Mark Egan and Danny Gottlieb Release “Electric Blue”

by Kevin Johnson Thursday, October 1st, 2020

Mark Egan and Danny Gottlieb: Electric Blue There is a special connection between bassists and drummers, especially ones that have played together for some time. That’s why, with nearly five decades of playing together in the books, Mark Egan and Danny Gottlieb have incredible chemistry. The duo has released a new album called Electric Blue that documents their powerful musical bond.

Egan and Gottlieb met as students at the University of Miami and became members of the original Pat Metheny Group. They’ve recorded and toured together for 49 years.

“The duo music contained in this recording reflects our 49-plus years of friendship and our musical adventures together,” Gottlieb says. “In your musical life, and especially if you are a rhythm section player, you sometimes get lucky to find a musical partner with whom you connect immediately on the deepest level. It’s even more amazing when that person turns out to be a best friend. That is the relationship I have had with Mark since we met at the University of Miami in 1971.”

“For this new recording, we wanted to document our rapport as a duo team,” Egan adds. “When you look at the definition of rapport, it’s ‘a harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other’s feelings or ideas and communicate well.’ That perfectly describes how we interact as a duo.”

The album opens up with “Back And Forth,” which the bassist explains was built from the Golden Ratio. “This song started with a multi-tracked drum/percussion groove. We then added a groove fretted bass line, a fretted bass comping bass part, then a soloing fretless bass. The form was derived from the Fibonacci Sequence also known as the Golden ratio, a special number approximately equal to 1.618 that appears many times in geometry, art, architecture and nature. By taking the total number of measures and multiplying by the golden ratio and repeating that process several times, we came up with different sections where we placed the chord changes.”