Question: what will you achieve over a lifetime of playing bass?

When our team here at Bass Player HQ put our heads together a while back and decided which bassists should receive BP’s coveted Lifetime Achievement Award this year, we came up with a long, long list of names. Even though we’ve been giving these awards out since 2000, the occasional year out for publishing or pandemic reasons aside, there is still a huge number of bass players who deserve this recognition.

In the end, though, we narrowed it down to three bona fide legends of our instrument, and added a new award category while we were at it — the ‘Rising Star’ award, given to a bass player who may not have many decades as a professional behind them just yet, but who is pushing our community forward anyway. We want to commend and celebrate bassists with vision, young or old, and to acknowledge the fact that great bass didn’t only take place in the distant past. Please join me and the BP staff in congratulating all four of our cover stars Marcus Miller, Gail Ann Dorsey, John Taylor and Charles Berthoud for their incredible talent, hard work and creativity.

In this issue we also hang out with Tal Wilkenfeld and Freekbass, we look at Queen’s bass history before John Deacon (yes, you read that right) and we road-test a range of stunning bass gear. As for our state-of-the-art bass educators and technical advisors, I feel extremely privileged to head up a team as talented as they are. One day I hope they’ll get their own Lifetime Achievement awards... and on that note, with the right vision and attitude, you could earn one too. Why not?