The 50 Greatest Bassists of All Time

Richard Davis’ Sixties résumé reads like a survey of some of that decade’s most challenging and enduring musical statements, from progressive-jazz landmarks like Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch! and Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure to Van Morrison’s free-folk masterpiece Astral Weeks. But that’s just a fraction of his overall output: During the past 60-plus years, he’s also elevated the bands, sessions, and performances of giants like Sarah Vaughan, Paul Simon, and Igor Stravinsky. Davis is at his best in intimate settings, where his profoundly empathic playing can shine, whether he’s playing stirring arco lines in a duet with Dolphy on Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” providing a warm rhythmic bed for Bruce Springsteen’s tale of a small-time criminal in “Meeting Across the River,” or conjuring impossibly poignant phrases to complement Morrison’s poetry on tracks like “Beside You.” “[F]or me, it was Richard all the way,” Astral Weeks producer Lewis Merenstein said, reflecting on the record 40 years later. “Richard was the soul of the album.”

Motörhead’s most iconic song, “Ace of Spades,” opens with Lemmy Kilmister playing a tap-dancing lead bass line before falling into a melody that sounds like his Rickenbacker is headed straight to hell as he sings about feeling “born to lose.” Both in his poetry and his bass playing, Kilmister’s aesthetic was all about reckless abandon. Prior to Motörhead, he was a rhythm guitar player who switched to bass to play with space rockers Hawkwind. “[Bass] is just like playing the guitar without the top two strings,” Kilmister once said. “I just made chords out of what strings I had left. It’s unorthodox, but it works for us.” After his predilection for uppers got him ousted from that band, he developed his own gritty style. “Lemmy was an influence on me in the way he uses distortion — that was different, new, and exciting,” Metallica’s late bassist Cliff Burton once said. Kilmister’s approach perfectly matched his sandpapery voice and underdog wit, and it made him unique — a distinction he was proud of. “I think I play like nobody else does,” he once said. “I always wanted to be John Entwistle, but since that place was taken, I became a lesser version.”

Sting has received so much attention for his songwriting skills and singing chops over the years that his technique as a bassist sometimes gets overlooked. The former Police frontman learned to simultaneously sing and play by listening to records at 78 rpm, so he could hear the bass parts more clearly. “I had been a guitar player working in clubs, and then someone lent me a homemade bass, and I fell in love with it — the dimensions, the aesthetic — and I realized I could play bass and sing,” he told Bass Player. “I learned how to play Paul McCartney’s parts on Beatles songs and sing them at the same time.”  With the Police, he contributed throbbing, melodic lines that cemented the band’s iconic blend of New Wave and reggae. You can hear his bass prominently on “Every Breath You Take” and “Roxanne,” where he supports Andy Summers’ guitar riffs without overpowering them. He’s continued to expand his creative horizons, as on 44/876, his 2018 album with Shaggy, where his tasteful, dubby performances anchor the songs’ relaxed grooves. “There was a golden ray of sunshine coming down from the heavens, through the roof of the building, through the ceiling and landing on this bass player,” Police drummer Stewart Copeland said of the first time he saw Sting onstage, in 1976. “And as a drummer in a band in those days, I didn’t even notice his singing.”

“Look, have whatever in your collection at home, but everybody needs a little Friday night,” Chic’s Bernard Edwards said in 1979. Edwards built upon his devout study of jazz and classical to become disco’s most influential bassist, turning any minute into Friday night with his bandmate and longtime friend Nile Rodgers and soundtracking thousands of dance floors in the late Seventies and beyond. Had he recorded “Good Times” alone — one of the most sampled bass lines in history and the inspiration for hip-hop’s first mainstream hit “Rapper’s Delight” — he would’ve made this list. But as co-songwriter, producer, and bassist on Chic tracks like “Le Freak,” “I Want Your Love,” and “Everybody Dance,” alongside hits by Sister Sledge (“We Are Family”), Diana Ross (“I’m Coming Out”), and Madonna (“Like a Virgin,” “Material Girl”), Edwards turned instantly head-nodding riffs into dance and pop classics. When most bassists receded in the background, the effortlessly and perpetually stylish Edwards came to the front. He died in 1996 at age 43. But as long as there’s a wedding, party, or any other reason to celebrate literally anything, his catalog will remain immortal.

