Artist: Victor Bailey

Victor Bailey was an American bass guitar player.  He was the bassist for Weather Report during their final years, from 1982 to 1986, and launched a solo career in 1988. As a musician, Bailey was known for his signature scat-bass solos. 

Born in Philadelphia in 1960, Victor Randall Bailey was raised by a highly musical family. His father, Morris Bailey Jr., was an active musician and composer, while his uncle, Donald "Duck" Bailey, was a jazz drummer, who played on numerous Blue Note records (e.g., Jimmy Smith Trio, Hampton Hawes, Carmen McRae, Dizzy Gillespie). 

As a child, Bailey played the drums, but ultimately switched to bass guitar after the bassist in his neighborhood band walked out of band practice. Because young Victor took an immediate liking to the instrument, his father encouraged him to become a bass player. Beginning in 1978, at the age of 18, Bailey attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston. 

Further information about Victor Bailey is found here and here.

Photography credit: Elvert Barnes, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Bailey_(musician), which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).