When I started scribing for a now defunct double bass magazine many years ago, frankly I needed the cash; but as bassist after bassist confided about their close emotional relationship with their instrument I began to empathise and eventually fell head over heels with the instrument – with its bass-specific tone colour and mighty five-octave range; with the idea that contained within the bass is a blueprint for all other string instruments.

And it’s no coincidence that Bang on a Can bassist Robert Black’s recital disc works best when resonating in sympathy with the instrument’s tonal grain and registral colours. Black has technical facility like other people have mice but there isn’t much even he can do to sex up the generic neoclassicism of Joseph Iadone’s Sonata (1950) or Halsey Stevens’s Arioso and Etude (1953); Otto Luening’s Suite (1958), with its kooky ping-ponging tonalities in the first movement, fares slightly better (a pity about the faux-Copland finale though); other composers who draw on the bass’s jazz heritage, Jerome Moross in particular, at least jolt the instrument out of default ‘lyrical’ contours.

The truth: write for the bass like an obese cello and you run into trouble. The bass defined classically has only a supporting role; come the modern age though, music finally catches up. Cage’s minute-long 59" (1953) is fleeting but Black’s leapfrogging, widely displaced pitch intervals and incorporating the wooden frame drags the instrument’s full topography into focus at last.

James Tenney’s Beast (1971) and Jacob Druckman’s Valentine (1969) are the masterworks of the modern repertoire that changed perspectives on bass lore. Tenney makes the bass roar like a beast by detuning the E string a semitone lower; the bassist’s job is to harvest the resulting frequency overtones, and here Black and instrument are as one. Valentine is a valentine to that intense physical bond bassists share with their instruments. Black sings at his bass, fondles it with a timpani stick, caricatures its melodic utterances with his voice. It sounds like spontaneous pillow talk but every detail is carefully notated to showcase the instrument’s b(l)ooming marvels.