Rabbath started making his own jazz/pop recordings, starting with the cult favorite Bass Ball in 1963. Rabbath has issued many more discs over the years, ranging from jazz to classical to his own works, but not everything he has recorded will see the light of the CD laser beam.

“He’s recorded all the Bach cello suites,” reports composer, bassist, and sometimes recording engineer Frank Proto, “but they’re not released, because he hasn’t gotten around to approving the editing. He’s done this a few times over the years. In the 1980s, we were supposed to record the second suite. I went to Paris and we were supposed to do it in a church, but the church became unavailable and François had just hurt his back. So I said, ‘Let’s just hang out a few days and enjoy ourselves.’

“He said, ‘Let’s try it in my apartment’. So I set up my equipment, he started playing, he forgot about his back, everything was going well, and we finished the second suite. Then he said, ‘Keep the thing running.’ He played through, without stopping, all six suites.

“It was awesome and I just let the tape run. I said, ‘This is fantastic! Let’s go through it again and splice in a few spots.’ “He said, ‘I can’t do it again, my back is killing me, and I made too many mistakes.’ I found out later that the sound was dreadful, bouncing all over the windows and mirrors; the sound wasn’t up to snuff, so it never got released. There’s a lot of stuff like that lying around.”

Despite his growing celebrity, in middle age Rabbath felt he needed more job security for the sake of his family. At age 50, he auditioned for a position at the back of the Paris Opera bass section, merely because the opera house was within walking distance of his apartment. He remained there for 15 years, even beyond the normal French retirement age. He says he was valued there for his sense of rhythm, which developed from his jazz playing.

“Jazz gives you a good rhythmic feeling that can enrich your classical playing,” he says. “Now I do many other things, but I don’t do it for the money. We cannot die with money; nobody has gotten away with a penny, yet,” says this son of a failed banker. “The richness is not money. The richness is what you do with the bass. The richness is love.”

Rabbath inspires love, or at least very deep and affectionate regard, in many of the people he works with. Proto, who has worked with Rabbath for more than a quarter century, remains one of the bassist’s greatest supporters. Proto has written seven or eight pieces especially for him. “Not only does he play them, he plays them at a very sophisticated level, and he does that from the very first performance,” he says.

“But he’s really particular about what he plays. Getting him to do something new is sometimes like pulling teeth, which makes no sense, because he’s a very quick learner. I gave him my second bass concerto, which is half an hour long with every problem known to bass players in it, and he learned it in two weeks.”

Rabbath’s career has not been an unbroken string of triumphs. When he started accepting students 25 years ago, his unorthodox technique drew sharp criticism. Yet Rabbath persevered—after all, he was living proof of his method’s potential. Now he tends to get standing ovations at bass conferences and recently became the recipent of ASTA’s Isaac Stern International Lifetime Achievement Award.

“When you create something, everybody follows it blindly and never changes it,” he complains. “I was doing my own thing, and I found that it was a good way; the traditional way is one way to go from here to there, but you really have 100 other ways to go from here to there. Doing it my own way saved my life, but it took time, and it took a lot of work. I didn’t want to die without letting everybody know what I had discovered.”

So now Rabbath is up to the fourth volume in his own series of bass method books, and he is the subject of a DVD, The Art of the Bow, which Paul Ellison of Rice University calls “revolutionary.” It employs multiple camera angles, biomechanics, and the technology of motion-capture to dissect Rabbath’s strokes. “Only Tiger Woods in the sports world until now has been able to put this sort of ‘swing doctor’ thing together,” says Ellison. “It’s the most profound teaching tool I’ve seen.”

Ellison became a Rabbath convert when he saw him perform in 1981.

“His statement then that ‘all the technique in the world is for the sole purpose of playing one note beautifully’ is something that I needed to hear at my first midlife crisis at age 40 as principal bass of the Houston Symphony,” he says.

“I was sitting in the audience with these renowned bass players from the jazz and classical world, watching him perform this concerto by Frank Proto, and we were captivated by his artistry.

“He did things on his instrument that left us dumbfounded.”

The next year, Ellison took a leave of absence from the orchestra and from Rice University to study with Rabbath in Paris. His colleagues were dubious, and Rabbath at first didn’t want to take Ellison on. “You have your position, you have your stature; what are you after from me?” Ellison recalls Rabbath saying. “I told him, ‘I want to rethink the learning process, and re-create the steps that you took to get where you are today.’ He said OK, and I was there the next month.

“He had no idea how to teach me at first. I had a good idea of what I needed from him, so I crawled on the floor and looked up at his hands and came up with ideas so we could resolve issues together. Today, he is extremely precise as a teacher—except when he needs to be vague. He may say to someone who’s struggling, ‘Your sound is here’—and play that way—‘so how can we get to here?’—and he plays an example, hoping they’ll take the bait and find out why there’s a difference.”