With very few exceptions, among which one can find Hawkins (Reference Hawkins2002, Reference Hawking and Scott2009) and Hawkins and Niblock (Reference Hawking and Niblock2011), popular musicology has largely neglected the area of instrumental performance practice. Per Elias Drabløs brings his contribution to this field with his The Quest for the Melodic Electric Bass, at least as far as the use of the electric bass between 1951 and 1982 is concerned. The author, a professional bass player himself, provides an analysis of the rise and fall of a performance practice which he terms ‘melodic electric bass’. According to Drabløs this practice, which is identified and defined throughout the book, took over in the early ‘60s, i.e. about a decade after the Fender Precision (the first electric bass guitar to have wide distribution) was introduced in the market. The new Fender bass was a game changer. The double bass ‘was hard to hear, hard to play, and hard to carry around’ and it was ‘generally meant to be sensed rather than actually listened to’; on the other hand, ‘when the Fender Precision entered the market … a new moment was at hand – here was a bass one could listen to’ (p. 14, emphasis Drabløs). If in the early days of the electric bass players provided simple accompaniments (root, fifth or walking lines), the beginning of the 1960s saw performers breaking with this convention and playing the instrument ‘more capriciously’ (p. 15).

The author's methodology draws upon that of the American musician and scholar Richard J. Ripiani (Reference Ripiani2006), who used the Billboard lists as a source of R&B hit songs to analyse. Although the research aims of Ripiani and Drabløs differ, the latter founds his study on the number one hits of each week in the ‘Best Sellers in Store’, ‘Top 100’ and ‘Hot 100’ Billboard charts from 1951 to 1982. This represents a strong and a weak point at the same time. To be sure, if it is true that by choosing the songs which made it to the highest position of the music charts one is certain to address the popularity (in terms of sales and radio play) of a certain style, genre or artist, it is also true that this poses at least two limitations that slightly weaken Drabløs's otherwise interesting research. The first limit is geographical, since the Billboard charts reflect what happened on American soil. This of course does not mean that only American artists are considered; it means, though, that the American market alone is considered. The second limitation concerns the choice of the songs to take into consideration: by choosing almost exclusively the number ones, Drabløs rules out a large portion of equally valid and representative songs which for several reasons did not have the privilege of being listed at the top of the Billboard lists. Unfortunately the author only partially addresses these limits (‘I would argue that the selection gives a fair indication of what bass playing was like during that period’, p. 28).

The Quest for the Melodic Electric Bass is organised into three parts: ‘Setting the Pace’, ‘The Melodic Electric Bass: Establishing Style as Performance’ and ‘Toward a Performance of Aesthetic’. The initial five chapters serve primarily as a big introduction, defining elements such as ‘popular music’, ‘style’ and ‘genre’, and providing a good framework. Chapter 6 deals closely with musical analysis, and represents quite a substantial part of the book with its 66 pages – about a third of the whole publication. It is in this chapter where the characteristics which Drabløs identifies as specific to the melodic bass style are outlined and discussed. This investigation is done by employing some of the points introduced by Phillip Tagg (Reference Tagg1982) in his analytical model, and leads to the isolation of 20 designated features.

Another piece of information in support of Drabløs's thesis is given in Chapter 7, where the author states that ‘studio players in America and the electric bass players in bands that followed in the wake of the British R&B boom all played a substantial part in setting upon the bass's new role in popular music’ (p. 143). Chapter 8 focuses on four case studies of bass players who started the new trend of ‘melodic bass playing’. I have found the choice of these four performers slightly confusing, because in the first chapter (p. 15) the names of the key players in the melodic electric bass are James Jamerson, Carol Kaye, Paul McCartney and Jack Bruce. In Chapter 8 (as well as in Chapter 3), though, Jack Bruce is substituted with Alan Spenner. Leaving this hiccup aside, the chapter offers interesting insights into these performers' playing style, techniques, equipment, biographical details and analysis of some of the songs in which they played.

The book concludes with an analysis of the likely reasons for the decline of this ‘unorthodox’ bass practice in the late 1970s, namely the so-called disco wave, which saw an increasing use of the keyboard bass and of the sequencer; the rising status of the producer over that of the musicians; and the advent of the early slap bass techniques, which ‘utilized mostly octave figures and were therefore easily adapted to the disco era's bass patterns’ (p. 190). As a consequence of these three events, Drabløs argues, ‘the bass in popular music shifted from an independent and mobile voice to a source of musematic repeating figures’ (p. 191), since they gave rise to a more repetitive plying style.

The Quest for the Melodic Electric Bass will please both the musicologist, thanks to its numerous transcriptions and analysis, its rigorous methodology, and the academically informed tone, and the electric bass player/enthusiast, who will find a rich examination of some of the greatest bass players and songs of all times from the perspective of a bass player. Overall, the few weaknesses of this study are largely compensated for by the huge amount of useful information in support of the clear and convincing thesis that this book conveys.