As a primary member of Nashville’s famous A-Team, Bob Moore’s upright-bass work can be heard on hits by everyone from George Jones to Bob Dylan. Alongside fellow session legends like Charlie McCoy, Buddy Harman, Ray Edenton, and Hargus “Pig” Robbins, Moore’s sophisticated stylings helped transform Nashville into one of the nation’s musical power centers when artists like Patsy Cline, Chet Atkins, and Brenda Lee began to infuse country with piano-driven pop and jazz in the Fifties and Sixties. “I used to sit right beside Pig and I watched his left hand,” said Moore, “and I could tell every time he was going to move, and I’d move exactly right with him.” The opening bass strut in Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”? That’s Moore, who estimated he’s played on roughly 17,000 sessions throughout his career. Moore’s approach would help forever transform the role of the instrument in country session work. “In those days, a bass player was a comedian in the band,” Moore once said about starting out in 1940s Nashville. “I was something new; I was a player.”

The Talking Heads’ 1977 breakthrough single “Psycho Killer” sets an ominous mood before frontman David Byrne even sings a word. That’s because it opens with Tina Weymouth playing one of the most haunting bass parts in rock history. She’s unaccompanied for the first eight seconds, setting the stage for a tale of madness and fear that launched one of the great bands in history. And it’s a grave injustice that Byrne has always gotten the lion’s share of the credit for their accomplishments. Weymouth was a critical part of Talking Heads’ songwriting team — even if she didn’t always get credited — and she brought an effortless cool to everything they did. “Had there been no Tina Weymouth in Talking Heads,” said the band’s drummer and Weymouth’s husband of the past 40 years, Chris Frantz, “we would be just another band.”

As half of the rhythm section for Bob Marley’s Wailers, Aston Barrett and his younger brother Carlton played a primary role in introducing the sound of reggae’s one-drop rhythm to international audiences. But the influence of the self-proclaimed “Architect of Reggae” extended far beyond that genre into pop, R&B, and funk: His strutting bass line on the 1969 instrumental track “The Liquidator,” by the Harry J. All Stars, would end up serving as a direct template for the Staples Singers’ smash “I’ll Take You There” three years later. “The drum, it is the heartbeat, and the bass, it is the backbone,” Barrett once said. “If the bass is not right, the music is gonna have a bad back, so it would be crippled.” Barrett was deeply attuned to the storytelling of his Wailers bandleader, paying close attention to Marley’s songwriting before he came up with his own bass lines. “It’s like I am singing baritone,” he once said of his bass work. “I create a melodic line each time.”

Some of the funkiest records of the Sixties and Seventies — the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” Etta James’ “Tell Mama,” Aretha Franklin’s “Oh No Not My Baby,” R.B. Greaves’ “Take a Letter, Maria” — had one thing in common: bass player David Hood. First working at Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, before becoming part of the town’s legendary rhythm section at their own Muscle Shoals Sound in 1969, Hood was nicknamed “Little David” for his size; you can hear Mavis Staples call him that on “I’ll Take You There” during his supple solo. But his deep, pulsating bass lines made him part of “a rhythm section to die for,” Staples said. Working with his fellow Muscle Shoals players, like keyboardist Barry Beckett and drummer Roger Hawkins, Hood’s bass was equally at home in pop (Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome,” Rod Stewart’s “The First Cut Is the Deepest”), blues (Boz Scaggs’ “Loan Me a Dime”), and rock-R&B mergers (Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll”). His other legacy: his son Patterson, the Drive-By Truckers’ singer and songwriter. Hood remains modest about his accomplishments. Referring to another Staple Singers’ classic, “Respect Yourself,” he says, “That’s got a little bass solo in it too. It’s just a few bars in the beginning and the middle, but they’re just melodic hooks. We were just trying to make pop music.”

Though he made his primary innovation in the 1930s, Israel Cachao López has exerted an influence you can hear throughout pop music to this day. Working with his brother, pianist and cellist Orestes López, he hot-wired stately Havana ballroom music to create mambo, an Afro-Cuban fusion that would influence salsa, Cuban jazz, R&B, rock & roll, and by extension the entire constellation of Latin-influenced modern pop. “What’s Cuban in origin is also African,” he said years later. “The Africans had as much influence as the conquistadors on what is Cuban. Naturally, this being in the blood, many things have come into being always with an African influence.” His playing — a sumptuous rumble of crosscutting lines, probing yet elegant, gliding alongside the other instruments with relaxed precision — created a perfect backdrop for the rich, freewheeling improvisation that would become central to Cuban music thanks to another Cachao innovation of the 1950s, the descarga, a jazz-influenced jam session. Cachao moved to the U.S. in the Sixties, but didn’t find his widest recognition here until the 1990s and the release of the essential two-volume series Master Sessions.

