His work has unsurprisingly landed in many different places, although there are certain labels synonymous with his meandering career. Indeed, on moving to New York and enthusiastically engaging with the experimental music community, Laswell ended up working with Eno both on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and Ambient 4 (On Land) in the early ’80s.Īs well as wild, noisy ventures fuelled by the spirit of free jazz, over the years Laswell engaged with the early stages of hip-hop, demonstrated an affinity for ambient, tackled drum & bass in the mid ’90s and conjured up exotic world music. Dub has a sizeable presence in all manner of Laswell-affiliated recordings, as do traditional African and Eastern sounds, and this outer-national instinct quite rightly places him in parallel with the likes of Brian Eno. The seminal ‘electric period’ of Miles Davis is often cited as a looming influence on Laswell’s work, and jazz-fusion reverberates through the meandering catalogues of his many different groups and projects, but at heart his significant impact on modern music has risen from a desire to fuse together previously disparate forms. Since he first hit his stride in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the New York-based producer has infected a dizzying amount of different music with his unique touch, both as an artist in his own right and working the faders for scores of others.Īs a musician and band member he’s most readily thought of as a bassist, and it was with this instrument he first stepped out in R&B outfits as a teenager.
You could be digging around in any number of niches of alternative music and come across the name Bill Laswell. From downtown NYC to working with Herbie Hancock, Fela Kuti, and Iggy Pop, tackling early hip hop, ambient, drum & bass and dub with a daring free jazz spirit along the way, Bill Laswell is a polymath of the alternative underground.
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