The musical journey of the Bay Area bass player taking on the outdated ways the world has perceived women

Before she decided to become a professional musician, the acclaimed Marin bassist Angeline Saris was a pre-law student at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on women’s rights in the workplace.

On her new single, “Come Undone,” which she released last week and is available on Spotify and other streaming platforms, she takes on some of those same issues she studied in college and that she and other women face in the male-dominated occupations like the music business. She describes it as “a high-energy dance song that feels like a farewell party to the outdated ways the world has perceived women.” And it’s highlighted, appropriately enough, by a killer bass solo.

A sample verse:

“I’m for real, this ain’t no show/ You can’t treat me like it’s 1964/ You made the law, so you get double/ When we complain, you say we’re nasty trouble/ What’s yours ain’t mine, what’s mine ain’t yours/ This ain’t no peep show when you close the office door.”

Speaking from her home in San Rafael, she cites several incidences that happened to her that she refers to in the song — being offered less money than a male bassist for the same gig, for one, and having to deal with episodes of inappropriate behavior. When she plays with male musicians for the first time, the compliment she tends to get is, “Wow, you’re actually pretty good, the parenthetical being ‘for a woman.’”

“You try not to think about it,” she says. “You try and show up and be the best player you can, letting it be all about the music. That’s generally how I operate most of the time. But sometimes it feels like those other things creep in. And it’s hard because you’re constantly asking yourself these crazy-making questions: Is this happening because I’m a woman? I think it’s a tough thing to constantly have to ask yourself. And sometimes it’s more obvious than others. I think sometimes you have to strike a balance, too. You go into a situation and you want to be assertive but not aggressive, you want to be friendly but not too friendly, you want to be professional but not hardened. When I talk to other women in male-dominated industries, whether it be in sports or CEOs of tech companies, we all sort of relate on those levels.”

New initiative

“Come Undone” is the first in a series of eight singles that she plans to release over two years in support of an initiative she’s launching called GROW, which stands for Global Reach of Women.

“Each single is going to be dedicated to raising money and awareness for a foundation that helps women to thrive, either locally or globally,” she says. “The first one will go to a group in Oakland that hosts an after-school rock camp for girls and gives scholarships for kids who need it. The next single will go toward something else.”

Charismatic and photogenic, she’s become a glamorous personality in the bass world. She’s been on the cover of Bass Musician Magazine and Bass Quarterly, and has been featured in Guitar Girl Magazine and Bass Player magazine.

Over the past decade and a half, she’s earned the status of “a first-call” bassist on the Bay Area music scene. This past fall, she went on tour with the Celebrating David Bowie tour starring former Marin resident Todd Rundgren and onetime Frank Zappa and King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew, playing 30 dates in the United States and Canada over six weeks.

“It was a beautiful experience,” she says. “It was really a star-studded band that I was honored to be making music with. I sponged up everything I could. And it was a great catalog. I learned 40 Bowie tunes. The musical director chose a lot of the B sides, the less-popular songs. There were some random ones. It was cool.”

For 10 years, the 44-year-old lifelong Marin resident has been a member of Marin drummer and Grammy-winning record producer Narada Michael Walden’s band, playing on four of his albums, performing in New York and Japan. Walden has nicknamed her “Angel Funk.”

“She can play anything I’ve asked her to do,” he says. “And she can do it … with that smile of hers.”

With drummer Lex Razon from the Marin band Vinyl, she formed the group Angelex, releasing an album, “Tight Lips,” in 2018 that not only showcased her bass work, but her emerging talent as a songwriter.

“Her vibe on the album is that of a musician finally creating her own musical identity after years of playing other people’s material,” says a review in Bass Player magazine. “And it’s a sound that suits her well.”

Most recently, she’s teamed up with singer Kate Vargas and guitarist Eric McFadden in Sgt. Splendor, which will perform at the Joshua Tree Music Festival and Napa’s BottleRock in May.

As a “hired gun,” she’s also toured with Jamaican reggae legend Ernest Ranglin, does recording session work and plays locally in several bands when she can, including Catfight with singer Teal Collins, and a new group, Walking Mirrors, that Mark Nelson formed last year.

“She makes it all so easy,” Nelson says. “Except for her schedule. She is just so damn busy.”

‘An epiphany’

At San Rafael High, she was playing the clarinet in music classes and not really liking it that much when the head of the music program asked her if she wanted to play bass in the school’s jazz band after the regular bass player graduated.

“I was like, ‘Oh, yeah,’” she recalls. “First of all, the jazz band was super cool. I loved the music. I loved what they were doing. They were a top-notch jazz band and traveled all over. I also loved the idea of playing this stringed amplified instrument. So I immediately began studying and subsequently fell in love with it.”

While at UC Berkeley, she was what she calls “a hobby bass player.” She played in the unaccredited UC Jazz program, took a Latin jazz class, did some work in small combos and big bands, and played in funk groups on the side.

“So I was always playing bass, even before I made that leap,” she says.

The leap, jumping from becoming a law student to a working musician, was inspired by what she describes as “an epiphany” she had after studying Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary in a class on the rhetoric of the counterculture.

“I came home, started playing my bass, the sun burst through the clouds and I thought, ‘I’m not supposed to be a lawyer. I’m supposed to be a bass player,’” she remembers. “And that was a totally terrifying prospect because I was pretty good at my law studies and a mediocre hobbyist on my bass work.”

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric with an emphasis on legal discourse, she felt the need to continue her musical education and moved to Los Angeles.

“I moved to L.A. because I was kind of lost, actually, to be honest,” she says. “I was sort of directionless, which I think happens to some people after they graduate.”

While taking some music classes and playing in jazz ensembles, she began collecting music school pamphlets, poring over them at night. She thought she had found what she was looking for when she went to an open house at the Musicians Institute, a college for contemporary music in Hollywood.

“I was like, oh my God, you can study the bass lines of Jaco Pastorius and the bass lines of John Paul Jones, then you can have a theory class,” she recalls. “I was completely blown away.”

The open house ended with a drawing for a year’s free tuition at the school. She was hoping against hope that they would draw her name and was crushed when they didn’t. But instead of being discouraged, the setback only deepened her resolve to make music her life and career.

“I was devastated, but it was at that moment when the epiphany came full circle,” she says. “I was like, OK I have to do this or I’m never going to be happy. Music has chosen me. I can sit here and deny it, but it’s not going to go away.”

Back to Marin

Unable to afford tuition, she decided against taking out a student loan, knowing that a fledgling musician would be hard-pressed to pay it back. So she canceled a lease on a place to live in L.A. and returned to Marin, moving in with her mother. Her plan was to work as a bartender and save enough money for tuition at the Musicians Institute.

As it turned out, she began sitting in with bands at the Fourth Street Tavern in San Rafael and subsequently met rock bassist Uriah Duffy, who gave her his gig with a flamenco speed metal band when he went on tour with the English hard rock band Whitesnake. She went on to join the all-female Led Zeppelin tribute band Zepparella, touring with the group for seven years.

“One gig turned into two and two gigs turned into four and within a year I was living the life of a gigging musician, so it didn’t make sense for me to drop that because I had a ton of momentum,” she says. “I never went back. Part of me says, oh I wish I had gone to school, but I kept gigging and here I am 15 years later.”

She may not have gone to music school, but she has enough practical experience and has studied enough on her own to be a popular bass teacher with a roster of students and to write a book on how to craft bass lines. Teaching got her through the pandemic, but she’s relished returning to the road, playing shows again for live audiences.