When Metallica formed, all James Hetfield, Dave Mustaine, and Lars Ulrich wanted to do was rage on finger-breaking thrash metal — until they met Cliff Burton. The bassist had been playing with a rival metal group, and when they saw him play a jaw-dropping bass solo, they wanted him in Metallica so badly that they relocated from Los Angeles to his native Bay Area at his request. Once in the band, Burton introduced the guys to R.E.M., the Misfits, and Bach, opening them up to a new musicality, as he added orchestral flourishes and bass virtuosity to some of their hardest-hitting songs. His bass solo, “(Anesthesia) — Pulling Teeth,” on their 1983 debut, Kill ‘Em All, is an aggressive showcase of classical-music improvisation and wah-wah lyricism, while his delicate intro to “Damage Inc.” and the middle of “Orion” showed just how beautiful thrash could be. His concepts continued to resonate with the band after his death in a bus accident in 1986. “No disrespect to anybody else, but he was at a different level,” Ulrich once said of Burton. “When it came time to put [‘Anesthesia’] on a record, instead of it just being a bass solo, we turned it into more of a composition. It adds some different dynamics to it, almost like different acts — like, Act One, Act Two and Act Three.” That sensibility was so spot on that when Metallica collaborated with the San Francisco Symphony in 2019, the orchestra’s principal bass player wanted to perform “Anesthesia” in tribute to Burton.

Onstage with Rush, Geddy Lee was always a master multitasker, playing keyboards and foot-controlled synths while nailing daredevil vocal parts. But his bass playing, tough and sinewy yet beautifully nimble and accented with just the right amount of daredevil flash, is what’s made him a legend to fans of forward-thinking rock, and one of the key links between Sixties pioneers like Jack Bruce and John Entwistle and Nineties innovators like Les Claypool and Rage Against the Machine’s Tim Commerford. Lee’s playing added grit, flair, and surprising funkiness to every era of the band, from high-prog Seventies landmarks like A Farewell to Kings to New Wave–informed Eighties gems like Grace Under Pressure and streamlined, hard-hitting Nineties efforts like Counterparts. And his imaginative parts — the off-kilter strut that leads off “Cygnus X-1 Book I: The Voyage”; the wiry 7/4 bridge riff in “Tom Sawyer”; the lean dance-pop vamp of “Scars” — often acted as hooks in and of themselves. “He was the one that when I was a 14-year-old fellow I thought, ‘Boy, I’d sure like to make those sounds,’” Claypool once said of Lee. “I’m still trying to do that.”

“There must be hundreds of better bass players than me,” Bill Wyman told Rolling Stone in 1974. “I mean I could never play like Jack Bruce. If I was ambitious in that direction I’d practice, [but] I don’t.” But while he undersells his talent, his fellow Rolling Stones disagree. “Bill Wyman’s an incredible bass player,” Keith Richards once said. “I’m still always amazed by Bill’s tastefulness in his bass playing.… He’s a very sensitive musician.” Wyman earned Richards’ praise by playing smart harmonies under the guitarist’s iconic “Satisfaction” riff (playing a melody that goes down while the guitar goes up), a gentle rumble underneath “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and rhythms that wiggle underneath the boogie-woogie of “Rocks Off.” “I’m not a busy bass player,” Wyman once said. “I’m not a Stanley Clarke or anyone like that. To me, they should be playing guitar, not bass.… You need some balls in the bottom.… You leave the space for other people, you don’t fill it in with the bass. Leave lots of room and let the track breathe from underneath.”

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have gone through many drummers and guitarists since their formation in 1983. But Flea has been their sole bassist, a player whose signature sound — an earthy, wildly charismatic hybrid of punk, funk, and psychedelia — forms the backbone of the band. Born Michael Balzary, Flea was heavily influenced by his jazz-musician stepdad growing up. “My goal was to become a jazz trumpet player, but then I got into my early teens and I had to rebel against my parents,” he said in 2006. “All I wanted to do was be a punk rocker and play the bass.” Outside of the Peppers, he’s played on the Mars Volta’s 2003 debut, De-Loused in the Comatorium, and in spinoff group Antemasque. In 2009, he formed Atoms for Peace with Thom Yorke, showing his versatility on songs like “Before Your Very Eyes…” and the schizophrenic “Reverse Running.” But it’s his playing with the Peppers that’s made him so beloved, from his Bootsy Collins–inspired slapping work (“Higher Ground,” “Sir Psycho Sexy”) to his poignant melodic moments (“Soul to Squeeze,” “By the Way”). “The Red Hot Chili Peppers are Flea,” Anthony Kiedis told Rolling Stone in 1994. “He’s such an essential portion of this pie that it’s impossible to think that the band would exist without him.”

