BASS PLAYER AWARDS 2021

After a year off thanks to the pesky virus, BP’s annual Lifetime Achievement Awards return—and this time we add a new category. Raise your glass to this year’s winners, Marcus Miller, Gail Ann Dorsey, John Taylor and Charles Berthoud.

Here at Bass Player magazine, we’re keenly aware of our position in the bass community. As the first and oldest of a very small number of print magazines about bass in the world, and certainly the only one in the English language, we feel that our job is not only to chronicle events in the world of bass as they occur, but also to celebrate that world and to help it to move forward.

With this in mind, I and my predecessors have made an annual point since 1998 of awarding Lifetime Achievement Awards, in every year where business and/or pandemics haven’t prevented it. You will recall the amazing Bass Player LIVE! events that used to take place for this purpose: a similar live event will return when conditions allow. For now, we’re contenting ourselves with sending out the trophies to the winners, although believe me, we’d much rather be doing it in person and sharing a glass of champagne with as many of you as we could get into a venue. Watch this space!

The number of bass players who deserve this award is long, and growing all the time, making it tough to narrow the winners down to just four, as we have this year. Our legendary quartet are in esteemed company: For the record, here’s a list of the previous winners, which has never appeared in the magazine before, as far as I know.

1998 Milt Hinton, Bobby Rodriguez

1999 Chuck Rainey

2000 Joe Osborn, Percy Heath

2001 Jerry Jemmott, Leo Fender

2002 (no awards)

2003 (no awards)

2004 Anthony Jackson, Will Lee

2005 Ron Carter, Jack Bruce

2006 Stanley Clarke

2007 Lee Sklar, Tony Levin

2008 Carol Kaye, Verdine White, Mike Watt