Collection: Eberhard Weber

Eberhard Weber started on cello at six, switched to double bass in high school when his orchestra teacher needed a bassist, and spent his first decade as a professional working in German jazz and jazz-rock groups alongside pianist Wolfgang Dauner, recording with Joe Pass, Stéphane Grappelli, Hampton Hawes and Mal Waldron along the way. None of that sounds like it leads to one of the most distinctive voices in the history of the bass. But Weber had been quietly modifying his instrument, adding a fifth string tuned to low C and developing an approach to the electric upright that used the bass melodically rather than rhythmically, ostinatos and sustained tones carrying compositional weight rather than walking lines keeping time. When Manfred Eicher heard the result and recorded it at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg in December 1973, the album that came out, "The Colours of Chloë" (ECM, 1974), won the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis and was described by ECM's own documentation as "a near-perfect album" by "an artist whose creative vision seemed completely mature." It is routinely cited as an early defining instance of European chamber jazz and of ECM's emancipation from a US mainstream. Weber formed the quartet Colours immediately after, with Charlie Mariano on soprano saxophone and flutes, Rainer Brüninghaus on piano and synthesiser, and Jon Christensen on drums, before Christensen left after "Yellow Fields" (1975) and was replaced by John Marshall. Alongside the Colours work, Weber recorded as a sideman with Gary Burton, Pat Metheny and Ralph Towner, and spent two decades as a core member of Jan Garbarek's group.