Shortly after joining Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler switched from rhythm guitar to bass and divined his own freewheeling style. Since he’d never played the sort of four-on-the-floor bass that defined Sixties rock, he came to the instrument with a guitarist’s sensibility, adding harmonies and ornate filigrees to guitarist Tony Iommi’s parts. The secret to Black Sabbath’s impact is how Butler and Iommi stacked their instruments for a big, walloping sound. On “War Pigs,” Butler played a bluesy lead underneath Iommi’s drawn-out riffs, and by the middle of the song when Iommi solos, Butler plays his own jazzy, Jack Bruce–inspired fingerpicked solo whenever the guitarist holds a note. There’s also a sense of liberation in the way he plays, as on 1981’s “Slipping Away,” when he traded playful solos with Iommi, and on his own swampy, wah-wah–inflected solo “Bassically,” which leads off “N.I.B.” — a guitar trick he adopted long before other bassists. But despite his obvious skill, Butler has always downplayed his ability. “Because I was a rhythm guitarist, I’d fill in gaps left by the lead guitarist,” he once said. “I continued that with bass: being the rhythm player. I never rated myself as a bass player; I just played what I thought was necessary for each song.”

The legend of the Band centers on their down-home appeal, but revisit their classic records and it’s impossible to miss just how funky they were. Rick Danko’s bass work — spare, stylish, and always situated deep in the pocket — was crucial to the inimitable lope of tracks like “Up on Cripple Creek” and “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” Danko grew up in rural Ontario listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a battery-powered radio and watching his dad play at barn dances. He joined future Band-mates Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm in Ronnie Hawkins’ Hawks in 1961, picking up crucial rhythm-section tips from the group’s then-pianist Stan Szelest. Within a few years, the group was backing Bob Dylan on his first plugged-in tour. Once the Band got underway, Danko established himself as the group’s trusty secret weapon, a position he’d hold during both their initial run and their prolific reunion era. Throughout his tenure, he complemented his signature warbling vocals with crafty four-string lines that always fit hand-in-glove with Helm’s swampy grooves. “I feel about bass playing as I do about background singing,” he told Bass Player in 1994. “It should be a hair behind. It’s nice to leave the top of the beat for the vocal and spread the other parts around the beat. That gives the music a sort of Ferris-wheel effect and carries it along.”

Maurice White, an accomplished singer-songwriter-drummer-producer, brought his brother Verdine out to L.A. to join a young Earth, Wind, and Fire in 1970. Verdine had studied under Louis Satterfield, whom he described as “the James Jamerson of Chicago,” and scrutinized jazz players like Ron Carter and Richard Davis. He brought it all to Earth, Wind, and Fire’s elegant, breathtakingly complex, million-selling albums. The group’s major singles tended to be speedy dance cuts, but there’s more room to appreciate White’s playing on the ballads: the darting, ascending rumble that opens “Can’t Hide Love”; the nubby, attacking runs in “Love’s Holiday”; the nimble, succinct riffs underpinning “After the Love Has Gone.” White left an impression on the uptempo numbers, too: Listen to him slash through “Beijo (Interlude),” making notes shiver and whine. White tends to be modest in interviews, throwing much of the credit for his playing style to others. “What I have to do on record is make sure that I’m complementing the singer,” he once explained. “If I don’t hear the singer, I’m gonna play it, but it won’t have any imagination.”

Many musicians came and went from Yes over the decades, but the only constant (at least until his death in 2015) was bassist Chris Squire. The prog-rock giants could survive without titans like keyboardist Rick Wakeman and guitarist Steve Howe, but Squire’s work was the bedrock of their sound. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Jack Bruce, John Entwistle, and Paul McCartney, Squire had a thick, melodic tone that powered everything from Seventies prog classics like “Close to the Edge” and “Awaken” to Eighties pop hits like “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” “Chris took the art of making a bass guitar into a lead instrument to another stratosphere,” Wakeman wrote at the time of his former bandmate’s death, “and coupled with his showmanship and concern for every single note he played, made him something special.… We have now lost who, for me, are the two greatest bass players classic rock has ever known. John Entwistle and now Chris.”

Robbie Shakespeare and his rhythm and production partner drummer Sly Dunbar have implanted their immediately recognizable imprint on decades of reggae. “It was the whole body of the bass, the sound and the way it flowed against the drummer,” Dunbar said of first hearing Shakespeare’s playing in the early Seventies. “At a certain part of a tune he’d play like three different lines, change the line on the bridge and the verses after that, and get four different lines.” The two went on to record with every major artist of reggae’s golden era, lending fluidly melodic yet implacably solid underpinning to classics like Culture’s Two Sevens Clash and Peter Tosh’s Equal Rights; they excelled in the rubbery negative space of dub, found a unique way to create an organic feel in a digital context as dancehall emerged in the Eighties, and brightened the grooves on rock and pop albums by Grace Jones, Talking Heads, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and others. No other musical entity in the post-Marley era has been so omnipresent in shaping the sound of Jamaica and bringing it to the world.

