"That was my first falling off a cliff moment" – Tal Wilkenfeld on the challenges and trust of playing bass with Prince and Jeff Beck

Tal Wilkenfeld played bass in Jeff Beck's band at the age of 21. She was an incredibly mature musician then, and has only gone from strength to strength since as a multi-instrumentalist solo artist and acclaimed session bassist. Now in an extended podcast interview with Lex Fridman, Tal has taken time to reflect on what an extraordinary bandleader Beck was, and how Prince took her to the edge of a cliff as a musician.

It's telling that she talks about the late guitar legend Beck in the present sense, and his legacy is very much still alive for her as it is for many musicians and listeners.

"It just shows what a generous musician he is and that's evident in his playing across the board," says Tal reflecting on Beck's insistence she took a bass solo when they played Cause We've Ended Up As Lovers at the 2007 Crossroads Guitar Festival, a performance that you can watch above. "He is a generous, loving, open musician. He's not there for himself, he's there for the music. And he thought this would be the perfect musical thing to do."

Tal's willingness to face down scenarios that would instill fear into many other musicians has continued in her session career, including a recent gig playing Allman Brothers songs with the Allman Betts Family Revival.

"Different styles of music invite varying degrees of uncertainty or [lack of] safety in the way people might perceive it," she explains. "For instance, the tour I was just on playing Allman Brothers songs, I am standing on the edge of the cliff the entire night and if I mess it up… or I do a clunker or whatever it is, it's like, so what? I wouldn't have played half the stuff I'm playing if I wasn't constantly standing on the edge of the cliff. So I don't care about those few little things, I care about the overall expression."

The interview above features a lot of great insight from Tal about how she approaches the preparation behind all this – including just how vital it is to practice slowly, take breaks and not overload your brain with too much new information at once. Still, all the study in the world doesn't account for the value of reacting to music Tal has heard for the first time, and what that brings out of her.

"My favourite thing about going into sessions with musicians I adore is that we don't hear the demo," explains Tal. "Because if you hear the demo you're hearing what the producer or songwriter has already imagined that every instrument is playing. And it's like, I've already hear what you want, now part of my mind is already focussed on what you want and what the destination is gonna be, why did you bring me in here?

"I want to not hear it and I want you to sit at a piano, sing the song and I want to hear the chords and the lyrics, or sit [with an acoustic] and play it. Then let's all go in the room and then take one, I would say 80% of the time take one has the most gold. Then there might be a mistake or two, or someone forgot to go to the b-section and you might want to punch that in so that you're hitting the right chord. But all the magic is in that first take.

"And then sometimes it happens that we're rehearsing and it's take one, two, three- four, five… and then you're thinking about it too much and then you go and have dinner. Then the next take one after dinner is the one. It's usually after there's some kind of break. Obviously there are exceptions to the rule – sometimes it's take two or three."

Which leads Tal and Lex to Prince and his approach. Like Beck, Prince recognised not just Tal's musical talent but her knowledge of other instruments. She picks up the story…

"With that particular album that we made together, it's called Welcome 2 America [recorded in 2008 and released posthumously in 2021], he called me up and asked me, he said, 'I want to make a band with you – I'm really inspired by what you're doing with Jeff Beck. I want to make a trio. Do you like the drum rolls of Jack DeJohnette?' That was like his first question. Yeah who doesn't like Jack DeJohnette? He's one of the greatest of all time.

"Then he said – because we had a conversation about drums – 'It sounds like you're kind of particular about drummers so why don't you find the drummer and I'll trust you to find the drummer. You can audition some people and send me some recordings of maybe your two favourites and I'll pick out of the two or something.'

"So I did that, went on a journey, found a couple of guys and he picked the one [Chris Coleman]. We went in and he basically would just be like, 'Ok so the A section is gonna go like this, then the B section I think we're gonna go to G and then the bridge, I might go to B flat but maybe I'll hold off… OK let's go, 1,2,3,4' And then we recorded it to tape. He did not want me to punch [n] anything.

"Then there was one song called Same Page, Different Book, and he talked through it just like he did, then he had me soloing between each phrase, like little fills. I didn't know that was coming up – and he loved that. He loved to have me on the edge of my seat, like falling off a cliff. That was my first falling off a cliff moment from somebody else holding me on the edge of the cliff, if you know what I mean. Now I just do it on my own because it's so fun and makes sense, it's the best thing for the music.

Prince's insistence on capturing the moment without re-editing clearly had an impact on Tal.

"It's great," she says. "Nobody makes records like that anymore. Everyone wants to edit and edit, and re-record this and that. Unfortunately with a lot of music, and I'm not saying all music because there's plenty of great music coming out, but there's the danger of it being flat because every little imperfection is digitally removed."

• Interview – Tal Wilkenfeld: “I’m a completely different bass player now. When I was in Jeff Beck’s band, I hadn’t even been playing for four years!”