Sorry to bump this, but I had to share this little vid somebody passed along to me:
Wow…that’s insane.
ah yes, jean baudin. he does a lot of solo stuff now, but he’s had a few pretty well known bands in the SF area - nuclear rabbit and element of surprise. great player.
That doesn’t even seem like bass, per se - more like an old Chapman Stick.
Cool, interesting - all good, but not what I think of as an instrument focused on holding down the rhythmic/melodic foundation of group instrumentation.
foundation role is not limited to the bass frequency range.
(see bach re:tocatta & fugue).
nor is the instrument (or any other instrument focused on that particular frequency range) “focused on” any aspect of music at the expense of any other.
(ibid)
What, man - are you crazy? Challenging my preconceived biases and prejudices?! The nerve! 
No, I hear you and agree - but would you also acknowledge that the bass’ role has evolved in popular music to that sort of foundation spot? Certainly in mid-century swing and pop, most jazz from the classic era (30’s through the early 60’s) and with rock n’ roll and country - i.e., most popular music forms leading up to techno and hip hop - that is the role bass plays. I am not saying it is correct, just what is commonly known and understood…
most definitely.
i consider it one of the greatest avenues of exploration and creative impression available to me as a musician to find new and unexpected ways to provide foundation for the music, not in hopes of being a wanker showoff, but rather in hopes of surprising someone who hears it into liking it.
there are fundamental, genre-independant truths about music that define its appeal. rhythm, melody, structure, a measure of knowability or approachability, all combine to make a song communicate something on some level and thus appeal to folks. these functions are provided by the various instruments in an ensemble, either alone or in concert, to construct the language of the song, in much the same way as the palate, dentition and lips form language. this arranging of roles and functions is called, aptly enough, the arrangement of a piece - more simply, who (what instrument) is playing what and how?
finding new ways to provide these functions, these fricatives and formants of the musical language, satisfies one of the deepest and most visceral necessary functions of music, appealing to the ear through truth rendered with an original, singular beauty.
in other words, in an arrangement sense, music is still stuck in the model t days - any color you want as long as it’s black, in my opinion. production has gotten slicker, but arrangement is still stone age.
it’s rare that something so patently new and relatively untested sits there staring you in the eye, but there it is.
time for some new color cars, just gotta right some good songs in a new paradigm. i’m trying :).
sigh all this agreement and still no kudos for my support of your multi-necked bass that was the start of this thread - no respect, I tell ya’s! 
I hear what you are saying - the biggest challenge facing any attempts in the direction you describe is finding an audience. If a player knows they are headed into experimental territory, the further they deviate from commonly-accepted-at-the-time sounds, the harder it will be for folks to accept. Look at the Ramones and Pixies vs. Nirvana - the Ramones innovated but were never particularly popular; same with the Pixies (and remember - both are considered hugely influential now, but at the time their records simply didn’t sell). It wasn’t until the common vocabulary of pop music accepted punk and hard rock elements that Nirvana could blow it open.
Then you look at the Police - they incorporated Reggae and World Beat elements into fundamentally pop songs and were accepted…
(bolding mine)
I agree with everything in your post except your lack of qualifier. Generally speaking, a lot of jazz musicians/composers experiment with more than just tone/rhythm, and classical has explored just about every aspect of musical “arrangement” (I’m accepting this as a catchall for more specific terms), including deconstructing them.
But you’re dead on w/ regard to Rock/Country and the derivative genres. Compositions in those genres tend to work within a fairly tight framework of accepted conventions - mostly because those styles are the great-grandchildren of the most simple forms of music (folk).
I’ve wasted approximately 2 hours writing essays expanding on this point, but I’m sure I’ve become tiresome so I’ll try and K.I.S.S.
heh
I read Wordman’s post which invokes Genre Cross-Breeding - an interesting phenomenon, and then re-read my post.
It may seem like I’m stuck in a “classical rawks, everthing else sux man” POV, but that’s not my intent. (Hey, I ditched my classical roots because I got tired of living in the 17th century!) I’m trying show that these questions have presented themselves before to musicians. Somewhat to point out that there’s nothing new under the sun, but also because there might be something to learn.
Perhaps what I’m fighting here is that classical music has become so completely inaccessible that it is no longer relevant, even to musicians in other genres.
Which ironically enough, is germaine to the subject of experimentalism. If you become so “innovative” that your only audience are people sophisticated enough to understand your music, you’ve lost the broad appeal and rendered yourself irrelevant.
