"You
have to pick up The Bass, as Mingus called his, with audible capitals,
and think of the slow years the wood spent as a tree, which might
well have been enough for wood, and think of the skill the bassmaker
carried without great thought of it from home to the shop and back
for decades, and know what bassists before you have played, and
know how much of this is stored in The Bass like energy in a spring
and know how much you must coax out. How easy it would be, instead,
to pull a sword from a stone. But what's inside the bass wants out."
(William Matthews, 1995)
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