Gary Peacock

Bassist Gary Peacock played a major role in the development of avant-garde jazz. He has worked with the likes of Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry}, {{Barney Kessel, Don Ellis, Terry Gibbs, Shorty Rogers, the Paul Bley Trio, Jimmy Giuffre, Roland Kirk and George Russell, among others. His recorded output is enormous — ECM Records alone lists fifty-one CDs on which he is featured. He has collaborated frequently with Ralph Towner in duet format, and since the late '70s has played and recorded in a world-renowned trio with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette.

Peacock was born in Burley, Idaho, on May 12, 1935; He grew up in Yakima, Washington, where he attended Yakima Senior High School. In school, he played piano, trumpet, and drums, When he was 15, he attended a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert featuring Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown.

After graduating high school in 1953, Peacock attended the Westlake School of Music in Los Angeles but was then drafted into the Army. While stationed in Germany, he played piano in a jazz trio, but self-taught himself the bass. According to Peacock, he "just sort of figured it out".

After being discharged from the Army in 1956, Peacock remained in Europe, playing with Hans Koller, Tony Scott, Bud Shank, and others, before returning to Los Angeles. His bass playing at the time was influenced by Paul Chambers, Ray Brown, and Scott LaFaro. He soon established himself as a bass player, participating in sessions with Barney Kessel and Art Pepper, and Don Ellis. In that time frame, Peacock began a musical association with pianist Paul Bley, with whom he would go on to record nine albums.

In 1962, Peacock moved to New York,where he played with Bley and musicians such as Jimmy Giuffre, Roland Kirk, George Russell, and Archie Shepp. While in New York, he joined Bill Evans' trio, which included drummer Paul Motian, who would become a long-time associate, recording the album Trio 64 with the group in December 1963. In 1964, Peacock briefly joined the Miles Davis quintet, substituting for Ron Carter in April and May of that year. Reflecting on his time with Davis, he stated:

"Miles probably said one of the most brilliant, useful, and necessary comments I've ever heard. Somebody was recording with him, and Miles looked at him and said, "What I want to hear is what you don't know." That is really the key: not playing what you know, playing what you don't know. To do that, you have to get very quiet inside, listen, and surrender to whatever that particular musical setting is. So it doesn't make any difference whether I'm playing standards or free stuff, because you're giving up any kind of fixed positions or attitudes you may have about what it should or shouldn't be. And to do that, you have to be vulnerable, to be in a place where you realize that what you're after, you cannot know. It's not conceivable. But it's there. It's the muse. So it's kind of a switch from the self playing the muse to the muse playing the self."

Peacock continued to record with Bley, Williams (Spring, which also featured Herbie Hancock, Sam Rivers, and Wayne Shorter), and others until the late 1960s, when he began experiencing health problems. Later he reflected: "I was not in good shape. I was doing a lot of drugs and alcohol, and I was discontented with myself... I happened to meet with Timothy Leary and... took acid. The result of that was realizing, number one, that I didn’t know who the hell I was, whereas before, I’d always identified myself as a musician, a bass player. Then, of course, came "Who am I?" I also noticed that this desire to play music wasn't there anymore. So the question was, what to do. So what I did was nothing. I stopped playing."

At this point, he decided to take a complete break from music. He recalled: "I got involved with macrobiotics and felt drawn to Eastern philosophies and medicine. I became a regular practitioner of macrobiotics and eventually moved to Japan for two and a half years, studying the language, history, and Oriental philosophy." .

By 1970, while still in Japan, Peacock began to play again, recording Eastward in Tokyo with pianist Masabumi Kikuchi and drummer Hiroshi Murakami, followed by Voices the next year. During this time he also recorded with Mal Waldron (First Encounter). In 1972, he returned to the United States and enrolled as a student at the University of Washington, where he studied biology, graduating in 1976. He resumed his musical relationship with Bley, touring Japan and recording "Japan Suite". In 1977, he recorded "Tales of Another" with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette; together, they would later become known as the Standards Trio due to their focus on jazz standards. They recorded twenty-two albums over the next thirty years. From 1979 to 1983, Peacock also taught at the Cornish School of the Arts.

Through the 1980s and '90s, Peacock released a number of albums under his own name, and also played and toured extensively with Jarrett and DeJohnette. He also performed and recorded with a trio known as Tethered Moon, with Masabumi Kikuchi and Motian, as well as recording with many ECM artists, including Bley, Garbarek, Ralph Towner, and Marc Copland. Regarding the trio format, Peacock stated:

"If three people share a common history in a particular area of music and they all found something in that music that freed them, when they get together to play a piece everyone is 100% in that composition... The question is, how much are you willing to give up to play this music? I don't think it can work if you still have an agenda, if you feel you still need to prove something musically. That's not the point – it's just about the music. So you're going to serve that, not yourself or somebody in the audience, not the critics or the reviewers. It's just the music. What does the music want?"

The following decades saw Peacock continuing to play and record in the existing trio contexts, as well as with Marilyn Crispell, Lee Konitz, and Bill Frisell, and with a new trio featuring Marc Copland and Joey Baron. Copland would play on Peacock’s final two recordings, 2015’s "Now This" and 2017’s "Tangents", both with drummer Joey Baron.

“Gary was quite well-known and sought after because of his unique improvising concepts,” said drummer Jack DeJohnette, a longtime collaborator. “His tone was incredible—rich, deep and even all over. His feel was amazing. He could really swing, and his free playing was like a rocket taking off, like a spring exploding.Gary will be missed but remembered as one of the giants of the double bass,” DeJohnette said. “He’s a legend, and he will remain that.”

Gary Peacock passed September 4, 2020 at age 85 following an unspecified illness.

Source: Michael Wieskamp