Elliot Racine

The music of Elliot Racine uses instruments and concepts from traditional music styles from all around the world. It is funk, rock, jazz, and experimental all at once. It is danceable as well as thought-provoking, joyous as well as melancholy, and meditative as well as humorous. The bass is his primary instrument, and Elliot Racine’s music is built from the bottom-up. As Rachel Milani of tourworthy.com put it, “He’s primarily a bassist but that doesn’t even begin to describe the diversity this musician incorporates into his music.”

Elliot Racine and music found each other early on. Racine learned to play keyboard at age 8, after taking inspiration from fusion jazz artists such as Herbie Hancock and Weather Report. A few years later, his tastes shifted towards rock ‘n roll, and he learned to play guitar at age 12, and quickly developed a passion for it. His passion for the guitar soon expanded into a passion for music as a whole, and by age 14, he began collecting recordings of traditional music and instruments from around the world, and rediscovered his early love for jazz.

His passion for music continued to blossom through his teen years and eventually led him to Berklee College of Music, which he attended from 2001-2005. It was between his first and second years at Berklee in 2002 when he switched his primary instrument to bass from guitar, due in part to his love of basslines, his wide finger span, and a high demand for bass players among his peers. Racine also made many of his first recordings during his time at Berklee, including the material that he would release on The 8-Track Recordings in 2010, and Too Fucking Human, which he re-released in 2012.

After finishing at Berklee in 2005, Racine became located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although he had done so sporadically over the 10 years prior, it was then that he began to perform regularly under his own name, or, from 2005-2009, under his own band names, All One Thing, All One Thing-Plant, and Band of Musicians. He began working on Curiosity in 2012, and finished and released it in 2016. Currently, he is performing live and he is in the process of creating material that will be released on his next album.

The music of Elliot Racine is much more than just a sound. It is a whole world. It is a world complete with sights, sensations, and values. Lyrically, Elliot takes us from the deeply personal, as exemplified in songs such as “Far and Away”, to the consciously social, as exemplified in songs such as “Holiday”. Compositionally, he takes us from the beautiful to the explorational, with pieces like “You, Me, and Mount Tamalpais” and “How Many Sounds from a Piece of Babmboo?”. In a similar fashion to many of the recordings of traditional music that have influenced him, Elliot Racine’s albums come with extensive liner notes that include pictures and descriptions of the instruments used. While Elliot’s recordings feature instrumentation and production, his live performances feature communication and spontaneity, and no two Elliot Racine performances are ever the same.