Darren Michaels: Cumulo

So a few days ago I went and checked my mail and I recieved my first cd to review submitted by Darren Michaels, an up and coming artist from right here in Atlanta and I was very excited to give it a good listen! The cd itself looked very cool because of the artwork which was mostly paintings that Darren had done himself, a very nice touch! The cd is titled "Cumulo" and I was suprised to find out that it's a bass album! Five of the tracks on the album including the first and last tracks were completely solo bass and nothing else while others were bass and vocals and bass, drum loops, and vocals. I have heard of maybe one or two other bands that have tried to just have bass, drums, and vocals but failed miserably to sound remotely talented and musical but I was quite surprised when I listened to "Cumulo" because Darren is a very talented bassist and composer. I had the opportunity to interview Darren and ask him a few questions about him and his music and he seems to be a very nice and intelligent person.
His influences go across the board from classical music to alternative rock, to pop, jazz, and Motown. It's no suprise that he is as talented as he is because he is 34 years old and has been playing the bass guitar for just over 16 years. I had to ask him what made him choose to do an album with just bass and he said that when he began playing bass, he immediately began composing music such as this and that the bass has such a broad voice and responds well to mimicking other instruments. He also wants for more bass players to explore the solo side of the instrument so that someday a bass player would be viewed like someone with an acoustic guitar that you can pretty much assume that he or she can play a song without accompaniment and make it sound like music.
I enjoyed his techniques hearing more than one bass track and harmonics and other cool techniques being used and asked him what they were and he told me that he mainly plays in open tunings and that one of his basses has detuners for all four strings which are little levers that you can flip that change the pitch of the open string that way each string may have two seperate tunings which is what banjo players, acoustic guitarists, and upright bass players have been doing for a long time and Michael Manring is most notibly know for this in the bass world.
When I asked him what his songs were about he simply replied "Clouds" which I found to be pretty interesting. I asked him if he plays any other instruments besides bass and will they be featured on his next album and he told me that he does play other instruments such as the keys, harmonica, tuba and Ukelele but he plans to keep his next album still "very bass centric" because he is not finished saying things there. He is currently booking summer tour dates which can be found on his website at http://darrenmichaelsbass.com and also he offers guitar lessons in Atlanta at the "Atlanta Bass Gallery" so if you are interested in bass lessons from a very talented bassist you may contact him through his website. If you would like to get a copy of his album it can be purchased here:

Make sure you check him out and give him a good listen because it is a quite origional and unique expierence!


If you would like to purchase single mp3 files of his songs you can get them from the following links:

Teach My Eyes to See Only the SilverBlue