The LizyT Show with MITCHELL COLEMAN JR.

Mitchell Coleman Jr. was born the day after Christmas of `67 in Meridian, Mississippi. He spent his early years in Cuba, Alabama. When his father returned home from Vietnam, he moved the family first to Hartford then Bloomfield, Connecticut. There, Mitchell fell in love hard with electric bass. “In Bloomfield, nobody was into basketball or anything like that - everybody played bass. My friend Greg Carrington was THE baddest bass player in town – a beast to bow down to. I begged him to teach me. He and Kevin Weaverbey laid it all out for me. The first song I ever learned was “Just the Two of Us” by Grover Washington, Jr. & Bill Withers with Marcus Miller on bass - then came the calluses and blisters.”

Mitchell received full support from his family, especially his mother Mary Ruth Coleman who bought him his first bass (a short-neck Sears special for kids that Mitchell wound up detuning to get the sounds he wanted – ironically helping him develop the sounds he gets now) and his Aunt Orcie Delaine who used her credit card to buy his first real bass. When his parents divorced, Mitchell moved back to Alabama but all his cousins and friends had moved away. “Bass became my babysitter,” Mitchell states. And once again Marcus Miller proved inspirational when Mitchell discovered what became the Funk-Jazz blend of his wildest dreams in David Sanborn’s LP, Straight from The Heart. It was really on now. 

http://www.mitchellcolemanjr.com