Here is an excellent write-up about Richard Davis;
Richard Davis, the versatile bass player with over 3,000 recording credits, has died at the age of 93. Davis’ daughter Persia Davis confirmed her father’s death Thursday on a memorial page.
“We appreciate all the love and support the community has shown him over the years,” Persia shared in a statement.
Perhaps no artist besides Davis could claim to have worked with musical giants as different as Igor Stravinsky, Eric Dolphy, Frank Sinatra, and Bruce Springsteen. A prolific and supremely versatile bass polymath, Davis spent his seven-decade career refusing to abide by musical barriers, playing everything from jazz (both the bebop and avant-garde varieties) to blues, pop, rock, folk, and classical music. He cited one artist in particular for this inspiration: Duke Ellington. Ellington “didn’t classify any genres,” Davis told Bob Jacobson in 2014. “To him, there were only two kinds of music: It’s either good or bad. I’m with Duke Ellington on that.”
Though popular audiences might not know Davis by name, they certainly know many of the records on which he played, particularly platinum-selling pop-rock masterpieces by Bruce Springsteen (Born To Run), Paul Simon (There Goes Rhymin’ Simon), Van Morrison (Astral Weeks) and Janis Ian (Between The Lines). But though Davis’ pop and rock excursions certainly helped him financially and took his name into the wider public domain, his heart belonged to jazz, and he played with some of the genre’s biggest names, from trumpet pioneers Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie to jazz singer Sarah Vaughan and avant-garde magus Eric Dolphy.
Famed for his deep, rich tone and musical dexterity (he could pluck, strum, and bow the bass equally well), Davis was a master technician who could alternate between acoustic and electric bass and was in high demand as a sideman. He also found time to record over 20 albums under his own name and enjoyed notable LP collaborations with ex-Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones, vibraphonist Walt Dickerson, and saxophonist Archie Shepp. The classical music world, too, benefited from Davis’ expertise; he worked with the Russian-American composer Igor Stravinsky (who once purportedly described Davis’ virtuosity as “god-like”) and also played under the baton of several eminent conductors, including Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, and Leopold Stokowski.
But Davis would probably contend that his greatest contribution to music was his role as a teacher, which began in 1977 when he took up the post of a music professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he stayed for 39 years. He firmly believed in passing on his knowledge and wisdom. “I love teaching,” he said in 1979. “I believe you should share what you have.”
Davis was a Chicagoan by birth, born on April 15, 1930. Music hooked him early thanks to his mother’s collection of 78-rpm jazz records, which he played incessantly. His first taste of active music-making was singing in a family vocal trio, coached by a cousin. But it wasn’t until he was 15 that Davis felt the urge to take up an instrument. Bashful as a child, Davis wasn’t drawn to a front-line instrument like the saxophone or trumpet but while attending DuSable High School, where his classmates included future saxophone star Clifford Jordan and blues man Bo Diddley (then known as Ellas McDaniel). He was fascinated by the upright bass. “The bass was always in the background, and I was a shy kid,” he told Steve Krakow in 2022. “So I thought maybe I’d like to be in the background.”