Darryl Jones: jazz cat or rock star? Some pigeonhole the 62-year-old as a jazz cat, most likely because his first big professional gig was with Miles Davis in 1983. Others say rock star, because for the past 30 years, he's held down the bass chair with the Rolling Stones. Jones doesn't even know the answer himself.
“I straddle the fence,” he told Bass Player . “Once I was playing with Miles at a festival with the Modern Jazz Quartet, and one of those guys came up to me and said, ‘I really don't like rock music, but I like the way you play rock.’ “Another time, I was recording with guitarist Carlos Alomar, who had played with David Bowie for a long time, and the guys at the session were all rock guys.
At the end of the session, one of them came up to me and said, 'Listen, man, I don't dig jazz, but I like the way you play jazz.’ “In a way, I've been this wandering musician, moving from one idiom to the other, and I've been influenced by all the people I've worked with.” And Jones has worked with a lot of people.
Over the last 30-plus years, the Chicago-born bassist has graced the stage or the studio with Sting, Madonna, Peter Gabriel, and Eric Clapton, among others. But the whole rock-star thing truly took root in 1993, when he replaced Bill Wyman in the Rolling Stones. Back in August 2005, in the midst of preparations for the Stones' four-month cross-country trek for the A Bigger Bang tour, the dreadlocked, baritone-voiced bassman took time out to reflect on.
