Singled Out: Jeff Berlin's Groovin' High

Groovin' High has been in my live repertoire for about three years. One of my regular choices for playing medium fast jazz bass solos, I used to play this song in every gig that, mixing it in with my original compositions. I also practiced a great deal on this tune trying to find new and hip ways to navigate through the chord changes. After a long time of apprenticing to this tune, I felt ready to solo on it offering up new melodic ideas on a bass guitar that weren't common to the electric bass instrument. On the day of the session, I recorded this song twice and kept the second take. This bass solo represented something quite special for me, a venture into melodic areas usually reserved for the higher pitched jazz saxophone or piano. Because the electric bass doesn't really have a long history of improvised virtuosity, this solo was my contribution to something unusual, a bass solo with harmonic core and melodic resolution, thanks to those geniuses on piano such as Keith Jarrett, and on saxophone such as Sonny Rollins, who taught me how to play this way.