At the same time, the unwashed masses are constantly in search of something new - so (tying this back to Wordman) it’s a crapshoot unless the musician can figure out a way to incorporate the “unexpected” with the “expected” in such a way that it has broad appeal.
As musicians, I feel we’re constantly pulled between those two realms - where our muse would take us, and where our listener would follow us. If we ignore either, we’re just wankin’ 
My point exactly - if you experiment purely for experimentation’s sake - that’s fine, but don’t expect anyone want to hear it, and expect to come across as a pretentious wanker. Go popular 100% and you’ve sold out. There is a fine line where experimentation can be incoporated into popular stuff. Hell, look at Van Halen - EVH brought heavier guitar and new techniques (hammer-on’s and octave tapping - both done by other players before, but not in that context) to what was essentially harmless power pop…
delving deep into my letterbox when I discovered
fanmail for MC FRONT, it kinda hovered
before my vision, I made a decision to open it up
it said “yo frontalot, you suck!”
oh whew, I was worried for a second that I’d started to earn love
seeing all my indie points burned up
next you know I’m meeting pop stars in stretched cars
doing the soundtrack for the wendy’s tie-in with jar jar
paying rent on time, owning things,
suing napster with my best friend sting
it’s like a nightmare (yep) cause that ain’t nerdcore (nope)
yes I’m indier than thou within my nerdcore flow
and if you’re slow on the uptake, I’ll lay it out
hipsterism is a religion to which you gotta be devout
must be seen as in between unpopular and hated
or else get excommunicated
MC Frontalot, “Indier Than Thou”
It’s interesting - I wasn’t thinking in terms of “expected=selling out”, but that’s definitely related. The Expected/Unexpected aesthetic is a pretty powerful way of examining art in general, and music in particular.
At the Micro Level: What happens in a given song
A convention in Classical music is the Cadence - a V->I (Dominant->Tonic) chord motion at the end of a phrase. It is “expected”. If every phrase ends in a vanilla V-I cadence the song is boring. So when you build up a phrase so that someone is expecting a nice V->I and instead you give them V-VI, you take them some place new and “deceptive cadences” (as they’re called) add a lot of spark to a song. But if there were NO cadences (everything "unexpected) then you wont get a sense of phrasing, and the music gets boring.
In a modern Genre take NIN’s version of “Hurt” - the whole song sets up this quiet, introspective feel, that’s capped at the end by those nasty, LOUD, abrupt power chords. Tell me that they didn’t wake you up the first time you heard the song, and that you don’t anticipate them (maybe a little air-guitar action) when they come around! (insert obligatory moment of awe for The Man in Black’s version).
At the Mid Level: what happens in a given Band/Musician
Any given band with staying power runs the risk of getting stale - because what made them new and interesting (unexpected) becomes “more of the same” (expected). Not quite the same as selling out, mind you, that just depends on what they do with it. U2, Pink Floyd, Rush (I think - I’m not a big Rush fan), and even (dare I say it) Metallica have changed their sound over the decades they’ve been around. Now, the first three continued to try and forge a NEW sound - you may not like post “Achtung Baby” U2, but it’s still uniquely U2. Metallica (depending on who you talk to) changed their sound by incorporating a fair number of grunge elements and lost that unique Metallica edge. (If) their motivation was money-linked, then they sold out. But if they were still writing music like on Pastor of Muppets, they’d be doing what john turner was talking about: recycling the same-old same-old but with better production coughAerosmithcough
At a Macro Level: what happens in a given Genre
For every moderately successful band, there are a million-billion bands who play the exact same shit. The internet-waves and bars are literally flooded with metal bands who sound like Staind/Shinedown/Nickelback/Disturbed - flooded with rock bands that have the same recipe of “whiney white boy” above angsty guitars, same Pantera/Sepultura clones who’re still trying to recreate the golden days of 80’s speed metal. . . They all sound the same because they are all doing the expected. I can’t hear that as selling out, because they’re not necessarily making the decision to do what’s expected - I think they all honestly don’t know how to do something different. Unexpected. Or their notions of “unexpected” are so. . . vanilla (“Dude, my guitar style is my own”) that the result’s the same. Nirvana and the Police (to invoke your earlier post) did something different.
I hope that it’s apparent that “unexpected” and “expected” work on every aspect of music. Even within a song, the UE/E play can happen at any level: instrumentation, rhythm, speed, density, volume, range - not just tone (harmony) which is what most people fixate on. Nirvana and the Police made their sound by playing primarily with instrumentation, density, and rhythm. john turner, in experimenting with placing the foundation “up top” is experimenting with range and probably density.