"Ian Hunter's album was a beautiful date...there were some strong players on that session."
(In August of 1976, Steve Lake's interview with Jaco appeared in Melody Maker, the then-popular British music publication. Lake's article was titled "Pastorius Reporting". Although I would prefer to simply reprint Jaco's quotes, there is some information to be learned from Lake's text, in which he doesn't always quote Jaco directly but clearly is rewriting his subject's comments.)
Jaco Pastorius had the privilege of sleeping through the rise and fall of electric jazz. Although he's only 24, he's a father of two, and was financially obliged to stop buying records when his daughter was born. The last album he bought, he says, was Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi, the tip of the fusion iceberg.
Besides which, he lived (and lives) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, not exactly the hub of the music business. And it was there, in isolation, that he developed the startling bass guitar technique that has established his reputation in just a few swift months with Weather Report.
"It was partly a conscious decision to stop listening to the latest trends," says Jaco, tall and bronzed, with the kind of good looks that could earn him a fortune in the modeling business if the bottom ever dropped out of jazz-rock. "I'd started to realize that what I was playing on bass guitar was very unorthodox, and, in order to develop that further, I figured I shouldn't be listening to the latest hip bassists, whoever they might be."
Paradoxically, Jaco had begun his musical career as a drummer inspired by his father. But at fifteen a football accident all but destroyed his left arm, and he could no longer wield the sticks with any power ("I was pathetic," he recalls). His colleagues suggested he move over to the bass, and, lending an ear to what was happening in soul music at the time, he did so, molding his style initially on that of the guys who worked with James Brown, Wilson Pickett and Otis.
"But I never listened exclusively to bassists. I'm interested in music, period. And growing up in Florida, where there is no one musical clique that's predominant, I've been able to study a great variety of styles. Besides which, I also worked on boats, playing my way to Mexico, Haiti and Cuba, absorbing as much of those cultures as I could. And of course, Miami is the only place in the United States that's actually in the Caribbean. Any Caribbean artists that visit the States always play there, and I gained a lot of useful exposure by hearing and working with dozens of those guys."
His jazz experience is surprisingly limited, although he worked up his chops by playing bebop horn lines on bass guitar. Outside of that, he has worked with Ira Sullivan, Pat Metheny and Bob Moses, and Paul Bley. The Bley gig, which lasted for four months in 1974, was as inspiring as one might expect, and produced some recording sessions which will shortly be made public on Bley's own label. the very excellent Improvising Artists Incorporated. The sessions were crazy, says Jaco, really quite wild. Bley was just emerging from his synthesizer period at the time, and played Fender Rhodes electric piano. Jaco played his regular fretless bass, although he apparently has some facility on the acoustic instrument too.
But the man who brought Pastorius to the breathless attention of the record-buying public was Blood, Sweat & Tears drummer Bobby Colomby, who in May of last year dropped by the Bachelors III club in Lauderdale and heard the word on the bass man, who had become almost a permanent fixture at the venue, working with all the visiting, largely soul-oriented, talent. Colomby signed him up fortwith and immediately went about the business of producing Jaco's eponymous debut album. Some of the guys he dragged in were artists not especially to Jaco's liking. Jaco prefers the drumming of the semi-unknown Floridian Bobby Economou (featured on "Speak Like A Child") to that of either Michael Walden or Lenny White, rather more famous names. But Colomby had the contracts and was concerned with sales impetus, although Pastorius thwarted his efforts in this direction somewhat by insisting that all the musicians be listed only in small type on the back of the record jacket.
However, the album is an unwieldy thing, with no cohesive overall identity and, ironically, the strongest cuts are those which feature the bassist entirely unaccompanied: his reading of Charlie Parker's "Donna Lee" and his piece de resistance, the gorgeous, harmonic-full "Portrait Of Tracy" (Jaco's wife) which constitutes a bona fide step forward for the electric bass. "I've always played all the harmonics," says Jaco flatly. "Being untutored, I just figured it was what you were supposed to do."
It was Colomby's manager Fred Heller who figured it could be a good business move to get Pastorius playing on Ian Hunter's All American Alien Boy, Hunter being another of his acts. "What he hadn't realized was that as soon as Ian and I met we were immediately like good friends. Heller and Colomby are telling me, 'Be cool, it's good for you if you do it,' and there was no problem at all."
But can a bassist who has worked with Paul Bley, rubbed shoulders with genius, actually raise any enthusiasm for rock and roll? You bet. "I'm enthusiastic about life, man. Once I've decided to do something, I give it my whole energy. I love rock, too. Playing with Ian, as opposed to working with Weather Report, is obviously a little less challenging musically, but there's other things you have to bring out to make rock work.
"Ian's album was a beautiful date. He's very intelligent. He knows a lot about sound, and there were some strong players on that session: Chris Stainton, Aynsley Dunbar. I got Dave Sanborn along, 'cause Ian is like a groupie for Dave Sanborn. I mean, he's the cat. Mister Tone. And he was on my record. When Dave came down, he tore it up."
Jaco resisted the earliest attempts to be drafted into Weather Report. The band sent him a rehearsal tape of the group with Alphonso Johnson on bass and Chester Thompson on drums. Pastorius threw it straight into the trash can. "I thought it was the worst shit I'd ever heard. Joe and Wayne sounded great, but the rest..." He shakes his head. However, the Report persisted. Zawinul called him up. Joe needed 'that Florida sound' for 'Cannonball', his dedication to an old employer. And with that cut successfully under his belt, Pastorius condescended to join the group. At this point Michael Walden was with them on drums, but Jaco was relieved when percussionist Acuna made the logical move over to the traps.
Zawinul, he figures, has only just begun to understand what an electrified rhythm section should sound like. Everybody else that's been in the band, he says, has been too inflexible. Thompson and Johnson could never improvise with any panache. Pastorius and Acuna can really shift the emphasis around, and love to do so. "That's what's so great about Weather Report," says Jaco Pastorius. "We take such chances. We're the only so-called crossover band that takes it out there. Once we're past the head of a particular arrangement, it's complete freedom; only we've got the kind of control that makes anything we do sound written."
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Melody Maker, 1976