The first thing you hear in the opening seconds of “Lonely Woman” — Ornette Coleman’s 1959 out-jazz masterwork that captivated a young Lou Reed along with an entire generation of open-minded listeners — is Charlie Haden strumming a yearning, pulsing bass melody over Billy Higgins’ double-time ride cymbal. His intro makes the tune feel ancient and sturdily grounded, like it’s growing up out of the earth. That was Haden’s great gift as a bassist, to give even the most contemporary of styles — from Coleman’s joyously unfettered excursions to the outsider folk of Beck — a feeling of the eternal. Haden grew up in Iowa, yodeling country songs on his family’s radio show. Seeing Charlie Parker play sparked a love of jazz, and after moving to L.A. for college in the late Fifties, he met Coleman, the saxophonist who would spearhead the genre’s next radical breakthrough. Haden was an integral part of Ornette’s core concept, adding muscle and lift to live and studio bands for decades to come (including at a 1968 gig where they backed Yoko Ono) and carrying the Coleman torch in satellite projects like Old and New Dreams. Elsewhere, he could be found just about anywhere forward-thinking, openhearted jazz was being made, whether with Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, or Alice Coltrane, in his own politically driven Liberation Music Orchestra, or in a warm, empathic trio with Ginger Baker and Bill Frisell. He also fit in seamlessly working alongside Ringo Starr, K.D. Lang, or his son and triplet daughters. “Charlie Haden plays for the existence of the listener,” Coleman once wrote. “This reason alone makes him a musical guru.”

Memphis native Donald Dunn — whose father gave him his lifelong nickname “Duck” while the two watched Disney cartoons together — wasn’t an original member of the influential Stax house band Booker T. and the M.G.’s. But when he took over bass duties from Lewie Steinberg in 1964, the group hit its stride. Dunn’s tenure with the band coincided with their creation of foundational Southern soul records by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Sam and Dave. “When it got more aggressive and syncopated … my style was more appropriate,” Dunn would later say. He anchored a dextrous, versatile rhythm section alongside drummer Al Jackson, mastering urbane pop balladry, country-soul shuffles, and uptempo gospel-infused soul all the same. Listen to his quietly descending bass line on the M.G.’s’ instrumental rendering of Sam and Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” or the loping strut that opens Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay.” Dunn, who Bootsy Collins once called a “brick in our musical foundation,” would go on to play with a who’s who of rock and pop legends — Eric Clapton, Stevie Nicks, Bill Withers, Neil Young — but it was his influential work with Booker T., Steve Cropper, and Al Jackson that redefined popular music. As Peter Frampton once said, Dunn “wrote the book on R&B bass playing.”

Although Led Zeppelin seemed to come out of nowhere, fully formed, in the late Sixties, both guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones had years of session playing behind them. Drawing inspiration from Motown records and jazz bassists like Charles Mingus, Jones played on recordings by Donovan, Jeff Beck, and Dusty Springfield, among others, and he arranged the strings for the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow.” So when the time came for him to play the slow-stepping lead lines on “Dazed and Confused” and “What Is and What Should Never Be” or the charging rhythms of “Immigrant Song” and “The Song Remains the Same” — in harmony with Page — it was a cinch. His sense of musicality would guide him well past his time in Led Zeppelin, too. “John silently challenges everyone,” Dave Grohl said around the time he was playing with Jones in Them Crooked Vultures. “His presence makes you play the best you can possibly play, because you don’t want to let him down. And if you can keep up, you’re doing OK.”

A whole generation of bassists — from Dave Holland with Miles Davis to Miroslav Vitous and Jaco Pastorius with Weather Report and Rick Laird with the Mahavishnu Orchestra — helped to wed the sophistication of Sixties postbop with the power of arena-scale rock. But it was Stanley Clarke who truly defined the role of the fusion bass god. Clarke started on double bass and wanted to pursue a life in classical music; meeting Chick Corea on a gig set him on a different path. The two formed Return to Forever, one of the Seventies’ premier plugged-in jazz groups, and a band in which Clarke could both hold down the low end and have his say as a star soloist. Early solo LPs — and future bass-repertoire staples — like School Days found him moving further into funk, and showcasing his astonishing technique while always minding the groove. More recently, he’s moved into film and TV scoring, turned up on Beck’s understated Grammy winner Morning Phase, and inspired new-school luminaries like Thundercat (who recently said, “I thank God that there was a Stanley Clarke as a frame of reference to what is possible with the bass”). “Before I came along a lot of bass players stood in the back,” Clarke once said. “They were very quiet kind of guys who didn’t appear to write music. But many of those bass players were serious musicians. All that I did was just take the step and create my own band.”

