Sad news today about Hugh Hopper, the bassist and composer who made his name with the ground-breaking group Soft Machine; Jazzwise magazine has an article on his death at aged 64, announced in Britain yesterday. One of the first really prominent musicians to apply a jazz style to the electric bass (“[Hopper] has Jimmy Garrison’s bass down perfect,” Robert Christgau observed in a review of Soft Machine’s 1970 Third), Hopper was also an under-recognized tunesmith, as Material’s cover of his composition “Memories” (with a then-unknown Whitney Houston, of all people, singing lead) testifies.
I had the pleasure and privilege of seeing Hopper improvise with Fred Frith and Chris Cutler at The Stone in December 2006, one of the many great shows curated that month by my pals at Downtown Music Gallery. I wrote about Alive In Paris 1970, a terrific Soft Machine concert film on DVD, here.
Hopper will be missed.
