I was born in Bowling Green, OH in 1970. My parents, David and Ann Pope, are both musicians of an unusually high caliber. Saturday mornings often found me lying half awake in bed listening to my dad tear through the Liszt b minor Sonata or a Rachmaninoff Etude Tableau with true world-class skill. Watching my mother walk to the piano after returning home from a movie to play her favorite song from the score she’d just heard for the first time was just part of the routine. Discussions of the key of a piece on the radio, or complaints of turntables running sharp were regular occurrences in the car on the way to the music building where they taught. And no, they weren’t checking the pitch against anything…except their ears.
I started playing piano as soon as I could reach the keyboard. It was a central part of life in our house, as it is now in mine. My parents, though they loved jazz and had a lot of records by people like Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Marian McPartland and more, listened mostly to classical music. My older brothers David and Peter, who are both very talented musicians, introduced me to many kinds of music I’d otherwise not have known about. Early on they graduated me from Kiss and Pat Boone (please don’t ask) to Emerson Lake and Palmer, Rush, Jeff Beck, The Beatles and so on. A few years later it turned into Return to Forever, then Pat Metheny, Weather Report, The Brecker Brothers, and so on.
So you guessed it, I got beat up in school because of the music I listened to! Ok, not really…but I do remember taking my Tarkus LP in to school for “Show and Tell” in 2nd grade. Yes…second grade…1977. Poor Miss Crockett got stuck listening to the entire “A” side of that record while my classmates looked on in horror! At the part where the “march” section fades way out she dove for the turntable arm but Carl Palmer cut her short. “He GONGED me”, she exclaimed through a nervous laugh…so polite. Freakin’ hilarious now. At the time I was just like, “Ummm…Miss Crockett, there’s still some more.” I was a geek of some type or another for sure.
Anyway, I digress…and digress and digress.
As a young musician I always had a thing for bass lines. Any time I picked a song out of the ether and wanted to play it on the piano I wound up playing a melody and a chord tone or two in my right hand, and an active bass line that sort of acted like counterpoint in my left. My parents, being musically alert, suggested maybe I’d be a bass player. After hearing more electric bass oriented music like Pat Metheny and Weather Report and started picking out bass lines and playing them on an acoustic guitar I had around the house. My brother Dave and I used to play Metheny tunes together on two classical guitars. Ultimately, at age 11, I convinced my dad to buy me a bass. It was a Kalamazoo bass that was made in some sense by Gibson. I sought a teacher and scored a great one. That was when things really began to grow.
My first teacher, Jeff Halsey, is one of the most fundamentally important influences in my development. What I learned from him at that point in my life was exactly what I needed to learn. There’s no question in my mind that I wouldn’t understand what being a bass player is as well as I do had it not been for Jeff. He got me listening to Ron Carter and Ray Brown and Bird and Coltrane (I was already way into Jaco and Stanley, etc). All of the originals. He encouraged me to play acoustic bass (once termed the “floor bass” by a school mate) and got me swinging. While studying with him I started playing with the Bowling Green State University Lab Band. I was only 15 years old and it was a great opportunity and challenge.
At age 16 I learned about some hot new bass player with a…what?.....five!…no…SIX???....SIX string bass???!!! “He’s crazy!” Then I heard Got a Match. NOT crazy. Not too long after that I got a chance to meet the great John Patitucci and take a lesson or two. It was largely because of his love and support that I realized maybe I could actually go somewhere with a music career. We’ve maintained a friendship over the years throughout which John has been supportive and inspiring. He played a large role in facilitating my brief but life-changing involvement with the Chick Corea Elektric Band.
After a few more years of playing in the BGSU ensembles and working around the Toledo, Detroit, Cleveland music scene I took off to the University of North Texas where I played in the One O’clock Lab Band under the great Neil Slater. I stayed in that ensemble for 3 great years. My relationships with Dan Haerle, Fred Hamilton, Mike Steinel, Ed Soph, and Ed Rainbow had a major impact on my ability to function as a cogent musical communicator. I met lots of great musicians at UNT, both students and pros, including the late great Michael Brecker who was instrumental in my ultimate move to NYC. I miss him.
After arriving in NYC I did my best to hang in there and play with whomever I could. Being there afforded me lots of opportunities to play with musicians I’d only heard on records. I don’t want this to become a name dropping festival, so if you want to know who I’ve played with please check the list of credits at the end of the biography.
Around 1997 I met a couple of bass guitar builders named Vinny Fodera and Joey Lauricella that went by the company name, Fodera Guitars. For those of you who aren’t familiar, a Fodera is NOT a Fedora worn backwards. In fact it is, in my opinion, the best bass guitar made. Anywhere. Through a long sequence of events too mundane to go into here, I ended up doing OEM electronic work for them. I designed and started manufacturing the Fodera internal preamplifier which became a standard item in Fodera basses starting around 1998. Over the years I’ve grown in that area and have started my own line of products under the company name, Michael Pope Design which includes some ultra high performance outboard bass preamplifiers. I continue to do custom work as well as design work for Fodera, who remains my only OEM client.
In 1999 I got married, bought a house, and in 2001 my wife, Lydia Courtney, gave birth to our first daughter, Elizabeth. Another appeared in 2002. I think it was the second pregnancy that did it. Madeline was born 16 months after Elizabeth, so it was a little like having twins for a while there. In 2005, we moved to Maryland. I was on the road so much then that where we lived didn’t matter so much, and we weren’t liking Long Island so much anymore. Lydia got a good job offer so we sold our house near the height of the bubble and really lucked out.
Since moving here. I’ve continued to tour and play locally as well as in NYC on both electric and acoustic bass. I’ve also built a studio in my house for doing my own projects as well as small production projects for others. I do remote recording there on both electric and acoustic bass. I teach some and am anxious to do some online lessons as well.
Given that this is a bio and is supposed to make me look good, I’m just going to name a few things I know I’m good at. So with the utmost humility, let me say this about myself: I can play electric and acoustic bass really well. I also have some real skill on piano. I know how to engineer a professional sounding recording and I have really good ProTools chops for editing and mixing. I can write and arrange and I have really good ears for harmony. I learn music really fast and I never hog the spotlight. SEE?? SEE ME???? Good music is my ultimate goal in everything I do and I believe making music is something you really have to do with others. So I consider myself a team player at my core.
Well that’s about all I can bear to say about myself. I hope you know more about me now than you did when you started….and I hope you don’t hate me!