van Morrison’s folk-rock album Astral Weeks that generations of fans may have sensed without knowing it – the coolly sensuous presence of its double bass player and de facto musical director, Richard Davis, who has died aged 93.
Davis was a natural enabler who was uninterested in drawing attention to himself. Astral Weeks (1968) was a classic example of that reality, since Morrison had issued the session musicians on the album with few directions, and it was Davis who led his jazz colleagues in figuring out most of the band parts on the fly. According to the record’s producer, Lewis Merenstein, Davis’s unobtrusive presence turned out to be “the soul of the album”.
On a wider stage, Davis represented a bridge between the virtues of a classical music education inaccessible to many African-American musicians of his generation and the spontaneity, harmonic awareness and rhythmic drive of jazz.
Playing in his Chicago hometown’s dance bands in the early 1950s, he had met and played with Sonny Blount (globally celebrated later as the other-worldly orchestral revolutionary Sun Ra), and spent a year with the artistically and commercially successful pianist Ahmad Jamal’s trio.
Then in 1954 he relocated to New York with the jazz/classical pianist Don Shirley, joining the vocal star Sarah Vaughan’s trio three years later – a revelatory experience in effortless timing that he would later refer to as like attending “the university of Sarah Vaughan”.
It was in the 60s and 70s that Davis’s freelance career really took off, as he worked with the multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Eric Dolphy, the cutting-edge composer Andrew Hill, in classical ensembles conducted by Igor Stravinsky, Leopold Stokowski and Pierre Boulez, and on many pop and rock recordings.
Davis’s resilient yet buoyant bass sound graced hit songs, including Frank Sinatra’s Watertown (1969), Paul Simon’s Something So Right (1973), Bruce Springsteen’s Meeting Across the River, Laura Nyro’s Smile and Janis Ian’s At Seventeen (all 1975) and he played with pop and rock musicians such as Morrison. He was also a founder member and regular participant (from 1966 to 1972) in the advanced and exciting Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra.
In 1977, however, a call came that transformed the second half of Davis’s life. The University of Wisconsin in Madison wanted a bass teacher, and he took the post, not just because the examples of his childhood tutor Walter Dyett, and of Martin Luther King Jr, had inspired a love of teaching in him, but because he was ready to ease the pressures of being a freelance musician.
Davis was professor of bass at Madison for almost 40 years, during which time he established the Richard Davis Foundation for Young Bassists in 1993 to teach school-age musicians on the instrument.
Born in Chicago, his mother died in childbirth, and he was adopted and raised by Robert and Elmora Johnson. They encouraged him to explore his mother’s record collection and to sing the bass parts in the family’s amateur vocal group. But Davis also found an affinity with the bass. “I was just enthralled by the sound,” he said. “The bass was always in the background and I was a shy kid. So I thought maybe I’d like to be in the background.”
At DuSable high school in Chicago he studied music under Dyett, a demanding but much-respected teacher who had mentored many future jazz and R&B celebrities, including Dinah Washington and Bo Diddley. Dyett challenged Davis to learn jazz and classical music simultaneously, which led to private lessons with Rudolf Fahsbender, bass player with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and, subsequently, degree studies at the city’s VanderCook College of Music.
Classical studies suggested to Davis an agile and swinging approach with the bow as well as a jazz player’s more familiar pizzicato sound, a distinctive voice-like expansion of his range that proved particularly useful in his prolific jazz years in the 60s.
He had an especially fruitful year in 1965, when he played on Hill’s dizzyingly rhythm-juggling album Point of Departure, on Dolphy’s Out to Lunch!, with its bold shapes and structures, and on the drummer Tony Williams’s Life Time, an early adventure in jazz-rock.
Davis led some accomplished bop and soul-jazz albums of his own with Elvin Jones, colleagues from the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis orchestra and others, and throughout the 60s and 70s he was also a member of the New York Bass Violin Choir, a classy seven-bass ensemble led by Bill Lee, father of the film-maker Spike.
In the 90s he also participated in a series of postbop trio recordings with the pianist John Hicks and the drummer Tatsuya Nakamura.
Although Davis’s later teaching duties filled most of his post-midlife days, he continued to keep up with his playing, and took gigs when the circumstances appealed – notably for his acceptance of a Jazz Masters fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts at the Rose theatre in New York in 2014 and, two years later, when he was 86, a tribute performance in Paris dedicated to John Coltrane led by Coltrane’s saxophone contemporary Archie Shepp.
Outside of his jazz work, though connected to it, he set up the non-profit Institute for the Healing of Racism under the auspices of the University of Wisconsin, and he continued to host its meetings at his own house until he was 87. He retired from the university staff in 2016, and Richard Davis Lane on Madison’s east side was named in honour of his work.
He is survived by his daughter, Persia.
• Richard Davis, bass player, born 15 April 1930; died 6 September 2023
