Bryan Beller is not only one of the most respected bassists today, he is also a fascinating guy. Perhaps best known to progressive music audiences for his abiding work with Mike Keneally, he has also recorded and/or toured with Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa, Steve Vai, and Wayne Kramer and recorded two albums with MullMuzzler featuring James LaBrie. Apart from playing with this impressive array of modern artists, Bryan is also an increasingly well-known writer, having contributed numerous articles to Bass Player magazine, written columns for political web sites, and created his own web journal, The Life of Bryan. Oh, and he graduated Magna Cum Laude from Berklee College Of Music.

Fans of Bryan's playing will get to see him this June as he appears as part of The Mike Keneally Band at NEARfest 2004.

Jeff Melton: Can you please tell us about plans for your upcoming solo album [since released as View]?

Bryan Beller: I'm not sure if "plans" is the right word. As long as I can remember in my eighteen years as a bassist, I've never had any original music floating around in my head. Then last year I moved to a fairly remote location in northern Los Angeles County up in the mountains, and suddenly I began hearing melodies and motifs. It was just two months ago that I constructed the first track, a bass solo/duet piece, and it wasn't until I recorded both tracks and heard them together that I actually believed I could execute the act of writing a song. Since then, I've recorded nine songs in demo form, with the goal of thirteen in all. It's been very interesting doing all this for the first time - recording the bass, simulating guitar on bass, playing keyboards, programming the drums, mixing, mastering, all that stuff - and I'm very much looking forward to completing this phase of the project, which would be a 13-song demo-track CD of the album in sequence, so I can have a very clear idea of what the record will sound like in total before I go into the studio with anyone else. But if someone told me three months ago that I'd be doing this right now, I would have laughed them off.


JM: Are you writing for it with your new Taylor bass?

BB: Yes, in fact three songs will be primarily Taylor bass solo pieces. I really have to credit that instrument with unlocking whatever door was locked in my brain up until this point in regards to songwriting.


JM: Who is on it and when do you plan to have it complete/available?

BB: There will be quite a few players on it, different ones on different tracks, and that's not all finalized right now, so let me only mention the people who I've confirmed. My longtime friend and current Frank Zappa vaultmeister Joe Travers will be handling drums, as will current Keneally drummer Nick D'Virgilio. Guitarists will include Rick Musallam, another Keneally band member, as well as a guy named Griff Peters, a fellow Berklee alum, longtime friend and excellent guitarist. And Keneally himself will play on a couple of tracks. This isn't exactly gospel because it's so early on in the process, but that's how I see it right now.


JM: Any plans to tour it?

BB: Honestly, the way I'm thinking now, no. I may do one or two local shows in Los Angeles, but touring the material isn't really why I'm doing this. It's more of a need to get this out of my system, to put it out there as a statement of where I'm coming from musically. Let's just say that the possibility of touring as a solo artist feels remote to me right now. It will take enough courage for me even to do one show as a solo artist. It's not my natural state of being, if you will.


JM: Are there any particular tracks/performances that stick out in your mind on this disc?

BB: It's hard to pick performances, but I suppose that Griff Peters' outro solo/melody on "View" is something I still can't believe I had a hand in creating. Tracks: the road from the beginning of "Eighteen Weeks" to the end of "Wildflower" is a set piece to me, and again, I can't believe I wrote it. I'm very happy with the way it all turned out.


JM: So you played a John Pattitucci song last night. Is he one of your heroes?

BB: He's one of my influences, that is for sure. I especially like the way he mixes hyper-advanced bebop lines with some flat-out blues and R&B licks when he's soloing. Taking it extremely out, then slamming it right back in, always at seemingly the perfect moment, is one of his trademarks. I'm no bebop player, but I appreciate what he does in that regard, and I've tried to emulate the idea of out-and-in when I'm soloing, another uneasy concept for me in general.


JM: Which Beer For Dolphins album is your favorite and why?

BB: Half Alive In Hollywood is my personal favorite, especially disc two. It's a full-show, practically flawless (yet just barely on the rails) live document of a band at its very peak. It's not easy to capture such a performance when playing material as challenging as Keneally's; in the past eight years, I can count on one hand the number of shows that were performed at this level. That it was captured from a board mix in such releasable fashion, to me, remains a miracle.


JM: What is it about Mike's musicality that makes you want to keep playing with him? I know the guy is dynamite, but from your insider's point of view, can you drill down into it?

BB: He brings complexity and chaos into the ordered musical world inside my brain, which I feel I need from an external source in order to continue to grow as a musician. There are other aspects too, like the fact that he's such an incredible songwriter and composer of melodies, and also our level of musical communication, which is incredibly high as you might imagine after nine years of playing together. But it's that sense of unpredictability that I really feed off of - and, conversely, I think my sense of remaining mostly grounded in the face of all sorts of insane musical chaos feeds him in a positive way. We balance each other very, very well.


JM: What can you tell us about the new Beer For Dolphins material you're playing on the Taylor tour? How is it different for you this time?

