Liberatore
locally in several bands when she can, including Catfight with singer Teal Collins, and a new group, Walking Mirrors, that Mark Nelson formed last year.
“She makes it all so easy,” Nelson says. “Except for her schedule. She is just so damn busy.”
`An epiphany'
At San Rafael High, she was playing the clarinet in music classes and not really liking it that much when the head of the music program asked her if she wanted to play bass in the school's jazz band after the regular bass player graduated.
“I was like, `Oh, yeah,'” she recalls. “First of all, the jazz band was super cool. I loved the music. I loved what they were doing. They were a top-notch jazz band and traveled all over. I also loved the idea of playing this stringed amplified instrument. So I immediately began studying and subsequently fell in love with it.”
While at UC Berkeley, she was what she calls “a hobby bass player.” She played in the unaccredited UC Jazz program, took a Latin jazz class, did some work in small combos and big bands, and played in funk groups on the side.
“So I was always playing bass, even before I made that leap,” she says.
The leap, jumping from becoming a law student to a working musician, was inspired by what she describes as “an epiphany” she had after studying Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary in a class on the rhetoric of the counterculture.
“I came home, started playing my bass, the sun burst through the clouds and I thought, `I'm not supposed to be a lawyer. I'm supposed to be a bass player,'” she remembers. “And that was a totally terrifying prospect because I was pretty good at my law studies and a mediocre hobbyist on my bass work.”
After graduating with a
bachelor's degree in rhetoric with an emphasis on legal discourse, she felt the need to continue her musical education and moved to Los Angeles.
“I moved to L.A. because I was kind of lost, actually, to be honest,” she says. “I was sort of directionless, which I think happens to some people after they graduate.”
While taking some music classes and playing in jazz ensembles, she began collecting music school pamphlets, poring over them at night. She thought she had found what she was looking for when she went to an open house at the Musicians Institute, a college for contemporary music in Hollywood.
“I was like, oh my God, you can study the bass lines of Jaco Pastorius and the bass lines of John Paul Jones, then you can have a theory class,” she recalls. “I was completely blown away.”
The open house ended with a drawing for a year's free tuition at the school. She was hoping against hope that they would draw her name and was crushed when they didn't. But instead of being discouraged,
the setback only deepened her resolve to make music her life and career.
“I was devastated, but it was at that moment when the epiphany came full circle,” she says. “I was like, OK I have to do this or I'm never going to be happy. Music has chosen me. I can sit here and deny it, but it's not going to go away.”
Back to Marin
Unable to afford tuition, she decided against taking out a student loan, knowing that a fledgling musician would be hardpressed to pay it back. So she canceled a lease on a place to live in L.A. and returned to Marin, moving in with her mother. Her plan was to work as a bartender and save enough money for tuition at the Musicians Institute.
As it turned out, she began sitting in with bands at the Fourth Street Tavern in San Rafael and subsequently met rock bassist Uriah Duffy, who gave her his gig with a flamenco speed metal band when he went on tour with the English hard rock band Whitesnake. She went on
to join the all-female Led Zeppelin tribute band Zepparella, touring with the group for seven years.
“One gig turned into two and two gigs turned into four and within a year I was living the life of a gigging musician, so it didn't make sense for me to drop that because I had a ton of momentum,” she says. “I never went back. Part of me says, oh I wish I had gone to school, but I kept gigging and here I am 15 years later.”
She may not have gone to music school, but she has enough practical experience and has studied enough on her own to be a popular bass teacher with a roster of students and to write a book on how to craft bass lines. Teaching got her through the pandemic, but she's relished returning to the road, playing shows again for live audiences.
“Touring is part of my lifestyle and I love it,” she says. “I've set my life up to accommodate that. I don't have kids, I don't have pets right now. I can see wanting to be out on the road for another 10 years and then make a shift.”
Traditionally, the bass and drums are a band's rhythm section, playing beside each other behind the lead singer and lead instruments. Their job is to set the tempo and create the groove. But as her star rises, Saris is at the point in her career when that's no longer enough to satisfy her growing creativity. She's done some backup singing with other groups and is beginning to step to the front and sing the songs she's writing for the new band she's formed under her own name.
“I love the supportive role of the bass, and I'm comfortable just hanging in the back with the drummer. It's probably one of my favorite places to be,” she says.
“But the truth is I have songs inside of me, that live in me and that I want to play. And I think that's more the impetus than being a `front person.' That's a new role that I need to step into.”