Walk, Don't Look Back

Rip It Up, Issue 123, 1 October 1987, Page 4

Walk, Don't Look Back

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Jaco Pastorius was possibly the most innovative electric bassist of the past two decades. On September 12, at age 35, he died in hospital after having been beaten unconscious outside a nightclub in his home town of Fort Lauderdale, Miami.

Pastorius rocketed to world attention when, in 1975, he was recruited from obscure clubland to join Weather Report. The story goes that Joe Zawinal heard a tape of his work and immediately phoned offering an audition. Such was the fretless purity of Pastorius’s singing tone that Zawinul thought him an acoustic bassist. That same year Pastorius not only recorded Black Market with Weather Report but provided integral support to Joni Mitchell’s Hejira and released his own solo set. The former two albums show him pushing the bass forward into the rote of lead instrument, white Jaco Pastorius enabled him to show off an extraordinary range of ability. In the first two tracks he moves from adapting Charlie Parker to writing for Sam & Dave.

Characteristics of Pastorius's flamboyant style soon became copied and adapted by bass guitarists the world over. Unfortunately, all too many of the acolytes lacked his accomplished musicality, (hence some cynical critics have pronounced Pastorius

as essentially a negative influence on the development of bass playing). Certainly Pastorius worked best complementing musicians of equal strength. In Weather Report his huge ego was balanced, by Zawinul’s and in the six years he was with the band he virtually became co-leader, forcing Wayne Shorter into almost a secondary rote. Joni Mitchell, on the other hand, deliberately used Pastorius’s melodic and harmonic ideas to flesh out her skeletal arrangements. As a duo they could be astonishing. But if Pastorius was a genius on . his instrument, there is evidence he could also be an obnoxious human being. When this writer saw Weather Report in Copenhagen in 1979, Pastorius took a solo that occupied nearly a quarter of the entire show, so long in fact that the other band members left the stage. One of Australa’s top session bassists, himself deeply influenced by Pastorius, pronounced the man “a complete arsehole” after meeting him. After 1982 Pastorius quite Weather Report, led a big band to Japan and then soon after began to drop from sight. Apparently he returned to Fort Lauderdale and began drinking heavily, almost giving up music entirely. Nonetheless the news of his death has . been a genuine shock to those who love his, music. I’ve been replaying his records' and marvelling.

Peter Thomson