With over 25 years of experience as a touring musician and composer and over 700 albums to his credit, producer and bassist Bill Laswell has collaborated with some of the most illustrious names in music across all genres and boundaries, including Buckethead, Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger, Laurie Anderson, Pharoah Sanders, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, The Last Poets, Buddy Miles, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Afrika Bambaataa, Tony Williams, Public Image Ltd., Peter Gabriel and countless others. He has also organized and produced recordings with master musicians from around the world, having logged extensive travel in Morocco and West Africa, India, Japan, Cuba, Australia, Brazil, and numerous other locations throughout Asia, Africa and South America. In the United States and abroad, his name has become synonymous with a commitment to creativity, integrity and daring -- whether in the recording studio or on stage -- that has earned him the respect (and often lifelong friendship) of all the artists with whom he has worked. Bill Laswell was born in Salem, Illinois in 1955 and fell into music originally for social rather than aesthetic reasons; he has often been quoted as saying "a band was like a gang." He started on guitar but soon switched to electric bass, and in his earliest groups played soul and funk music inspired by the likes of James Brown and Johnny "Guitar" Watson. ...show more

With over 25 years of experience as a touring musician and composer and over 700 albums to his credit, producer and bassist Bill Laswell has collaborated with some of the most illustrious names in music across all genres and boundaries, including Buckethead, Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger, Laurie Anderson, Pharoah Sanders, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, The Last Poets, Buddy Miles, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Afrika Bambaataa, Tony Williams, Public Image Ltd., Peter Gabriel and countless others. He has also organized and produced recordings with master musicians from around the world, having logged extensive travel in Morocco and West Africa, India, Japan, Cuba, Australia, Brazil, and numerous other locations throughout Asia, Africa and South America. In the United States and abroad, his name has become synonymous with a commitment to creativity, integrity and daring -- whether in the recording studio or on stage -- that has earned him the respect (and often lifelong friendship) of all the artists with whom he has worked. Bill Laswell was born in Salem, Illinois in 1955 and fell into music originally for social rather than aesthetic reasons; he has often been quoted as saying "a band was like a gang." He started on guitar but soon switched to electric bass, and in his earliest groups played soul and funk music inspired by the likes of James Brown and Johnny "Guitar" Watson.

In the early '70s he toured the "chitlin circuit" with cover bands that played Al Green, O'Jays and Meters material, while back home he was constantly making pilgrimages to Detroit for live performances of groups as diverse as The Stooges, The MC5 and Parliament-Funkadelic -- sometimes all on the same stage. Laswell was deeply into Black music but was also absorbing the tenets of protopunk and rock; the rhythmic assurance and aggressiveness that are the cornerstone of virtually all his work have their genesis in this early training. Early exposure to the music of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and Miles Davis also sparked in him a devoted interest in improvisation and the possibilities of real interaction with other musicians. Laswell eventually landed in New York in 1979 and almost immediately set out to change the climate of live and recorded music.

He became an integral fixture in the growing downtown avant garde scene (dubbed "no wave" music by the press) with John Zorn, James Blood Ulmer, Fred Frith, Olu Dara, Billy Bang and many others, and launched a recording career that began with Brian Eno's On Land and continued with the Material collective he co-founded with keyboardist Michael Beinhorn and drummer Fred Maher, as well as other groups such as Massacre (with Fred Frith) and Daevid Allen's "avant-fusion" band Gong. By 1984, after only five years in New York, Laswell had reached the first of many pinnacles in his career by producing the first two of three revolutionary electronic albums for Herbie Hancock -- the hip-hop fusion classic Future Shock, which yielded the worldwide dancefloor and MTV hit "Rockit," and the Grammy-winning follow-up Sound System. (Perfect Machine, the third of the triumvirate, would follow in 1988.) Future Shock was a monumental foray into hip-hop, which in 1983 was for the most part a self-contained and even consciously guarded movement. The album featured turntable improvisations by Grandmixer D.ST, who was in on the ground floor of the founding of Afrika Bambaataa's Universal Zulu Nation in the Bronx, and who later that year would perform live with Laswell's group Material at the Montreux Jazz Festival. ...show less