It’s a dream to write music for him because there’s virtually nothing he can’t do,” says composer and bassist Frank Proto. “He has a Middle Eastern approach to Western music, which I find refreshing,” says University of Arizona bass professor Patrick Neher. “It’s very emotional. He can really jerk your tears like no one. He approaches all music that way. He loves every note, and he projects that love into what he does.”

They’re talking about François Rabbath, the closest thing to a true guru the double-bass world has yet produced. Musicians make pilgrimages to his home in Paris or invite him to workshops in North America to learn the unorthodox practices that allow Rabbath to be a player of deep expression and astonishing technique, even at age 75.

Rabbath understands the appeal of his life story—the self-taught bassist from Beirut traveled to France, decided he had little to learn from the Paris Conservatory, and became a sideman for the likes of Charles Aznavour, then a member of the Paris Opera Orchestra, a composer of genre-melding music, and a performer who can master the most difficult new scores in days. He’ll happily settle back and recount all this, but before long it’s clear that he’d rather talk about music itself, and the people who play it.

“My pupils are all a huge family with talent and love, not jealousy and hate,” he says in an accent more French than Lebanese, during an interview at the University of Arizona, after offering a master class and bass festival performance. “They understand that each one of us is unique. I tell them, ‘Don’t imitate me or anyone else—be yourself.’”

Rabbath had no choice but to be himself. When he was a 12-year-old boy in Aleppo, Syria, one of his six brothers—most them musicians—came back from Damascus one day with what young Rabbath assumed was an enormous violin. He was immediately captivated by the marvelous thing, but he knew of no bass players in Syria or Beirut, where his family soon moved. He had to learn the instrument on his own.

A year later, he saw in the window of a tailor’s shop a book being used as a prop; it was a yellowed copy of Edouard Nanny’s contrabass method from the 1920s. Afraid that the tailor would refuse to sell it to him, Rabbath stole it. “That was my first and last robbery,” he says. Nanny did not provide any immediate revelations; Rabbath could read neither music nor French. But, using the diagrams and music examples, he began to connect printed notes to positions on the strings.

“I was reading and playing the music before I knew the names of the notes,” he says. “That’s the best way to go, from the note on the page directly to the ear, without translating it into a name.”

Rabbath quickly decided that Nanny’s fingering “was not logical for me. Because the fingerboard is so big, he would change position for every two notes and every time I changed position I was jumping and playing out of tune. So I invented the pivot. I keep my thumb in the same place and pivot down for the next notes.”

Rabbath had already been sitting in with his brothers in a small jazz and dance band at a nightclub in Beirut. “I was not playing,” he maintains. “I was just pulling the notes.” But because he was, in his words, obsessed with the bass, he worked hard and quickly gained proficiency. “It was not like study,” he says, “it was like discovery.”

He was devoting two hours a day just to scales when he was 16; by age 19 he was playing classical violin and cello pieces on his bass.

Sometimes patrons of the nightclub seemed to care more about their dinners than about the musicians, says Rabbath, but “when people paid attention, I would play with all my heart.” One night an attentive customer came up to him, said he was a violinist, and predicted that Rabbath would go far as a bassist. The violinist walked away, and Rabbath asked the man’s companion who that was. The answer: Yehudi Menuhin.

“Sometimes,” says Rabbath, “one word can change your life.”

By 1955, Rabbath had saved enough money to go to Paris; he intended to thank Nanny, and point out several improvements to Nanny’s method. “I wanted to give this to him as a gift, all that I had found,” Rabbath says, smiling at his own innocence.

When he showed up at the Paris Conservatory he learned to his dismay that Nanny had died eight years before. He also learned that auditions for the new academic year were to be held in three days. He obtained the required music, learned it, came back and won a spot among the students of Nanny’s successor. Within three sessions, though, Rabbath got fed up with the professor’s “old-fashioned” fingerings, and was having trouble financing his lessons. He was getting paid one kilo of tobacco for each gig he played at an American nightclub at the airport, but had to pay two kilos per lesson. Rabbath and the professor parted company, but on sufficiently good terms that the professor bequeathed him a bow when he died a few years later.

Charles Aznavour, the great French singer and songwriter, had performed in the Beirut nightclub where Rabbath played around 1951. Aznavour saw Rabbath playing with another singer in Paris shortly after Rabbath arrived in France, and invited him to join his band. For a while, Aznavour even permitted Rabbath to live with him until the young man could establish himself financially. (Aznavour would later become the godfather to Rabbath’s son.) This led to gigs with Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf, and other leading vocalists of the time.