BB: It's not, really. Mike and I have been playing in the acoustic duo format for a few years now, and we both have a sense of what subtle rearrangements to new songs need to be made in order to translate them from full electric band into acoustic duo. But new songs are always fun to do that with, and some of the hairier new tunes have been especially rewarding. It's also unique this time around in that we're already playing some material acoustically that hasn't yet been recorded by the full electric band, though we're scheduled to do that later this year or early next.


JM: I noticed that you do like to review CDs, and have a knack for it. What do you think of all the attention progressive rock is getting these days?

BB: Honestly, and this might be blasphemous for these pages but I must tell the truth, I haven't given the "modern progressive" rock movement much thought. My roots are in progressive insofar as I'm a big Yes fan - hell, I used to hack out a piano rendition of "The Gates Of Delirium" on piano when I was a kid, and when I was at Berklee, a band I led did a passable version of "Sound Chaser" - and I've always appreciated longer song forms and excellent musicianship, but it's just not what I listen to myself nowadays. I suppose that, ultimately, I'm not qualified to comment on your question, other than to say that I'm glad the desire to hear music more carefully thought out than the latest Britney Spears single has not completely disappeared.


JM: Now that you've been added on to the Shaming of the True gig, I'm assuming you've had a few rehearsals with Mike and Nick. Where do you think the genius in Kevin Gilbert's writing lies? True he has a wide range of influences he wears on his sleeve, but what tracks grabbed you and which ones are you looking forward to playing live?

BB: Kevin Gilbert in three words: Melodies, melodies, and melodies! No matter what kind of feel he's going for on any on specific track - and as you can tell, he's a master of several - there's always a really strong melody to drive the song home. I also have a lot of respect for the individual sounds he got to tape, and how he combined them to get a very specific and cohesive overall track sound. You'll notice that "Best Laid Plans" sounds like it could be right off of a mid-70s Elton John record. Well, that's because he got the exactly correct piano and electric guitar sounds. "Imagemaker" sounds like a Peter Gabriel type of tune because a) he inflected his own vocal with that kind of delivery; b) he used a gated delay effect on the vocal that emulated the production perfectly. He does that on every track in some way; some are subtler, while others are obvious. But it always feels like the right thing. He made excellent choices in the studio in practically every respect. And even his pop tunes have a weighty, epic quality to them.

Personally, I'm really looking forward to playing "Best Laid Plans" the most. I just love that song. "The Way Back Home" is another one. But they're all great songs.


JM: Now that you've gone through the on-line diary process, looking back on it, would you do that again? Seems like a lot of soul searching out in the open. It had obviously therapeutic ramifications and led to your novel. Are you going anywhere with that? It could be a pretty cool concept album if Mike got hold of it.

BB: I wouldn't change a thing. For every slightly uncomfortable moment, when someone recited something back to me that I'd written on the internet that perhaps I wasn't ready for, there were ten other positive moments, both personally and professionally, that made it all worth it. The Life Of Bryan, the original "web log" that preceded my current website, www.bryanbeller.com (which now contains the Life Of Bryan as an archive), first went online in late 1995. That was pretty early on in the game for that sort of thing, and I'm proud of that.

The novel will sit in my closet forever, and I don't feel a bit bad about that. Just the process of doing it improved my skills as a writer tenfold, and I learned a lot about myself while I was at it. You write what you read, they say, and I read probably twenty political columns a day. So it's no surprise that I feel most comfortable in the column format, as opposed to longer forms, where I ran into problems plot-wise. I feel that I still have a novel in me, maybe more than one. But it will be some time before I tackle that project again. It requires an incredible sacrifice of time, writing a novel. Working a full-time job, creating my first solo album, and playing bass for Keneally is quite enough for now. And no, I don't see the novel as anything worth considering in the form of a concept album - that would be just too self-centered, even for a maniacal egocentric such as myself.


JM: Is there anybody else out there you're keen on playing with? I can think of a few other guitarist who could benefit from your playing such as Steve Morse, Scott McGill or Robert Fripp Guitarcraft-influenced bands such the California Guitar Trio.

BB: I would just about die to play with Michael Landau or John Scofield. Their compositional tendencies, feel, and overall sound are where I'm at nowadays.


JM: Tell me how important chops are versus feel, since you've got a handle on both it seems?

BB: I assume you're asking from a playing standpoint as opposed to a compositional standpoint. My chops are passable, but compared to the people I get lumped in with sometimes, I don't feel I'm in the same league. One of the reasons I feel so comfortable in Keneally's band is that the music satisfies my desire to play complex music without having to play ungodly fast too often. Now, if you're talking about feel, and the ability to hear and quickly recognize complex tonalities and passages, in those areas I'm a lot more confident.


JM: Can you please give your take on Sluggo and what you think Mike was up to with that album?

BB: Sluggo was a transitional album. It fell somewhere between a Mike Keneally solo album and a more band-oriented effort. More than anything, it's the hardest-rocking record of them all. I think there was a lot of energy waiting to get out of his system, and it kind of exploded all over the place. Also, the way it was recorded - in between legs of a 16-month-long Steve Vai tour - led to a frantic nature that carries through the record. There's some heavy-duty playing all over it.


