Instead of using the same music for every stanza, some composers placed variations of a melody over a repeated, steadily moving bass line.
So I felt like there was a need for something different, and something where it had that kind of moving bass line that I knew Trevor could play.
He treats everything lyrically, not just melodies but slow-moving bass lines and hidden inner voices.
But there is no other pianist today who can colour Schubert's harmonies as bewitchingly as Lupu does, making the closing bars of the sonata's slow movement seem so radiant, and its bass lines move so eloquently.
But his bass lines moved through all the music as a nonstop, limber countermelody: tumbling in triplets to echo a guitar line, plunging lightly into the hurly-burly of a rhythm change, humming along as a second opinion on a solo or a vocal line, nudging the music toward the next bend.
Mr. Mercer and Mr. Million shared rhythm-guitar strumming until Mr. Mercer moved to leads; Brenda Sauter played trusty bass lines; and Stanley Demeski, on trap drums, and Dave Weckerman, on drums and hand percussion, played strategically shifting beats.
In the reprise, a bass line moves in contrary motion, further tweaking the chords above.
Beneath her, a bass line moves down step by chromatic step, in a corkscrew motion that has been echoed, consciously or not, by everyone from Henry Purcell, in "Dido and Aeneas," to Bob Dylan, in "Ballad of a Thin Man".
The bass line moves forward and throws in the kind of circular fillip that would take ages to sample but that a practiced session player can do without thinking.
