Badou

I'm just the ultimate music fan. I dig all sorts of music styles and have the ears for it. I grew up in Senegal in a very open society where hearing different sound patterns daily is part of the life there. I developped a fabulous love for it that later got me into the Bass.When I first heard the bass and distinguished it from the other instruments, I was listening to a cassette tape by Youssou N'dour's Super Étoile. It was in 1991, and I was literally floored by what I heard. It sounded so great and rythmic. I later found out that HABIB FAYE played the bass on it, and I became a fan of his ever since. He is one of my core influences.Shortly thereafter, I started having interest in the instrument itself. My uncle, who is a bassplayer in his own right, taught me a lot about the culture surrounding the bass too. I was interested in Jazz and got to discover more bassplayers. The Cameroonians (Etienne Mbappé, Richard Bona, Doumbé Diengué, Guy Sangué) just amazed me with their grooviness, agility, and their rythmic playing style. They are some of my favorite bassplayers ever.Back in the late 90's, I discovered Jaco Pastorius and knew right then and there that he was the Legend. His style is so groundbreaking and clearly musically challenging. It was love at first sight for me. And Jaco is many of my bass heroes' Hero. People usually say that one becomes a different bass player once they listen to Jaco. Victor Wooten had an interesting story about "Portrait of Tracy". When somebody first played it for him, he thought it was a piano flow. But, to his surprise and amazement, he was told that it was a bassist playing an all-harmonics tune on his bass. That changed him instantly. Around the same time, I discovered Marcus Miller, Stanley Clark, Michel Alibo, and many more.After falling in love with the bass for more than a decade, I finally picked it up in 2004, by accident. A fellow translator and friend of mine, Tim, was moving to Japan and didn't want to take all of his basses with him. He thought that one of them (the fretless) would be in good hands with me. That's how I got my first bass. I have been exploring it ever since, and I like jamming to my bass heroes' tunes. This is great, because I had been a passive bassplayer for such a long time that when I picked up the bass for the first time and couldn't produced a note, I realized how hard it was to play. But after practicing for a while now, I can say that exploring the instrument is the best part of it. I learn stuff everyday by just trying. I don't read and stuff, but I teach myself a lot of things. Watching other bassplayers helps me an awful lot in the learning process as well.In the past couple of years, I have been listening to a lot of bassplayers in North America. They are all amazing and unique in their styles. One advice my friend Tim gave me about playing the bass was to work toward having a voice, i.e. a unique style, a different sound. And that's what makes all bassplayers good and different from one another.