Why bass? Although I've played guitar since I was 13 or 14, my first instrument was actually electric bass. Indeed, for most of my teenage years I played bass in my high school's jazz-rock ensemble (led by Chuck Milazzo, who happened to be a cousin of Chuck Mangione) and I also played bass in a hard-rock band for a while. When I got into songwriting early in college I started focusing more deeply on guitar and even sold my old Fender bass. Yet bass lines have continued to speak to me strongly, and now that I'm not writing songs anymore, I'm devoting renewed attention to my musical first love (which I hope will result in recordings of music by Bach, Ellington, and Yes).
The following words by Langston Hughes well capture my feelings for the instrument (from the poem "Easy Boogie" in Montage of a Dream Deferred):
Down in the bass
That steady beat
Walking walking walking
Like marching feet.Down in the bass
That easy roll,
Rolling like I like it
In my soul.