Don’t Mess With Texas! Progressive Metal Bassist Jordan Eberthardt by Allee Futterer

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Don’t Mess With Texas! Meet Progressive Metal Bassist Jordan Eberthardt… Tattoos, body piercings, expletive t-shirts, babes, epic guitar solos and audience adoration? Welcome to the metal scene and honestly what more could anyone ask for?

Progressive metal bassist Jordan Eberthardt has been hugely successful touring with his Houston based band Scale The Summit, playing with acts such as Dream Theater and Zappa. With that said, Jordan knows he has had it better than most, “It has been very spoiling to play to the crowds of people that we have in the past couple of years,” Eberhardt said while admitting that he has had it better than most.

Originally from North Hills, California Jordan didn’t exactly grow up rocking out in front of thousands of people. In fact one of his earliest encounters with music was when his brother picked up the guitar and “Larry Little’s Learn Guitar on VCR”. After about an hour of hysterical laughing, Jordan says his brother never picked up the guitar again, “It was the most monotonous, dorky, uninspiring thing I had ever seen.” Fortunately Larry Little’s dry approach to teaching guitar didn’t spoil Jordan’s love for music or his desire to learn. Not too long after the Larry Little incident, Jordan picked up the bass and buried himself in the music of Cliff Burton (Metallica), Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clark and of course Victor Wooten. With his love for music only growing he enrolled Musician’s Institute in Hollywood immediately after high school. At that time he was actually enrolled in the audio engineering program. The completion of his first semester revealed that an audio engineers life was not the life for him. Not wanting to give up having an extensive social life, family and friends he decided to rethink engineering. It was during that time at M.I. that he met his current band mates and committed himself to music.

Metal and all of its subgenres are famous for their “screaming singers” or “screamers” as they are fondly referred to in the scene. The element of screaming in this genre is what has historically driven away music fans from metal. It seems as in the passed few years however a renaissance has happened in the metal scene and bands such as Between the Buried and Me and Scale the Summit are reshaping what it means to play metal. In the case of Scale the Summit they intentionally have no vocalist and let the music be mainly guitar driven. These dudes leave the melody completely open for interpretation and for each instrumentalist to contribute to. Before writing his bass line Jordan listens to the guitar melody, as he likes to hear how they weave in and out of each other. His education in music and natural ability certainly has something to do with his epic bass lines but also his approach to writing, “I like using a lot of counterpoint, but sometimes I will just re-emphasize a guitar riff if it really jams.” While you might expect this band to improvise a lot live, true to metal, they don’t tend to just “jam out on stage however Jordan reassured me that come rehearsal time there is plenty of outrageous death metal improv going on.

Between the heavy touring schedule and rigorous preparation for Scale the Summit’s new album, Jordan isn’t getting much sleeping done. The unmistakable pioneer spirit this young man carries makes one thing clear, you don’t mess with Texas or Jordan Eberhardt.

Check out Scale the Summit on iTunes ASAP!