JOIN USBorn in Paris to a West Indian vocalist mother and an Israeli guitarist father, Yossi Fine was steeped in music from birth. He picked up the guitar at the age of four. His professional career as a bass guitarist kicked off as a session musician at the tender age of 16.
In the decades that have passed from there, Yossi has established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the realm of global music.
He has been pivotal to the evolution of the bass guitar and is a composer extraordinaire. Fine has produced over 25 albums, and contributed bass music to over 150 of them. His performances across the world have endeared him to a global audience, and his music has earned him several awards, including a Grammy nomination. He has collaborated with a diverse group of artistes — from David Bowie to Vieux Farka Touré and Naughty By Nature.
The fact he was chosen early in his career by Bushrock, the band of the legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius, to play bass, is a testament to his talents. Talking about the early years when he was still known as Joseph Thomas Fine, he recalls being surrounded by music. “My father was playing Spanish guitar and my mother was singing soul and American black music, so my father taught me my first chords on guitar when I was four years old, and then I mostly listened to lots of music and recordings. Those were my main teachers — the records!”
Musical recall
His remembers his early influences were reminiscent of the “early 70s rock music from Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, James Brown, and funk music.” He says that “by the time I was 16, I started playing bass guitar, and my name spread quickly among the local community of musicians in Israel as a very funky bassist, and that was in demand in the early 80s. So I got lots of calls to play as a session player. I also got called because I could come up with good parts for the music.”
Fine moved to New York in 1985 when he was 20 years old, and was invited to play with Bushrock. He now says of the event, “Word spread fast that there’s a new kid in town that can play bass like crazy, and within a few months I met so many of my musical heroes of that time. That influence was huge. I got to see how the best musicians work and think, and that was something only New York could give.”
His music is a mix of a variety of influences that include American, African and Middle Eastern music. He believes that music “should make you move. We all dance to the same basic beats and I love to find common threads throughout the globe where people can feel and move to same beats,” and adds, “It brings people closer, it keeps evolving. I always study more traditional music styles from African music and from the Sahara desert, which were the origins of the Blues. I like to keep it funky and that makes for a new sound or dialect. Now the boundaries of styles that are in me are melting into the moment.”
He believes that his best work is yet to come, but he also admits that there have been many great moments. His considers the project, Ex-Centric Sound System, his biggest moment as a creative musician, adding that it “was only a part of the journey that keeps evolving.” He fondly says, “That was a great time to dive into African music and discover so many ways to create music. I wanted ordinary people to know what I was into, which was African music, so I introduced it by sampling tribes into beats that were danceable in the clubs of the late 90s and early 2000s. That in itself is a great act to experience life, the dancing on stage and the sound of it all. It’s a happy, energetic band. We played in many places — from Russia and Israel to USA and Europe. The results were always amazing — the power of music.”
Of the many collaborations he has been part of, he loves “the time when I collaborated with Jamaican vocalists on Afro rhythm sessions and also with so many musicians that I cannot count. Each moment was great for what it was.”
About performances, he says he prefers the ones when everything is in sync with the music on stage, and when it is open to something else that happens on the spot. “Jazz music and great musicians that I’ve worked with opened me to that. Musicians such as Gil Evans and his orchestra — back in the 80s, and in general — I get very excited.”
Ties with India
A participant in the recently held Jodhpur RIFF festival, he says he loves collaborating with Indian music and has already got some experience of it in New York. “I got exposed to it by working with Karsh Kale and lots of musicians that came to play with him, and also on some other projects that had Indian musicians.”
The future is open for this incredibly talented artiste as he vows “to use my gift — or the gift I got from the creator — to serve music,” adding that “lately, I love collaborating more and more — it keeps things open and fresh.”