Bass | b. 1940

Eberhard Weber was born in Stuttgart on 22 January 1940, the son of a music teacher. He started on cello at six, switched to double bass at sixteen after volunteering to fill a gap in his school orchestra, and spent the early part of his career working through German jazz and jazz-rock groups alongside pianist Wolfgang Dauner, playing with Joe Pass, Stéphane Grappelli, Hampton Hawes and Mal Waldron before his own compositional ambitions outgrew the sideman role. By 1972 he had added a fifth string tuned to low C to his electric upright bass and was developing an approach to the instrument built around melody and sustained tone rather than rhythm, ostinatos and harmonic colour rather than walking lines. Manfred Eicher recorded the result at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg in December 1973, with Rainer Brüninghaus on piano, Ack van Rooyen on flugelhorn, the Südfunk Symphony Orchestra cello section, and Weber on bass, cello and ocarina. The album, "The Colours of Chloë" (ECM, 1974), won the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis and is consistently cited as one of the records that first defined the ECM sound and the European chamber jazz tradition. Weber formed his quartet Colours immediately after and recorded across the mid-to-late 1970s while collaborating with Gary Burton, Ralph Towner and Pat Metheny on the same label. He spent the following two decades as a core member of Jan Garbarek's group. Weber suffered a severe stroke in June 2007 that ended his performing career, though he has continued to produce recordings by overdubbing keyboard and electronic treatments onto archived performances.