recorded history of the double bass duo in creative music:

1971: manfred eicher asks david holland and barre phillips to record for his new label, ecm (incidently, the young visual artist vincent golia, then the rommate of holland, is asked to draw the cover and uses the money to buy a soprano saxopone!)

1979: peter kowald begins his three part project by recording with barre 1980 french bassists beb guerin and francios make a great lp for nato 1981 kowald records with barry guy

1982 kowald records with maarten van retgren altena (the best lp of the three)

1986 kowald records with jöelle léandré for his "duos;europa" project

1989 barre phillips and barry guy make "arcus"

1994/95 barre makes 2 cds with japanese genius motoharu yoshizawa

1994 austrians werner dafeldecker and uli fuessenegger begin their long standing colaboration

1998 jöelle makes a cd with japanese virtuoso tetsu saitoh

1998 jöelle and william parker record ³contrabasses² (what is most amazing is how they don¹t sound so different!)

1999 tetsu aoki and malichai favors make a cd

2000 kowald records with damon smith

2000 marks dresser and helias record "marks brothers"

unreleased: william parker/kowald, bertram turetzky/phillips, turetzky/dresser

you can see that barre and holland pointed the way, "this can happen.."

then kowald, "there is a lot of potential here".

then in a way the next step is the long term colaborations with dafeldecker/fussenegger and dresser/ helais saying "we can work this way long term.."

i belive there still is a lot of music in the bass duo, and it can move in many directions.

damon smith