Nicki Parrott

Upon relocating in 1994 to New York from Australia, where she had studied jazz at the Sydney conservatorium, Nicki Parrott was a shy Aussie with no confidence whatsoever about her playing. Yet she intuitively felt a deep connection to the Big Apple scene. I went out to see music every night and got very inspired, she recalls. But as I got deeper into jazz, I came to understand what it takes to survive here.

Parrott had obtained a grant to come to the States and study with jazz bass great Rufus Reid, whom she credits with instilling a sense of purpose and pride in her upright approach. Rufus always gave me so much to work on that it would take me a couple of months to shed on each lesson. We got to the holes in my playing and did a lot of bowing work. But he also tried to bring me out of my shell. Rufus made me believe I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was. He gave me the confidence to get out there, fall over, and get up and do it all over again.

Parrott has since come into her own as a solid, reliably swinging bassist who is open-minded enough to take on the widest gig diversity. For nearly four years she has played an avant-garde spin on Jewish traditional music with virtuoso clarinetist David Krakauer’s Klezmer Madness. On Monday nights she carts her 100-year-old ¾-size German flatback to the Iridium jazz club near Times Square where she appears with Les Paul, the 87-year-old electric guitar pioneer who is still in fine fettle. On Wednesday nights, Nicki grabs her Fender Jazz 5-string and EBS Drome 1×12 combo and heads to Prohibition, a popular Upper West Side watering hole, where she thumps out the funk with singer Giselle Jackson. Switching from Chusen Kale Mazel Tov to How High the Moon to Respect is a stylistic stretch for any musician, but Nicki takes it all in stride. Fortunately, I’m not playing any music I don’t really like. Each gig has its joys and difficulties.

Parrott had never heard klezmer music growing up, hut she naturally took to Krakauer’s brand of the demanding style. It’s very rhythmic music gets so excitable, and if you don’t watch it, the tempos can get out of hand. In David’s band in klezmer music in general, the bass is the cement that holds it all together and keeps it from getting out of control. It might mean holding back drummer from accelerating too much or just giving the music life but not pushing it. I’ve gotten to know where David likes the tempos, and I try to put them there.

Nicki sees a lot of common ground between David Krakauer and Les Paul. Les is pretty much going for what he did in the ‘40s, and David is trying to recreate some of the wild energy of the looser, improvisational klezmer bands of the ‘20s. But they’re both passionate about what they do. That makes it easier for me, because they can explain exactly what they want. If you work for people who don’t really know what they’re going for, you’re always trying to work with them to find it. It becomes a much longer process.

To get the sounds she wants from her upright, has experimented with different pickups and strings. Acoustic bass isn’t a musician-friendly instrument at all. It’s heavy, it’s big, and it has a long scale lengthit’s a lot more work, so you have to find ways to make it work for you. I’m trying for a more natural, woody sound all the time. Nicki has used several transducer setups but has settled on a Barbera transducer, a SansAmp Acoustic DI preamp, and an Acoustic Image Coda combo amp. She uses Velvet Garbo synthetic gut strings. With the strings, the pickups and the preamp it’s starting to be more wooden sounding, more acoustic sounding. That’s the goal. Nicki put a C extension on her upright. I was at a couple of recording sessions where the bass-section music required those lower notes. It’s pretty useful for classical and soundtrack work.

Another project close to Nicki’s heart is her collaboration with her sister, saxophonist Lisa Parrott, who received similar grants to study with innovative saxophonist/composers Steve Coleman and Lee Konitz. On The Awabakal suite [www.parrottmusic.com], the two sisters combine their stellar jazz chops with Australian folkloric motifs in a startling three-part dedication to the Awabakal tribe of Australian Aborigines, the original inhabitants of the area where the sisters grew up. We’re interested in incorporating the sounds and folk melodies from home, It’s unique to us, so we’re trying to develop that aspect and bring it together with the other musical styles we love to play.