Bassist Rob Wasserman cut his teeth as a sideman for the likes of Elvis Costello, Dave Grisman, Rickie Lee Jones and Stephane Grappelli. But it was in 1988 that his "Duets" album, featuring collaborations with Lou Reed, Aaron Neville and Bobby McFerrin, earned Grammy and Billboard "Vocal Album of the Year" honors.

Now the San Francisco Conservatory of Music graduate has made another left turn with the funky and ethereal "Space Island" (Atlantic). Collaborating with producer-engineer Dave Aron (Sublime, Snoop Dogg, Prince), Wasserman puts his inventive acoustic/electric bass stylings to rhythmic drum loops on tracks like "Hillbilly Hip Hop" and "Got to Rock."

Wasserman and Aron met in the summer of 1998 while working on a project with ex-Jane's Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins, who is also featured on "Space Island." Among the album’s other contributors are turntablist DJ Jam (Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg), trumpeter Willie Waldman (2Pac, Banyan, Perry Farrell), percussionist Carl "Butch" Small (P-Funk) and sarangi player Sultan Khan (Ravi Shankar, Ornette Coleman).

LiveDaily correspondent Don Zulaica spoke with Wasserman about the album and future collaborations.

LiveDaily: Why did you choose to work with Dave Aron, and how did you guys pull this together?

Rob Wasserman: I thought Dave had so many good ideas. We started talking about what I wanted to do with my next album and agreed to get together and see what happened. When we got together for the first time, it was Dave's birthday--so there was a big party going on while we were writing. There I was in Blunt Brothers studio, which is in his home, and all of these people are walking through as we're jamming and writing. It was chaotic, but really fun. Dave's one of the great mixers in hip hop, and I felt that the only way this thing would work was to have the right mixer who could help to hone the sounds.

You've got live drummers on it as well as the loops.

A lot of the tunes started with drum loops, but "Butch" Small added all this percussion spice, and Perkins added a lot of different drum parts. So it really does come alive.

"Hillbilly Hip Hop" is a scream. That's you rapping.

Yeah. It was literally the last day of recording and I said, "Let's give this a try." I kicked Dave and his friends out of the studio, because I was really embarrassed. I'd never rapped before. It was 3 in the morning, and I just did it, and everyone flipped out for it. I wanted this record to show off all the different sides of my personality, and that track brings in a little humor--my kind of humor, dry and a bit of weird--to the record.

You're known for developing new equipment as much as your style on traditional acoustic and electric equipment. What did you use on the album?

The primary bass was the Ned Steinberger Design "Rob Wasserman" Model--it's a 6-string electric upright bass. This is actually the first record I've really used it on. It just has a new sound in itself, and when you add different effects, it takes things in a direction where you don't really know what you're hearing. People may recognize the bass parts, but they don't know where the other parts are coming from. Believe it or not, aside from all the percussion and drums, 99% of the album is the bass.

Any special gadgets, amplifiers, effects?

I used a talkbox on "Is Anyone There?" It produces some really crazy sounds when you try to talk through a bass. I didn't really get any words happening, but I got some very strange guttural sounds. I also did some real super-distortion parts, like you hear in a band like Korn, and it was all on the bass. That's possibly the thing I get the most pleasure out of: showing people what's possible with one instrument.

The folks at Atlantic alerted me to another project you're doing: composing original music for vocalists performing unpublished Woody Guthrie writings.

We're approaching a real diverse collection of people that love Woody Guthrie and his writings. It's going to be one-on-one, just me and great singers like Lou Reed, Ani DiFranco, Rickie Lee Jones and Michael Franti of Spearhead. They're really amazing writings too, because they're personal; they weren't necessarily meant to be songs. They're like pages of his diary, what he was doing hanging out in New York in the early Fifties. It's going to be very different.

All your collaborations on "Duets," "Trios," and now this. ...

I guess that's my good fortune. I have the ability to work with a lot of great artists. I really enjoy working with different people--jumping into different worlds and creating something different by merging the two.