Gary Peacock 12 May 1935 – 4 September 2020

When the Bill Evans Trio was recording Trio 64, producer Creed Taylor had an issue with the group’s bassist, Gary Peacock, who recalled: “We played a little bit to get a sound level. We were listening back to it in the booth and I said, ‘Wow, that sounds great, man, let’s go!’ Taylor said, ‘Ah, hmmmm,’ and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And he said, ‘Well you know, I don't really hear you playing the time.’ I thought he was joking. I couldn’t believe he was serious.” Compared to his predecessor Scott LaFaro’s flowing mix of melodic ideas, accompaniment and commentary on the music, Gary Peacock preferred to alternate passages that were laid back to a bare minimum with bursts of hyperactivity. His solos exploded into life with flurries of notes scurrying all over the bass, and his startling originality spurred Evans and Paul Motian into some of their most imaginative playing ever recorded.

Peacock took up the bass almost by chance, aged 21. During his military service, in Germany, playing both drums and piano, he eventually led his own jazz group from the keyboard. When his bassist left in 1956, Peacock taught himself the instrument, and was soon working at the very highest level. By late 1963, he was an acknowledged virtuoso. His friend, the pianist Marc Copland (who not only recorded a solo album of Peacock’s compositions, but also played in trios with him over a 30-year period) points out that Gary had been an innovator in the 1960s and still was at the time of his death. Peacock moved confidently from Evans’s trio to more adventurous settings with Paul Bley (a long-time colleague) and Albert Ayler, as well as Don Cherry and George Russell. He also briefly toured with Miles Davis’s second quintet, depping for Ron Carter.

Peacock was not in any way a stereotypical jazz musician, and after a period of following Timothy Leary’s tenets on artificial stimulants, he took time out to study Eastern philosophy and medicine, later spending time in Japan. In the 1970s he took a degree in biology at the University of Washington. On his return from Japan in 1977, he made an album for ECM’s Manfred Eicher called Tales of Another. Eicher – in a tribute to Gary – noted “it laid the groundwork for one of the longest-lasting groups in jazz”, namely what became Keith Jarrett’s ‘Standards’ trio, with Keith and Jack DeJohnette. This trio eventually clocked up 22 albums before its final concert in November 2014. These set the benchmark for contemporary piano trios from the dazzling re-imagination of standards, to the free collective interplay on such albums as Inside Out. For this achievement alone, Peacock will be remembered as one of the Titans of the double bass.