International Women’s Week 2025

Chapter 3: Amazing bass players under 30

This is a follow-up to my recent post on bass guitarists. It has also turned into the third chapter in my 2025 series honoring International Women’s Week. I was combing through my catalogue of great young rock bands, looking for outstanding bassists, and then when I looked at the resulting list, most of them were women.

So I’m publishing this under both rubrics. I am sure the young man in the group would not mind. He knows at least two of the other bass players on this list, and I think he would consider himself to be in great company.

With that, here are six of the best young bassists playing today. Most of these clips show them playing rock, but they all have strong jazz and funk influences and some of them in fact mostly play jazz or fusion. Interestingly, all of them primarily play finger-style, though some of them also use a pick on occasion.

Mohini Dey (28, Kolkata, India)

Dey was born into a musical family—her father was a working musician, and her parents encouraged her interest in music. They were financially strapped but managed to give her the chance to pursue music. She played several instruments but took to the bass, and by age 11 was touring and giving public performances.

She has collaborated with dozens of top-tier musicians from India and from the West, and has recorded music across many genres and styles, from traditional Indian to progressive rock to experimental jazz. Perhaps her best known collaborator, for Western rock fans, is Steve Vai, the guitar virtuoso.

At 19, in an interview, she confided that it was hard for her to make friends her own age—they found her too serious, and she was not interested in typical teen stuff, like boys. She just wanted to eat, sleep and breath music.

“Squared Marbles”

Wakazaemon (27, Shizuoka, Japan)

Wakazaemon is best known for her long-time collaboration with Marty Friedman, the former Megadeth lead guitarist who is now based in Japan. She is a multi-instrumentalist who mostly plays the bass, and she treats it as a lead instrument.

She keeps an intensely busy schedule, doing session work with various bands, touring with Friedman, and recording with the fusion group Koiai. She was one of the founding members of the supergroup East of Eden, which has put out two EPs so far. She left the group in late 2024 to concentrate on her other obligations.

This is “Crossroads” from East of Eden’s second EP. In terms of musicianship, this band is an embarrassment of riches, but focus if you can on Waka’s bass line. It’s like a second song playing in the background, perfectly matched to all the rest of the music.

* * * * *

Widi Rahmawati (25, Garut, Indonesia)

(This is mostly taken from previous columns in which I have featured Voice of Baceprot.)

What if making music were something that could get you exiled, or even killed? Imagine a group of teenaged girls in a conservative Muslim village in Indonesia, starting a heavy-metal band in the face of societal resistance, including death threats. That is Voice of Baceprot. They are:

Firdda Marsya Kurnia (vocals and guitar)

Widi Rahmawati (bass, backing vocals)

Euis Siti Aisyah (drums)

They consider themselves faithful Muslims, and wear hijab on stage, but they still get a lot of heat from people who are opposed to girls behaving this way (“baceprot” means “noisy” or “loud”). They honed their craft posting covers of big-name western metal bands (Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down, Metallica) before starting to release their own music.

“God Allow me (Please) to Play Music” is about resisting people who use religion to persecute artists. Rahmawati uncorks a wonderful, unexpected bass solo in the middle of the song.

“God, Allow Me (Please) To Play Music”

Miyu Yoshinaka (22, Fukuoka, Japan)

Miyu (bass) and his brother Mio (drums) are two thirds of the instrumental power trio Asterism, from Fukuoka, Japan. They were one of the three bands that made my list of Instrumentals of the Year for 2022. Here is that article:

Best of 2022: Rock Instrumentals

In 2014, the brothers were participating in a youth music festival in their hometown near Fukuoka, Japan. They were only 14 and 12 years old at the time, but they caught the attention of the scouts. One of those scouts had also noticed Haruka Noma (then only 11), and suggested that they play together. What happened can best be described as critical mass.

Miyu plays 4,5 and 7-string basses. In his hands, any of them is a lead instrument.Both brothers bring a lot of jazz and funk ideas into their playing. They are adept at filling musical space, giving the band a much richer sound than one would expect from a three-piece.

“Church”, featured here, is a showcase for their lyricism and sense of mood and phrasing.

“Church”

Fami (22, Tokyo, Japan)

Fami grew up a multi-instrumentalist, learning piano and violin as a little girl. She picked up the bass as a teen, and soon began posting videos to youtube, featuring her playing covers of a variety of pop, anime and rock songs. Her videos never showed her face, because she wanted people to focus on her playing, not her appearance. She amassed over 600,000 subscribers and over 50 million views by the age of 19.

By that time, she had written, recorded and produced a solo album. For reasons she has not discussed, but rumored to include a steady stream of vicious harassment from online trolls, she stopped posting on youtube and considered quitting altogether.

Around that time, the Japanese heavy metal band Lovebites lost their founding member and bassist. In the midst of the pandemic, they announced a global audition for a new bassist. There were hundreds of applications. After several rounds of auditioning, Fami was announced as Lovebites’ new bassist in late 2022.

Amazingly, her first performance with them was also her first ever live performance in front of a paying audience. She was only 20. Consider that this was also the first song of Lovebites’ first live set in over two years. They just explode out of the gate, and Fami looks like she’s been doing it all her life.

“Hammer of Wrath”

Ellen Alaverdyan (12, Las Vegas, USA)

Publishing her stuff under “EllenPlaysBass”, Ellen is perhaps the most startling person on this list. Yes, she does come from a musical family, and learned a bit of several instruments before deciding the bass was her thing. Still, it’s a little incongruous to see someone barely the size of her instrument, who can dominate it the way she does. She wrassles that thing around like it’s nothing.

She has jammed with some pretty heady company, including Steve Vai and Billy Sheehan. She is already providing on-line bass lessons to people just starting out. Here she is leading a band of absurdly gifted kids in a cover of “Hysteria”, originally by Muse. The bass line requires intense focus and endurance, and she makes it look like a piece of cake.

The entire group are a delight. Yoyoka, the drummer, is already an international youtube sensation, and the little dude on the guitar has rock star written all over him.

If you know of any great young bassists who belong on a list like this, please post you suggestions here in the comments. Thank you!