There is no one guarantor of great bass-playing, or a great bass line. But, as everyone from Monteverdi to Schubert, and from the Beatles to contemporary producers such as Xenomania have demonstrated, sonority, juxtaposition, dissonance or consonance – or a combination of at least two of those – are crucial to a killer chord.

Any discussion of the instrument’s greatest exponents can be lengthy and disputatious, but it has to involve the following: Aston “Family Man” Barrett, Stanley Clarke, Tommy Cogbill, Rick Danko, Duck Dunn, John Entwistle, Flea, Larry Graham, Charlie Haden, Janice Marie Johnson, Louis Johnson, John Paul Jones, Ronnie Lane, Scott LaFaro, Mike Mills, George Murray, Colin Moulding, Meshell Ndegeocello, Jaco Pastorius, Jerry Scheff, Paul Simonon, Bruce Thomas, Norman Watt-Roy, Tina Weymouth and Jah Wobble. That’s just 25, but such discussions are meaningless without the following, each of whom, alongside Jack Bruce, didn’t so much break the rules as write new ones.

BERNARD EDWARDS

To hear him kick along with the bass drum on Sister Sledge’s Lost in Music or on Chic’s own Good Times is to know what bass guitar is all about: punching the song forward, not even a cigarette paper between the two rhythm instruments, the bedrock for a to-die-for tune that would somehow be nothing without him.

JAMES JAMERSON

A linchpin of Motown’s Funk Brothers, who almost single-handedly invented the idea of the electric bass as a melodic vehicle on many of the label’s great moments: What’s Going On, For Once in My Life, Bernadette, Darling Dear and Going to a Go-Go. The master.

PAUL McCARTNEY

Where to begin? I Feel Fine, Paperback Writer, The Word, Rain, Taxman, Dear Prudence, Come Together? Or, following the Beatles, Listen to What the Man Said, Coming Up, Take It Away? Even on relatively minor Beatles songs, McCartney wrung beauty out of his bass where most of his contemporaries (and successors) would have made do with the root notes. A genius.

CHARLES MINGUS

The most important bass-player/composer jazz has ever known, he invented the notion that you could play the bass brilliantly, write amazing music and lead a band. Before him, bass guitarists stood at the back and played majestically but quietly. Because of Mingus, and beyond his genre, the instrument, and the man or woman who wielded it, claimed a place at the front.

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