Imagine picking up the double bass at 18 only because a music education degree at Ithaca College required a string instrument, then completely reinventing how the instrument is played before your 26th birthday. That is the story of Rocco Scott LaFaro, and this episode explores how a restless kid from Geneva, New York, who bounced from piano to bass clarinet to tenor saxophone, became obsessed with the bass within three months and went on to change the DNA of jazz.

We follow his move from the Buddy Morrow big band to Los Angeles, where he practiced clarinet sheet music on a six-foot bass and adopted an independent two-finger plucking technique from Red Mitchell, then into gigs with Chet Baker, Benny Goodman, Victor Feldman, and Hampton Hawes. The conversation centers on the Bill Evans Trio with drummer Paul Motian, where LaFaro’s counter-melodic playing turned the bass into an equal conversational voice, and on the 1825 Abraham Prescott bass whose sloped shoulders gave him physical access to the high thumb position. It ends with the June 25, 1961 Village Vanguard recordings, the Newport Jazz Festival with Stan Getz, and the car crash on Route 20 that killed him at 25.

• Why the walking bass line had kept the instrument in the background and how LaFaro stepped out of that role
• How replacing Charlie Haden in Ornette Coleman’s band and a greeting card from Miles Davis showed his rising demand in 1961
• What the fir top, flamed maple back, and long sustain of the Prescott bass contributed to his lyrical sound
• Bill Evans’s grief, his retreat from live performance, and his obsessive return to I Loves You, Porgy
• Ray Brown’s claim that LaFaro’s death set the double bass back ten years, plus the restored bass and Scott LaFaro Drive in Geneva