Although Willie Dixon is best remembered as one of history’s most influential bluesmen, whose songs were sung by Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, that’s just a portion of his legacy. He played bass on early rock recordings by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, and tunes he wrote like “I Can’t Quit You Baby” and “I Ain’t Superstitious” have been covered by everyone from Led Zeppelin to Megadeth. Dixon’s first bass was a “tin-can bass,” and eventually he was able to save up $200 or so to buy an upright. Around 1939, he was “boxin’, workin’, and playin’, trying’ to learn how to play the bass,” by his own account, learning from locals Baby Doo Caston and Hog Mason, until he developed his own undulating, genre-defining style. “After two or three weeks, why, heck, I could play just about as good as I can now,” he said in 1980. When Berry first played him the song that would become “Maybellene,” Dixon thought it was too country & western, so “I felt that some kind of bluesy idea or feeling that wasn’t in there would make it a better song,” giving the tune a bit of rock & roll attitude. “Willie Dixon is the principal [influence on me]” the Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman once said. “I always idolized Willie Dixon, particularly, because he was on [records] with Chuck Berry and Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, and many others at Chess.”

In the same way that the Grateful Dead reconfigured how a rock band should sound — looser and jammier, incorporating equal parts jazz and country — Phil Lesh made us hear the bass in a new way. The Dead’s founding and longtime bassist grew up on experimental and classical music and played trumpet and violin in high school. He only took up his signature instrument when he was asked to join the Warlocks, the first version of the Dead. As a result, Lesh ignored standard walking-bass clichés: “I didn’t think that would be suitable for the music I would make with Jerry, just to do something somebody else had done,” he said in 2014. His idea — “play bass and lead at the same time,” his notes darting in and around the melody — became as recognizable a part of the Dead’s sound as Garcia’s guitar. His unconventional sound can be heard in studio recordings like “Truckin’,” “Shakedown Street,” and “Cumberland Blues,” the live version of “Scarlet Begonias” from the legendary Cornell 1977 show, and many live versions of “Eyes of the World” (start with 1975’s One From the Vault).

“On the bass, that’s my man, Ron Carter,” Q-Tip says proudly on the outro to A Tribe Called Quest’s super-funky Low End Theory track “Verses From the Abstract.” A milestone for the intersection of jazz and hip-hop, the track was just another day at the office for the great Ron Carter, who’s been turning up on history-making sessions for 60 years and counting. With more than 2,200 credits to his name as of fall 2015, he earned a Guinness World Record a year later for the most recorded bassist in jazz history. Beyond the raw numbers, the range of Carter’s CV is astounding, from anchoring the Sixties Miles Davis quintet that reshaped jazz on a molecular level to bringing an unshakable drive to classic Roberta Flack and Aretha Franklin sides, providing a plush rhythmic bed for bossa nova pioneer Antônio Carlos Jobim, and finding the swing in Bach. Whether in a low-key duo or buoyant big band, Carter always adds a touch of pure class. “I think Mr. Carter is one of the consummate listening musicians ever,” said collaborator and lifelong fan Pat Metheny in 2016. “He has played in literally thousands of unique settings and is always able to find something that brings out the best in his associates, while always remaining true to his own very strong sense of identity.”

It’s hard to think of Paul McCartney as being underrated in any category. But for all the praise he’s earned as a singer, songwriter, and live performer, it’s quite possible he hasn’t gotten enough for his low-key low-end verve. He first took up the bass as a matter of necessity, after Stu Sutcliffe quit the Beatles in Hamburg in 1961. “There’s a theory that I maliciously worked Stu out of the group in order to get the prize chair of bass,” McCartney told biographer Barry Miles. “Forget it! Nobody wants to play bass, or nobody did in those days.” But he made the instrument his own, particularly as the Beatles’ studio adventures took off in the second half of the Sixties and he switched out his Hofner for a Rickenbacker. McCartney’s bass could be a cool, steady support, as on “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “Dear Prudence,” or a colorful lead character in its own right — see “Paperback Writer,” “Rain,” and “A Day in the Life,” all songs where his playing conveys the yearning for a freer or more exciting life behind everyday lyrics. His playful, melodic style in that era owed much to Motown’s James Jamerson, whom he’s often credited as his biggest influence on the instrument; after 1970, McCartney kept up with the times, grooving regally into the disco era with “Silly Love Songs” and “Goodnight Tonight.” And while his interest in the four-string has waned and waxed over the years, he’s never stopped inspiring generations of kids to see the expressive potential of a great bass line.

