Making the Low Notes: A Life in Music

A bass player navigates his way through the muddy waters of Chicago’s music scene

Bill Harrison chronicles his journey from bumbling music student to successful professional bass player in late twentieth-century Chicago. Told with a mixture of wry humor and hard-won insight, Making the Low Notes gives readers an insider’s peek into the prosaic life of a working musician. Harrison describes periods of camaraderie, disappointment, pain, and joy as he toils in venues as divergent as bowling alleys, jazz clubs, recording studios, hotels, orchestra pits, and concert halls. He shares the stage with jazz greats, including Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Clark Terry, Bunky Green, and Max Roach. Along the way, the bassist struggles to reconcile the dissonance between his desire to be heard and his impulse to hide silently in the shadows.

Bill Harrison worked as a professional bassist in Chicago for four decades. He performed with jazz luminaries Clark Terry, James Moody, Bunky Green, Max Roach, Woody Herman's Thundering Herd, Dizzy Gillespie, and many others. His theatrical credits include Wicked, The Lion King, Always Patsy Cline, The Visit, Bounce, Turn of the Century, and Billy Elliot. Bill's writing has been published in After Hours, Allium, Counseling Today, The Intermezzo, Performink, The Sandpiper, Sledgehammer, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. He has a private psychotherapy practice in Chicago, where he lives with his poet/therapist wife, Nina Corwin, and a naughty Bengal named Jazzy.