Stephan Crump via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Stephan Crump:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Stephan Crump
- City: Brooklyn, NY
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Memphis, Tennessee
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Memphis-bred, Grammy-nominated, Echo Award-winning bassist/composer Stephan Crump is an active bandleader with twelve critically-acclaimed album releases in addition to numerous film scoring contributions. Known for transforming his instrument into a speaking entity of magnetic pull, his focus on creative instrumental music has led to collaborations with many of the leading lights of his generation.
Transcending barriers of genre, Crump has performed and recorded with a diverse range of musicians, from Portishead's Dave McDonald, The Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano, to Patti Austin, Jim Campilongo, Jorma Kaukonen, Lucy Kaplansky, Big Ass Truck, Sonny Fortune, and late blues legend Johnny Clyde Copeland. Currently, he can be heard as a long-standing member of Vijay Iyer Trio and Sextet, Jen Chapin Band, Ches Smith Trio, Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet, Liberty Ellman Sextet, Secret Keeper (with Mary Halvorson), his own Rosetta Trio, as well as groups with Kris Davis, Ingrid Laubrock, Cory Smythe, Eric McPherson, Mat Maneri, and Okkyung Lee.
Stephan comes from a family of architects, sculptors, painters, storytellers, musicians, civic leaders, and craftsmen. He was raised in music and the arts by his Parisian mother, an amateur pianist, and his Memphian father, an architect, painter, and jazz drummer. After six years of classical piano study and two years with the alto saxophone, he got his first bass guitar at age thirteen and spent his high school years playing in rock and funk bands around Memphis. During the summers, he worked in the studio of his uncle, Stephen, a wood sculptor.
Crump received his Bachelor of Music degree from Amherst College, where he studied under Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Lewis Spratlin and was awarded the Sundquist Prize for performance and composition. It was at Amherst that he began his acoustic bass journey, with a focus on classical training that culminated in a year of study in Paris with Gary Karr-protégé Patrick Hardouineau. His jazz studies at Amherst included work with Max Roach, Frank Foster, and Ray Drummond.
Over the last decade, Stephan has made teaching a growing part of his mission. In addition to offering lessons in his Brooklyn home, he regularly visits conservatories and universities to coach ensembles, teach bassists, and offer to all musicians his “On Magnetism” masterclass, originally developed for a residency at the Banff Jazz and Creative Music workshop.
Crump launched his solo performance career as an invited artist at the 2009 International Society of Bassists conference and has since released several recordings documenting his duo collaborations with alto saxophonist Steve Lehman, pianist James Carney, and guitarist Mary Halvorson. His all-string Rosetta Trio, with Jamie Fox and Liberty Ellman, just completed their fourth album, and his Rhombal quartet, with Tyshawn Sorey, Ellery Eskelin, and Adam O’Farrill, recently released its eponymous debut.
He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two boys.
Stephan is an enthusiastic endorser of Velvet strings, Aguilar bass amplifiers, AMT acoustic bass microphones, and David Gage Czech Ease travel bass.
Contact Information
- Email: info@stephancrump.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://www.stephancrump.com/store
- ▶ Buy My Music 2 (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://stephancrump.bandcamp.com
- ▶ Twitter: crumbletones
- ▶ Instagram: crumbletones
- ▶ Website: http://www.stephancrump.com
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCqvrbwJtNYLNsNIh8GmVy-g
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
I strongly believe in and am increasingly dedicated to teaching, whether in a private lessons, group workshops, master classes, or ensemble coaching. From dealing with specific issues particular to the bass and its roles in various musical realms, to larger concepts on improvisation, composition, group interaction and development, and just music in general, I relish the the opportunity to share with the next generation of musicians some of the ideas and concepts I’ve learned and developed over the years. Whether in and around NYC or on the road at various conservatories and universities, it’s been enormously gratifying to make teaching a greater part of my mission, and a blessing to discover that what I have to offer can be illuminating and inspiring to others. Do get in touch if you’d like details on what I might bring to your program or to you as an individual.
Here are some of the places I’ve taught:
Indiana University, Penn State University, Kunst Uni Graz, International Society of Bassists Convention, Amherst College, Franklin & Marshall College, Banff International Workshop in Jazz & Creative Music, Harvard University, California Jazz Conservatory, Humboldt State University, University of Wisconsin, Carl Maria von Weber College of Music Dresden, Sibelius Academy Helsinki, University of Memphis, Norwegian Academy of Music Oslo, University of Northern Iowa...
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
