Summer Time Jazz Festival

Summer Time Jazz Festival: Concert Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Victor Wootan- memorable performance!
By Natasa Tepavcevic
Belgrade, July 12, (Serbia Today) - Last Thursday, July 9, in Sava Center, Belgrade audience had an opportunity to listen three of the world's great jazz bassists!
Big names such as Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Victor Wootan attracted hundreds and hundreds of fans, not just from Belgrade and Serbia, but also this big event was reason for many people from region to come and enjoy real jazz attraction: the greatest bass musician today! They are simply bass acrobats, heroes of electric bass! The crowds in energetic applauses were drawing out the dialogue between them and audience. The audience were on their feet clapping and cheering all the time during the concert. Sava Centar had more then 900 visitors that night.
Dream team Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller and Victor Wootan for first time performed together in October 2007. The occasion was a concert in honor of the award, which Stanley Clarke has got for life-work in the art field of playing bass guitar.
At the beginning of 2008 they entered the studio and recorded the CD entitled “Thunder”. During the same year they started summer and autumn tour. Since then, concerts performances of three living bass legends and their supporting band were all over the world. Wherever they have a concert, they simply burn the mind of audience. Considering that, their promotion of album is continued in 2009, so Summer Time Jazz Festival was one of the stations.
Last year, Belgrade had extraordinary opportunity to listen Marcus Miller band, but this time master of electric bass accompanied by no less than two giants of the same instrument: Stanley Clarke and Victor Wootan.
It was enlightenment for many, including myself, I felt like I was in jazz heaven.
For people who are not familiar with these names, as they represent themselves through the solo jam sessions during the concert, in follows lines I would like and I have honor to introduce them separately.
Marcus Miller is a Grammy Award-winning jazz musician, composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. Miller is perhaps best known as a bassist, working with trumpeter Miles Davis, singer Luther Vandross, and saxophonist David Sanborn as well as a prolific solo career. Miller is classically trained as a clarinetist and also plays keyboards, saxophone and guitar. Miller's proficiency on his main instrument, the bass guitar, is generally well-regarded. Not only has Miller been involved in the continuing development of a technique known as "slapping", particularly his "thumb" technique, but his fretless bass technique has also served as an inspiration to many, and has taken the fretless bass into musical situations and genres previously unexplored with the electric bass of any description. The influences of some of the previous generation of electric bass players, such as Larry Graham, Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius, are audible in Miller's playing.
As a composer, Miller wrote "Tutu" for Miles Davis, a piece that defined Davis' career in the late 1980s. He also composed "Chicago Song" for David Sanborn and co-wrote "'Til My Baby Comes Home", "It's Over Now", "For You To Love", and "The Power of Love" for Luther Vandross. Miller also wrote "Da Butt", which was featured in Spike Lee's "School Daze".
Stanley Clarke is an American jazz musician and composer known for his innovative and influential work on double bass and bass guitar as well as for his numerous film and television scores.
During the 1970s he joined the jazz fusion group Return to Forever led by pianist Chick Corea. The group became one of the most important fusion groups and released several albums that achieved both mainstream popularity and plaudits from critics. Clarke also started his solo career in the early 1970s and released a number of albums under his own name. His well-known solo album is School Days (1976), which, along with Jaco Pastorius's self-titled debut, is one of the influential solo bass recordings in fusion history. His albums Stanley Clarke (1974) and Journey to Love (1975) are also notable.
Clarke has long been associated with Alembic basses, and the much of his recorded output has been produced on Alembic instruments, particularly a dark-wood-colored custom bass in the Series I body style.
In the late 1970s, Clarke was playing Rick Turner's first graphite neck on his Alembic "Black Beauty" bass, and he decided to have an all composite bass made. He commissioned designer/luthier Tom Lieber to design and build this bass, having purchased one of Lieber's Spider grinder basses in 1979. In 1980 Lieber and Clarke formed the Spellbinder Corporation and produced a limited run of fifty Spellbinder basses. One left-handed bass was built as a gift from Stanley to Paul McCartney. After the run the molds were destroyed. In 2007 Clarke once again teamed up with Lieber and Rick Tuner to reform the Spellbinder Corp. and produce a limited run of 125 of the Spellbinder Bass II, which Clarke is currently playing on the RTF reunion tour. Clarke has also played a Ken Smith BT Custom, and a German made Löwenherz Tenor Bass.
Since the 80s, Stanley has been turning his energy to film and television scoring. He is currently scoring the ABC Family Channel series “Lincoln Heights” in addition to writing the show's theme song. In October 2006 Clarke was honored with Bass Player magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award. Bassists Marcus Miller and Victor Wooten presented the award at a ceremony at New York City's Millennium Broadway Hotel. A multi-Grammy award winner, Stanley was the first “Jazzman of the Year” for Rolling Stone magazine, won Music Award - Best Bassist from Playboy magazine for 10 straight years, and is a member of Guitar Player magazine's “Gallery of Greats.” He was honored with the key to the city of Philadelphia and put his hands in cement as a 1999 inductee into Hollywood's “Rock Walk” on Sunset Boulevard. In 2004 he was featured in Los Angeles magazine as one of the 50 most influential people.
Victor Wooten is an American bass player. He is known for his technical virtuosity and his skills as musician, composer, and author. Wooten has won the "Bass Player of the Year" award from Bass Player magazine three times in a row, and was the first person to win the award more than once. In addition to a solo career and collaborations with various artists, Wooten has been the bassist for Béla Fleck and the Flecktones since the group's formation in 1988