Stratton had a little bit of a vision, but I think even he had no idea what it would turn into But I went to music school, met my future bandmates, and it never would have happened if I hadn’t gone.” They don’t ask me, ‘Should I finish music school?’ or ‘Should I get a degree in music?’ which is a different thing. If any kid comes up to me and says, ‘Should I go to music school?’ I would say, ‘Yes, absolutely’. Pretty much everyone else was on upright. I was one of the few guys who came playing electric bass. I decided to go to U of M for that reason, and met Jack Stratton after that.” Semi-schooled
I would never have guessed that, after being at that show as a high schooler and being inspired to come to that school, that I would end up playing with those guys. Those guys were Theo Katzman, who plays drums and sings in Vulfpeck, and Joey Dosik, who is a great singer-songwriter in his own right, who also plays with Vulfpeck. I couldn’t believe their energy and their songs. At the time I was just a high schooler at a sold-out show in a college town, just losing it over this band. Two of the guys in that band would later go on to be my bandmates, my friends, in Vulfpeck. “When I came down to Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan music school is, I saw an amazing band called My Dear Disco, which was a synth-pop band with a synth player on one side and an organ player on the other, a great singer, a great drummer, bass player and guitarist. How did you meet the other Vulfpeck musicians? But the Rocco 16ths muted thing just spoke to me.” I also didn’t learn the kind of Victor-style slap thing.
Stuck in the middle with you bass tab full#
The downside of that is I don’t have the full three-finger dexterity. When I think back to starting to play bass, I could have learned using one finger, two fingers, three fingers, or a pick, but it just so happened that my primary teacher was a two-finger bass player. You use a super-tight, Rocco Prestia-type picking style. For me, that was the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and then later Earth, Wind & Fire, Sly & The Family Stone. My bass teachers realised that as a young bass player, nothing will get you excited like a band that features the bass prominently. We had his music on around the house: I remember as a kid dancing around the living room to Prince, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. My mom and dad loved Stevie Wonder and Prince. “It was a confluence of the influences of my parents and my bass teachers, who happened to be in the sphere of funk music. I remember as a kid dancing around the living room to Prince, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder
They were great teachers and great players, and they steered me down the funk bass track.” I would see them play on the weekend, and then have a lesson with them during the week. They would teach at the local music shop, they would gig on the weekends at the local pub. These guys were all working bass players in New York and LA in the 80s and 90s, and when they had kids and a family, they thought, ‘Maybe we’ll go back to the Midwest’. They would be Michiganders originally, move out to the coast to play, and decide to semi-retire.” “I grew up in northern Michigan, the middle of nowhere - you would think it would not be a musical hotbed, but there were a couple of great bass players from Detroit, Chicago and even New York. The second bass I ever got was a Fender, then the third bass I got was a Music Man.” So about age eight, I had a Samick bass with action about a foot high, and luckily, developed my finger strength and dexterity on a bass that was impossible to play. When my dad realised that he had five children, all of whom loved music as kids, he said, ‘Well, why don’t we have a family band?’ We literally had one instrument assigned to each of us, and a basement with a drum set, a bass, a guitar and keys.” “I started when I was about eight years old.
When I hear young bass players come up to me after shows and say, ‘You’re the reason I started’, or ‘You’re the reason I stuck with it’, that’s the highest honour for me.” Is it rewarding to get this level of recognition from the bass community, Joe? When we sat down with Dart, still only 27, it’s clear that those rewards have been gained thanks to much hard work as well as talent. Four albums, four EPs and a clutch of Spotify releases later - including the brilliant, music-free Sleepify of 2014, designed to game the streaming system - Vulfpeck are established as the thinking musician’s funk band for the third decade of this century.
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