Jaco Pastorius

[Chris-Sax]

Jaco has had one of the biggest effects on my jazz playing for years!! As a sax player i find his bass playing and song writing abilitys incredible!! The very first time i heard that opening tune "Donna Lee" on his first solo album, i was left gob-smacked by his incredible technique on the frett-less bass!!
He has played with & featured many great sax players on his albums:

* Brecker ("birthday concert", "word of mouth","Jaco")
* Mintzer ("birthday concert")
* Sandorn ("Jaco")
* Bob Berg
* Shorter (weather report)

The list goes on!!!! I would urge anyone who hasnt heard Jaco's playing to get a hold of one at least one of his c.d's! You want regrett it!! The Bill Milkowski book on jaco's tragic life is also very intresting! In a lot of ways jaco's life mirror'd the Be-Bop sax player Charlie Parker.

My personal favorate Jaco Pastorius song is "Continuum" it is a very moving piece. I also regularly perform "Come on over" with my funk band! (trying to be Dave Sanborn!! :D )

Jaco was one of the main contributers to the creation of jazz/fusion today & i find it extremly sad he isnt here today to carry on his fantastic work!

[Sam]

One of the most memorable shows I ever saw was The Herbie Hancock Quartet, fall '76: HH, Bennie Maupin, James Levi on drums and the young, sane, sober Jaco Pastorius. No grandstanding, just a full-career retrospective of HH's work from top to bottom.

Jaco single-handedly changed the way EB players approached their instrument and notably affected the music as a whole. There's only a handful of musicians who reached that level. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

[Chris-Sax]

Sam,
I wasnt lucky enough to catch a Jaco performance :( sounds like an amazin line up for the gig u were at though :) !!!
Jaco's live towards the end was very tragic.....still makes me sad when i think about it.
Chris 8)

[hbl]

Caught Jaco with Weather Report back in the summer of 1981 - he was fantastic! Played great, looked great - he was all business that night! Hey, Wayne wasn't to shabby either!

I recommend the anthology that just came out - it's a broad overview of his career and has previously unreleased tunes from a home recording of "The Chicken" (cute), the CC Riders tune "Amelia" (some great sax from our friend Randy Emerick) and a tune from Holiday for Pans, "Good Morning Anya" (so-so, definitely unfinished). Check it out, you dig?!?

Hey, Jaco Lives, baby. His playing was a revelation back in '79 when I first heard him - he still has me in awe.

[pfox]

I have to admit my ignorance of Jaco's life until last month when I read Milkowski's excellent biography. I was a fan of Weather Report, but at the time, I only bought cassettes, and they were infamously short of information, pictures, liner notes, etc. back then. When I used to hear the name Jaco Pastorius, I always pictured him as 1) old, like Stephane Grappelli, and 2) European, like Stephane Grappelli. To find out he was so young, and American was surprising.
After reading the book, I went back and listened specifically for his playing on Weather Report, and got a copy of Jaco Pastorius. I'm still not a big fan of most fusion, but he did the most amazing things on a bass. Sad, sad end, but like so many manic-depressive, bi-polar, call it what you will, they cannot be helped if they won't take their meds. We're still lucky to have had him advance the music in the way he did. If you are interested, check out the Jaco Pastorius family website. The resemblance of his sons is scary. For that matter, the resemblance of his second wife is also scary. Great player, wonder what he would be into now if he had stayed on the straight and narrow.

[saxtek]

Very interesting. I didn't even know the Jaco retrospective had been released, and I definitely didn't know I was on it. Amelia, by the way, was named for Amelia high school near Cincinnati, where the CC Riders did a concert and clinic while Jaco was in the band. A lot of biographers got that one wrong.

[hbl]

saxtek - sadly, you are not credited, but there is a smoking baritone solo and then a monster tenor solo on the track, and I assumed from the recording date that one of them was you.

FYI, it's not the Bob Bobbing set, but a Warner Bros./Rhino anthology, 2CDs. As I said, it's nice.

[saxtek]

If it's a CC Riders recording, the bari solo is the great Robert Gable, and the tenor player is me. When I listen to old tapes I'm always knocked out by how good Gable sounds.

The Bob Bobbing project will be released soon, and there will be early 1970s CC Riders recordings on it, too. Jaco was my room-mate, and we used to cruise pawn shops together. I got about half the horns I'm still using in pawn shops on the road, and Jaco got at least one of the basses he used until the end.

[hbl]

saxtek - Of course, I would have known that had I actually READ the liner notes - you are fully credited on "Amelia" and on your tunes from Invitation and Twins. :oops:

By the way, you sound great on "Amelia" and the rest, too. Were you playing the King Super 20 on these recordings?

[saxtek]

I played a Super-20 tenor then and now. I bought my Selmer Mark VI low A baritone in a Memphis pawn shop (for $400!) when I was Jaco's room-mate in the 1970s. I used the same horn with him in the Word of Mouth big band in the 1980s.

By the way, since this is a saxophone discussion group, Jaco used to mess around with saxophone a bit - especially baritone. When he was really, really young (teens), he sat in with local Ft Lauderdale bar bands using a borrowed baritone sax. At one time, his choice might have been drums, bass, or saxophone.