Born in 1940, Steve Swallow was raised in New York and first took private lessons on piano and trumpet before switching to the string bass at the age of eighteen. In 1960, he joined the Paul Bley Trio and featured also in the first sextet formed by George Russell. Swallow and Bley were also part of the innovative Jimmy Giuffre Trio and the Art Farmer Quartet. He subseÂquently played for Stan Getz and in Gary Burton's quartet. In 1970, he moved to live and write songs in Bolinas, California. He gave concerts in San Francisco, appearing with pianists Art Lande and Mike Nock. But in 1973, he returned to join Burton, and apart from the occasional interruption, has remained a loyal partner ever since. In the early sixties, Swallow belonÂged to the free jazz scene and in 1964 took the Down Beat critics' award for best new bass player. As the decade progressed - and particularly as a member of the Burton Quartet - he sought ways to combine elements from jazz, rock and country. With electronic backdrops becoming more and more the norm, Swallow often found himself obliged to amplify his bass instead of playing acoustically. He took up the electric bass guitar, and when he realised the different techniques required for each instrument were not compatible, he soon gave up using the acoustic string bass altogether. As Gary Burton recalls: "He worked on playing bass guitar using a pick - a method used by relatively few in the jazz world - and this picking owed more to the technique associated with guitar playing. He plays according to his own set of rules, and as a

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