In Memoriam: Rick Laird

 

Another video from Jazz Video Guy.  We fondly remember the late, great, Rick Laird, bassist from The Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Rick Laird played music from a young age and enrolled for guitar and piano lessons. He started playing jazz after moving to New Zealand at the age of 16 with his father. He played guitar in jam bands in New Zealand before buying an upright bass. After extensive touring in New Zealand he moved to Sydney, Australia, where he played with many top jazz musicians including Don Burrows.

Laird moved to England in 1962 and became house bassist at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, playing with many visiting musicians including Wes Montgomery and Sonny Stitt. With Buddy Rich, he played a residence at The Talk of the Town in 1969. From 1963 to 1964, Laird was at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He was recorded on the soundtrack of Alfie (1966) with Sonny Rollins, and played in The Brian Auger Trinity (July 1963-February 1964) and The Brian Auger Group (February–October 1964).

His next step was to go to Berklee College of Music in Boston, US, where he studied arranging, composition and string bass. He then teamed up with John McLaughlin and The Mahavishnu Orchestra to play electric bass until 1973, when the band broke up. After that, he moved to New York and played with Stan Getz (a tour in 1977) and Chick Corea (a tour the following year). Laird put out one album as a leader, Soft Focus. He was interviewed in Guitar Player in 1980 and Bass Player in 1999. Later in life he was a successful photographer as well as a private bass tutor and an author of a number of intermediate- to advanced-level bass books.

Laird was one of a handful of musicians to play an S. D. Curlee, which was his principal fretted bass. Richard Laird, as he was known in the art world, in March 2009 came across a collection of photographs in a file cabinet that he had taken in years past of legendary jazz artists but had mostly forgotten about. The discovery of these historic photos that feature Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Elvin Jones, Keith Jarrett and many others led to the formation of an online archive[3].

He is survived by one daughter, Sophie Rose Laird, who was born on February 21st, 1988 to his second wife, art lawyer, Jo Backer Laird.