Bassist Alison Keslow has come a long way. Keslow began playing copious gigs in her youth as a Berklee College Of Music graduate with a Principle in Bass and a music education degree. After making the rounds of greater-Boston venues since the 1990s, she has released two CDs, including last year’s well received Bass Dharma, and she’s been nominated for a Boston Music Award in the Jazz category for the second year in a row. She was still feeling high about last year’s nomination when this year’s was announced.
“I’m honored,” she said. “It’s always nice to be recognized for whatever it is we do,” she said. “Two years in a row is very exciting. That’s certainly high praise.” Keslow is well known to local Boston area musicians and music instructors and former professors, calling music more of a lifestyle than a career path.
“I’ve been doing some writing and I’m hoping to keep working on a new album to maybe release it in the summer,” she said. “I’ve started doing a couple of tracks. I just got out of the studio recording with Regie Gibson who was one of the winners of the poetry slam. He wrote some lyrics for some music I wrote. We collaborated on a song. He does a combination of spoken word and rap and singing.” Keslow plays in his project Shakespeare To Hip Hop that has a year long residency at the Boston Public Library.
“It’s been four hundred years since the death of Shakespeare, and there’s a lot of celebrating his literary works,” Keslow said. “Reggie speaks his stories and his literature and creates poems and spoken word and performance art with his partner Marlon Carey. I provide the grooves and the backing music along with a keyboardist and a drummer. There’s a lot of improv.”
Keslow isn’t sure if her recent CD Bass Dharma increased her visibility but she is very proud of that recording, calling it a snapshot of time for her. An instrumental CD, Bass Dharma represents the kind of music this bassist has always been into.
“I’ve always composed instrumental music, even as a child, on piano,” she said. “I used to wake up in the morning and just improvise music and just give it titles. I’ve always composed that way.” Piano was Keslow’s first instrument, as her mother, a jazz pianist and vocalist, inspired her to become a musician. Keslow played piano until age 18 when she became a bassist and eventually went to Berklee to further her knowledge of the low end, until it as a part of her.
“I kind of sing through my bass,” she said.
Keslow also makes it out to New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and even New York state when she’s not in Cambridge, Arlington, Somerville, and Boston. She’s will be performing in November at the Tremont Church in Boston Congress Hall with The Mystic Chorale, a choir that’s been around for 30 years. This year’s show is called Our Voices Will Be Heard: Songs Of Protest And Hope. It runs November 19 and November 20.
“So this is a hundred and seventy five voice choir that’s been together for 27 years,” Keslow said. “He usually hires music. So, I’ve got that coming up. I play pretty regularly at a Vietnamese restaurant in Framingham called Pho Dakao.” Keslow’s plethora of unusual gigs expands her horizons and gets her a lot of work.
“One thing in my favor is my versatility,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of tools in my toolbox. I can blend into a lot of situations so that is what I keep doing.” Keslow cannot estimate how many musicians, bands, singer-songwriters, and ensembles she’s worked with since entering the Boston music scene in the early 1990s.
“I like the challenge of playing with different people and going to a new venue or a new group and just playing and people not knowing what to expect, kind of recreating myself,” she said.
From here, Keslow would like to move onto making her new album and releasing it next summer. She and her husband, Peter Wiermik, own Sudbury School Of Music in Sudbury, Massachusetts. “I teach lessons and ensembles there. I’m just going to keep on expanding my lesson base. I’d like to offer some new classes.”
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