“My name is John Francis Pastorius III, and I’m the greatest bass player in the world.” That was Jaco Pastorius’ opening line to Joe Zawinul when he met the Weather Report keyboardist backstage at a 1974 Miami show. Zawinul scoffed at the time, but he wasn’t laughing a few years later, once Pastorius had joined the group and helped turn them into bona fide fusion superstars. Jaco’s 1976 self-titled debut, where he played high-speed bebop with ease and dazzled with chiming harmonics, set a new standard for electric-bass virtuosity; joining Weather Report the same year, he thrilled audiences with his signature fretless sound and cocky flair, and forever banished the notion that bass was a background instrument. As flashy a player as he was, he was also a stellar collaborator: From the mid-Seventies through the Eighties — preceding his tragic death at age 35 — Pastorius’ revolutionary four-string approach was a perfect match for everyone from Pat Metheny to Jimmy Cliff, and especially Joni Mitchell’s increasingly adventurous songwriting on albums like Hejira. “[I]t was as if I dreamed him, because I didn’t have to give him any instruction,” Mitchell once said of Jaco. “I could just kind of cut him loose and stand back and celebrate his choices.”

As a member of Sly and the Family Stone, Larry Graham helped popularize the slap-bass technique with hits like “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Dance to the Music.” He developed the unmissable, percussive approach — Graham calls it “thumpin’ and pluckin’” — while playing in a trio with his mother in San Francisco. When the drummer quit, “I would thump the strings with my thumb to make up for the bass drum, and pluck the strings with my fingers to make up for the backbeat snare drum,” Graham remembered. These lines erupted in Sly and the Family Stone songs, inverting the traditional roles of instruments in popular music and making an indelible impression on future icons like Prince, a friend and frequent collaborator of Graham’s who once called Graham “my teacher.” “If you listen to records from the Fifties, you’ll find that all the melodic information is mixed very loud … and the rhythmic information is mixed rather quietly,” Brian Eno explained in 1983. “From the time of Sly and the Family Stone’s Fresh album, there’s a flip over, where the rhythm instruments, particularly the bass drum and bass, suddenly become the important instruments in the mix.” Graham had a simple explanation for it all: Playing with that much force ensures that “the dancers just won’t hide.”

Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker got much of the attention in Cream, but Jack Bruce gave the group the thrust to make them a true power trio. When Clapton would play his soaring blues licks and Baker explored jazzy new strata behind his drum kit, Bruce, also the group’s lead vocalist, kept the band together with heavy bass lines that always seemed to be moving. “Jack Bruce definitely opened my eyes as to what a bass player could do live,” Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler once said. “I went to see Cream mainly because of Clapton … and I was mesmerized at Jack Bruce’s playing. I didn’t know a bass player could do those things, filling in where the rhythm guitar would normally be.” Bruce played jittery, tumbling lines under the trio’s group vocals on “I Feel Free,” smart harmonies on “Sunshine of Your Love,” and basically his own riff under Clapton’s on “Strange Brew.” “He was a small guy, but his playing was monstrous,” Mountain guitarist Leslie West, who played with Bruce later, once said. “He made his bass bark, and everything he did was so melodic.”

Cutting her teeth in Fifties jazz clubs and breaking out as a studio guitarist for hitmakers like Sam Cooke, Kaye went on to become the most recorded bassist of all time — with more than 10,000 tracks under her belt. From the sunny swing of the Beach Boys’ 1965 track “Help Me, Rhonda” to Richie Valens’ now-classic 1958 version of “La Bamba” to Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s romantic 1967 rendition of “Somethin’ Stupid,” Kaye’s fingerprints are all over the history of modern pop. And that’s not even including her myriad movie and TV show themes — she gave the title songs for everything from Batman to Mission Impossible their uniquely groovy backbone. “I was a guitar player, and I thought, ‘God, that’s kind of a simple bass line,’” she told For Bass Players Only of the intuition that helped guide her playing. “I thought the bass could be moving around more and the music would sound better.” Her star collaborators evidently agreed. “He would keep my bass sound way up in the mixes,” she said of Brian Wilson in 2011. “On a song like ‘California Girls,’ at times you can hardly hear anything else. He just liked my sound and the way I moved around the fretboard.”

