Rick Laird

Rick Laird was the quiet member of the Mahavishnu Orchestra -- while John McLaughlin, Jan Hammer, Jerry Goodman, and Billy Cobham each regularly tried to outdo his bandmates in speed and volume, Laird provided the anchor to the group's sound. Not that he didn't occasionally get the chance to step out in front for a brief solo spot, but he seldom broke his playing down into anything anywhere near the seeming 32nd or 64th notes that McLaughlin et al. sometimes aimed for. Even before he was a member of that short-lived best-selling jazz-rock fusion group, however, Laird was one of the busiest and most respected jazz bassists of his generation. Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1941, Laird grew up in a musical household -- his mother was a gifted pianist, fluent in everything from impressionist classical pieces to boogie-woogie, while his father played the ukulele. He showed a strong interest in music from an early age and was soon learning chord symbols and experimenting on the piano and the ukulele -- his formal attempt at learning the piano didn't work out, however, and he felt similarly stymied when he took up the guitar. Instead, he listened to lots of music, especially the work of Erroll Garner, George Shearing, and Louis Armstrong, thanks to his mother, and for a time he tried his hand at the drums. His parents were divorced in the mid-'50s and Laird moved to New Zealand with his mother. It was there that he took up the guitar again, and also began discovering the new jazz sounds of the period. According to a 1980 article by Arnie Berle in Guitar Player magazine, it was Ray Brown's playing, on a record by Oscar Peterson, that led Laird to start playing bass parts on his guitar. He ended up taking up the upright bass on his own, and was a good enough self-starter to quickly...