A Tribute to Wes Wehmiller

Having known Wes for fifteen years makes picking out a single standout memory difficult, if not impossible. The one thing that I keep coming back to, when I think of Wes, is how I grew as a bassist just by knowing him, being around him, watching him play, and feeling the depth of his musicality. But I have to admit that I wasn’t always this serene about his seemingly limitless ability on the bass, and that’s why I’ve chosen the first time I ever saw him as the memory I’d like to share first.

It was the fall of 1990, and I was a sophomore at Berklee College Of Music. After a year of heavy practicing in private, I felt ready to make my mark as a hot-shot bassist, and was eager to get playing with as many people as I could.

When semesters at Berklee begin, there’s a fairly intense peer-connection period in the first couple of weeks, where people begin jamming with each other, and reputations are born as word spreads about who the new hot players are, and who the established “name” players are working with. It wasn’t but a few weeks into that fall-1990 semester that people began coming up to me and telling me about some new bassist named Wes Wehmiller. He played a yellow Kubicki X-Factor, they said. His technique was flawless. His groove was intense. His thumb was seriously funky. And they never failed to mention that he looked like he was about 15 years old. I was understandably curious. I noticed that he was playing a recital and made a note to attend.

The show day came. He looked young, to be sure, but carried himself onstage as someone who’d done it a million times. His hair was long in the front and back, and it covered half his face, and he made sure to look down so the other half wasn’t readily visible either. He was just buried in his instrument, grooving, nailing everything. His sound was so fluid, so graceful, it made me ashamed to be working so hard at what I was doing. This was the way it was supopsed to be - natural, musical, spiritual.

Then the band launched into an extremely difficult song by John Patittucci, called “Scophile.” I recognized it right away, because I’d had the misfortune of trying to play it myself just months ago with a different band, and we crashed and burned badly, including me. I was nervous watching it, both for myself and for Wes.

Well, he just aced it. The melody in the head of the tune, a series of blizzard-like sixteenth-note runs, was nothing to this baby-faced Berklee freshman. He just blew through it like it was a pop tune. I was stunned, but not as stunned as when the song neared its end, and the guitarist’s amplifier failed, leaving Wes to play this insane melody by himself in front of a typically discerning and skeptical Berklee crowd. And, again, he nailed it to the wall.

The crowd went nuts. And I walked out feeling, to be honest, like someone had punched me in the stomach.

Fortunately for both of us I got over my jealousy, and realized that I wanted to get to know him better. Just a few weeks later, we found ourselves jamming with each other in a practice room. Two Berklee bassists jamming generally doesn’t make for an overly musical experience, but this was transcendant. I felt so comfortable playing with him, so relaxed in his broad musicality, that it exceeded the musical relationship I had with any other instrumentalist at the time.

Three years later, when it came time for my Senior Recital, I felt it would be incomplete without Wes being a part of it. We performed a classical duet, and then segued into, appropriately, a John Patittuci bass solo vehicle called “A Better Mousetrap,” in which both of us took turns soloing and supporting each other. I knew while it was going on that what he was doing was at a higher level than I could reach, but I was no longer ashamed. I was just happy to be sharing a musical experience with him.

So, I suppose my first memory of Wes, among many, many others, was that, when I saw him play, I thought to myself, “That’s the bassist I’d like to be someday.”

As the years went on, I watched as he wrote songs, changed styles, changed instruments, and evolved muscially in fascinating ways, all the while still retaining the core musical identity of Wes Wehmiller: mature, understated, and precise, yet soulful, emotional, and deep.

I consider myself lucky to have seen this genius of a bassist and musician up close for so long, and will feel his presence inside my own musicality for as long as I’m able to pick up a bass and play it. Because I’ve never been a serious bassist without him being there.

That hasn’t changed.