Jake Wolf

Some players spend a career learning to be heard. Jake Wolf has spent one learning what happens underneath. He came up outside Boston, went west to Olympia to study audio engineering and music production, then landed in San Francisco, where he took lessons from Michael Manring and Kai Eckhardt and enrolled at the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music. That last detail explains a lot. North Indian classical music teaches you that the drone is not the background of the piece; it is the piece, and everything else is a decoration hung on it. Wolf has carried that understanding into nearly thirty years on the electric bass, six strings and fretless included, and it shows in the way his lines behave: patient, harmonically curious, willing to hold a single note long enough for the room to lean toward it.

He has lived in Asheville since 2004, and the roster of what he plays reads like a cross-section of the whole regional scene. There is The Billy Sea, the trio he founded with slide guitarist Billy Cardine and percussionist River Guerguerian, where Appalachian roots music runs headlong into Bengali folk melody and comes out the other side sounding inevitable. There is Dirty Logic, eleven people arranged around the impossible geometry of Steely Dan charts. There is work with the Juan Benavides Group, Billy Jonas, the Eric Congdon Trio, and the Chuck Lichtenberger Collective, plus sessions, sideman calls, and a long-running gear column at Bass Musician Magazine that has made him something of a regional authority on tone. He also founded the Asheville Bass Hang, a free semi-annual gathering that pulls players from across the Southeast into one room to talk shop, which tells you something about how he thinks: the low end is a community position, not a solitary one.