Bootsy Collins — or “Bootzilla,” “Casper the Friendly Ghost,” or “The World’s Only Rhinestone Rock Star Doll, Baba,” depending on the song — redefined soul and funk bass playing in the Seventies and, by proxy, rap and pop in the Eighties and Nineties. Collins joined James Brown’s backing group, the J.B.’s, in 1970 and immediately latched on to Soul Brother No. 1’s concept of “The One,” hitting the first beat of a musical measure as hard as possible and filling the rest of it with funkiness. Later, he stretched out that concept into a trippy wonderland when he joined George Clinton’s cabal, playing mushy, wah-wah bass in Parliament and Funkadelic before becoming a solo star, fronting his own Rubber Band, wearing star-shaped sunglasses, playing a star-shaped bass, and singing cartoonish love songs with comic-book enthusiasm. You can hear his influence in practically every bass player to come since, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea to the records Dr. Dre liberally sampled to create the G-Funk sound. “Bootsy came along and all he added … was the emphasis on the one,” George Clinton once said. “You could add that to ‘The ABC’s,’ and it would be funk in two seconds. And from then on, everything we did was funky for real, no matter how pop we tried to be.”

The Who’s John Entwistle had a lot of nicknames, including the Ox, due to his imposing build and endless appetites, and the Quiet One, because of his stoic demeanor. But the most apt was one Thunderfingers, a name bestowed upon him because every time he played a note on the bass it sounded like a vicious storm coming over the horizon. It was a style he developed to be heard while playing on the same stage as flamboyant showboats Keith Moon and Pete Townshend, but he brought a remarkable fluidity and grace to his role that was unlike anything anyone had ever heard before. Simply put, he treated the bass like a lead instrument and made it stand out as much as any guitar. And his chunky solo on “My Generation” inspired countless teenagers to pick up the bass, though emulating his playing was a near-impossible task. “Entwistle was arguably the greatest rock bassist of them all,” said Rush’s Geddy Lee, “daring to take the role and sound of the bass guitar and push it out of the murky depths while strutting those amazing chops.”

Charles Mingus was so much more than a bass player — composer, conceptualist, classically trained cellist, social critic — that it’s sometimes easy to forget how much of a force he was on his instrument. But at the heart of his lush, kaleidoscopic pieces was a relentless rhythmic drive that flowed from his fingers through the strings and directly into his bands, making it sound as though the soloists were jumping on a giant trampoline. Listen to him chugging away on classic compositions like “II B.S.” and “Better Get Hit in Your Soul,” aligning with drummer and musical soulmate Dannie Richmond, and you’ll get a sense of the strength and grace of his playing, the way he could make a walking line sound both hulking and nimble. Mingus’ career spanned multiple eras of jazz, and his command on the instrument made stylistic divisions seem irrelevant: That’s why he sounds equally at home swinging with Lionel Hampton’s big band in the late Forties (on his own “Mingus Fingers”), jamming with fellow bebop royalty in the Fifties (on the famed Jazz at Massey Hall album, which featured bass parts overdubbed in the studio by the famously exacting Mingus), and carrying on a lively, percussive conversation with his musical idol Duke Ellington in the Sixties (on the immortal Money Jungle). Though he was known mainly for his contribution to jazz, he was never bound by it, as shown by his collaboration with Joni Mitchell and his influence on Sixties rock greats like Jack Bruce and Charlie Watts. Throughout his life, Mingus constantly spoke out against those would tried to limit or underestimate his artistry. Commenting on the unfairness of jazz critics’ polls, he once said, “I don’t want none of them damn polls. I know what kind of bass player I am.”

James Jamerson anchored the Motown rhythm section, expanding the possibilities for bass players with hit after hit after hit, all while remaining mostly anonymous, because session players were rarely credited on Sixties Motown recordings. “James Jamerson became my hero,” Paul McCartney once said, “although I didn’t actually know his name until quite recently.” When Jamerson started his career, the bass was largely seen as a utilitarian support instrument; most players stuck to “stagnant two beat, root-fifth patterns and post–’Under the Boardwalk’ clichéd bass lines,” according to Standing in the Shadows of Motown: The Life and Music of Legendary Bassist James Jamerson. Jamerson helped revolutionize the field, jolting his parts with extra syncopation, additional chords that added melodic depth and complexity, and tonal choices that evoked gospel harmony. His list of contributions to iconic records is impossible to sum up quickly, but his key Motown recordings include the Temptations’ “My Girl,” which surely has one of the most recognizable, instantly gratifying bass parts in all of pop; Gladys Knight’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” where he plays a suave, bubbly counter to the jittery piano; and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” which finds Jamerson at his hyper-melodic best. “James went a step beyond what bassists normally do,” explained Bob Babbitt, who also played bass on several What’s Going On tracks. “At first he took chances and let himself go, and then it just became natural for him, and in the process he changed the course of bass playing.”