The American virtuoso bassist Gary Karr, who has died aged 83 after a brain aneurysm, brought the double bass into the limelight as a solo instrument. He embraced the skills of his bass predecessors Domenico Dragonetti, Giovanni Bottesini and Serge Koussevitzky, then raised the bar to a new level through his sheer joy in playing and communication of his love for the instrument, combined with an unrivalled technical skill.
Hugo Cole in the Guardian, recalling Karr’s visit to the UK in 1978, likened him to an ostrich suddenly becoming a nightingale and remarked that his “breathtaking solo bass playing is surely one of the wonders of 20th-century musical performance”.
One of the elements of Karr’s playing that set him apart was the way he used the bow. “I’ve always considered myself a lyrical artist. My first desire was to be a singer, so I have always been determined to sing on the bass.” He drew his individual, intense sound with long slow bows, playing close to the bridge, and projecting differently from the traditional back-of-the-string-section sound familiar from his youth. He applied many of the techniques of the upper strings to the bass.
Karr was strongly influenced by the mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel, who mentored him in the vocal skills of breathing and phrasing. In 1962 she enabled a private audition with Leonard Bernstein, who engaged Karr to perform Bloch’s Prayer and Paganini’s Moses Fantasy variations as part of the Young People’s Concert series with the New York Philharmonic.
“I don’t know when I’ve heard anything like it since the great Koussevitzky,” said Bernstein in his introduction to the concert. Bernstein had asked Karr whether the Paganini had an orchestral part. It didn’t, so Karr arranged one, and it was this performance, televised to millions, that launched his career. As a soloist, he was to play with leading orchestras worldwide, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic and the Hong Kong Philharmonic.
His first recording, entitled simply Gary Karr plays Double Bass, was issued later in 1962 by Golden Crest Records. That was the year in which Herman Reinshagen died, a teacher who greatly influenced Karr: “He exuded such enthusiasm, and although he might have held me back a bit by forcing the old traditions on me, in retrospect I only appreciate the positive things.”
The same year, after the groundbreaking concert, Olga Koussevitzky, convinced the spirit of her husband lived on in Karr, gave him Serge’s 1611 Amati bass (now thought by experts to be French, about 1811, but still a significant instrument through its history). Later Karr donated it to the International Society of Bassists, an organisation he founded to create and nurture a network of bass players.
Karr’s family came originally from Vilnius, in Lithuania, where generations had played the bass. Once in the US, they moved to Los Angeles to work in Hollywood movies. His father, Joe (who changed his surname from Kornbleit), a shoemaker, could not read music but played the bass in dance bands; his mother, Miriam Nadel, was an oboist. The 1939 film They Shall Have Music, with Jascha Heifetz playing himself, features an orchestra that included all but one of the Nadel-Karr family. Karr’s sister Arla Capps was a harpist, playing the instrument with a dark projected Russian sound that Karr said influenced his pizzicato.
Karr started the bass with Uda Demenstein, who had taught his grandfather, uncles and cousin. As a child he began to adapt pieces such as Ravel’s Habanera and the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria, and arrange baroque repertoire (later studying, playing and recording his teacher Stuart Sankey’s many baroque transcriptions). Many of the celebrated players of the day (Heifetz, André Previn, Artur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern) were soloists with the California Junior Symphony, in which Karr played, and left lasting impressions, technically and musically.
He took lessons from the Hungarian cellist Gábor Rejtő, and was inspired to use the technique of four fingers in his left hand, rather than the three promoted by the bass pedagogue Franz Simandl, and also benefited from tuition from the cellist Zara Nelsova.
An audition for the Curtis Institute, Philadelphia, run by the violinist Efrem Zimbalist (who had arrived from Vilnius at the same time as Karr’s grandfather) was successful – but only if Karr changed from an underhand German bowing technique to French overhand. Karr refused – though later in life he experimented more freely with his bowing technique.
For his application to the Juilliard in New York, he was required to fulfil the same entrance requirements as brass players; the bass was not included in the string department and his bass teacher there, Sankey, was a member of the brass department.
Later he taught at Juilliard and Yale, and other top music departments and summer schools, but devoted much of his enthusiasm to teaching in schools, mixing psychology, parenting and humour. He kept his performance schedule alive in the summers. “I knew of no other concert artist who had interrupted his career to teach in public schools,” he recalled. “But I loved the controversy and hoped to make an impact, to change the music education system and reverse the worldwide trend of aging classical music audiences.”
He met his long-term pianist and life partner, Harmon Lewis, in 1961. Together they created an engaging stage presence, Karr supplementing his almost magical technical facility with enthusiasm and a jokey manner.
His discography shows his wide range of technical accomplishments in arrangements, and acknowledgement of his mentors such as Koussevitzky and Dragonetti. Carr was a master arranger and instigator of new repertoire in his commissions – Hans Werner Henze and Lalo Schifrin were among many who wrote for him.
He wanted to engage a younger audience in the bass. Students tell of his support. One recalled how, on a junior camp in 1979, the conductor was being consistently unfriendly to the participants and Karr, a soloist there with Yehudi Menuhin, led him on a merry dance, extending the cadenza without prior warning. “We owe Maestro Karr big time.”
Lewis and Karr lived in Connecticut for many years before moving to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1995 and taking Canadian citizenship. Karr retired from performing in 2001.
Lewis died in 2023.
• Gary Karr, double bass player, arranger, composer and teacher, born 20 November 1941; died 16 July 2025