JM: Please include some feedback on your favorite songs, arrangements too.

BB: Well, "Why Am I Your Guy?" was my first initiation to experiment with bass distortion, something I'd been thinking about for a long time. It's really one long solo, but it's in a song context, which is a lot more comfortable for me than, say, "I, Drum-Running, Am Clapboard Bound," which featured a traditional bass solo over some extremely non-traditional changes. "Egg Zooming" was an over-the-top, two-bass-track, "can you top this?" form; "Cardboard Dog" was another exercise in long form and complicated passages. But my favorite from that record was, is, and continues to be "Voyage To Manhood." It's just so absurd, yet aggressive, and the bass sound is really raunchy. Now that I think of it, there's some really difficult stuff on that record.


JM: How difficult was it to take this on the road?

BB: It almost killed us. We did two successive six-week tours, four weeks apart, and the first was so low budget that it almost self-destructed before it even started. Then our road manager's father had a heart attack and I ended up tour managing a three-car caravan of eight people for a week, which didn't do my playing any favors. But the nights when we were on were pretty incredible. I look back on it now and listen to some of the audience recordings of that tour and say to myself, "How the hell did we do that?" That was true especially for some of the really out there stuff like "Looking For Nina" and "Vent". It was a ferocious, yet psychologically unstable band, and I'll leave it at that.


JM: What was it like for you to have a dot-com sponsor your tour? Pros? Cons?

BB: It wasn't a dot-com, actually - it was Full Sail School of all Media in Orlando, Florida, a very forward-thinking organization that was foolhardy enough to lend us a bus for the second of the two six-week tours. We were very enthusiastic about plugging them; it didn't feel like we were sucking nasty corporate tit or anything like that. They were utterly cool. It was just weird pulling up to some of the venues in the South, where a lot of people didn't know who we were, and we were playing these really low-level clubs, and there we were in this fancy bus with fresh coffee and fruit onboard.


JM: Can you please find a song you don't like to play at all in the Beer For Dolphins catalogue?

BB: The only one I can think of was a tune from one of the The Tar Tapes [mid-80s Keneally demos] CD's, called "Strange Impulse." It never really worked for me. But a lot of that was because of the execution. We didn't have the right kind of band to do it any justice. I really can't come up with anything else. Well, sometimes "Pretty Enough For Girls" annoys me because it's so damned hard to make sound good. But when it's right, I love it.


JM: How was Dancing different for you than Sluggo?

BB: Man, it was like a completely different universe. Sluggo was recorded in frantic spurts, while Dancing was done with the same band, in the same studio, over the course of four consecutive days. I had a chance to get really comfortable with my sound, my surroundings, and my sense of what belonged where in the tunes. It was the first time I ever really felt comfortable in the studio, to be honest.


JM: Do you have any further plans with the Zappa offspring?

BB: I don't think so, but it's really not up to me anyway. If Dweezil called me tomorrow to do a session, I'd have no problem doing it. But I think he's moved on to other things.


JM: How is the current tour going? That first piece you played from Hat in Beaverton was a monster. Any good parties?

BB: Well, the current tour is already over as I write this, but the musical performances were really special. It's always special when Mike and I can get together and perform his music in its most distilled essence. The speed of communication between us can really take off in the acoustic duo setting. But no good parties this time around. It just wasn't that kind of tour. Maybe next time.


JM: How is the new Mike Keneally Band material materializing? What is your role?

BB: As of this writing (11/02), we're slated to go into the studio next month and record the first new Keneally band record in nearly three years. We've got a lot of material already worked up, and we've been playing it live for a few months. So I have a pretty good idea of what's coming, and it's going to be a really cool representation of the Quartet, which is Keneally, myself, Nick D'Virgilio on drums and Rick Musallam on guitar. As for my role, it's the same as always. I'm just the bass player, with some occasional arranging contributions. That's the way I like it in this project.


JM: Who would you like to play in an ensemble dream band: 4 piece: g/b/keys/drums? Pick your line-up and tell us why.

BB: I don't really have one, because there are different "dream bands" for different things. I will tell you about dream bands I'd like to be in, because I'm self-centered that way. I'd like to be in one with John Scofield on guitar, George Duke on keys and Toss Panos on drums. Another would be Michael Landau on guitar, Abe Laboriel, Jr. on drums, and Don Grolnick (R.I.P.) on Hammond B3. Steve Vai, Joe Travers on drums and myself would be a dream trio for just flat-out rock. The Keneally thing has been an evolving dream band in a lot of ways. I love the current quartet, but I also appreciated the 7-piece band for totally different reasons. How's that for a rambling non-answer?


JM: Are there any parting comments you'd like to impart?

BB: None really, other than I've been blessed to be able to play with those I already have. Everyone I've played with has drawn something different from me, something I didn't think I was capable of doing. You have to get in over your head; that's the secret to growing.


JM: Can you convince Mike to bring back the beer mugs please?

BB: Throw in some seed capital and I'll think about it.

Click here to see the interview posted at the Progressive Ears website.

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© 2004 Jeff Melton. All rights reserved.