Nicholas Gentry

Nicholas Gentry — Bass

Nicholas Gentry has been playing bass since the age of fifteen, beginning in rock and heavy metal and gradually working his way backward—and outward—through the musical traditions that helped create them.

For many years, rock and metal were his native musical language. In his twenties and thirties, his interests broadened considerably, particularly toward the soul and R&B of the 1960s and '70s, along with blues, funk, classic popular music, and the great rhythm sections that made those records work. That music remains at the center of his sensibility as a bassist: strong time, strong melodies, deep grooves, and playing in service of the song.

More recently, jazz has become the next horizon.

Not as a rejection of everything that came before it, but as an expansion of it. Jazz opens up a much larger vocabulary of harmony, improvisation, rhythm, and interaction—and also reveals just how thoroughly jazz runs underneath much of the soul, R&B, rock, and popular music Gentry has been playing and listening to for years.

As bassist and leader of The Gentry Band, he brings those worlds together. The repertoire isn't confined to jazz standards. It can move from Miles Davis, Kenny Burrell, Duke Ellington, and Herbie Hancock to 1960s soul, blues, R&B, funk, rock, and popular songs that lend themselves to reinterpretation. The common denominator is less a genre than an approach: good tunes, good grooves, room to improvise, and musicians listening closely enough to one another to let the music go somewhere.

That musical life exists alongside an equally unusual professional one.

Gentry is best known as a mentalist and psychological entertainer, performing at corporate events, conferences, private engagements, and live shows around the country. Before becoming a full-time performer, he taught rhetoric at the university level, and his academic background is in philosophy and rhetoric. Questions about perception, attention, persuasion, choice, and how human beings understand one another have followed him through all of it.

Increasingly, so has music.

That has led to an unusual live format in which The Gentry Band and Gentry's mind-reading performances share the same stage and the same evening. What initially sounds like an unlikely combination turns out to have a certain internal logic. Improvised music and mentalism both depend on attention, anticipation, uncertainty, communication, and responsiveness. Both begin with a structure, but neither becomes particularly interesting until other people enter the equation.

After more than three decades with a bass in his hands, Gentry isn't trying to leave one musical identity behind and adopt another. He's interested in finding out how much larger that identity can become.

Jazz is simply the newest frontier.

Gear

Fender four string electric bass and a Fender Rumble amp. That's it.