There are questions about everything from politics to religion to how pasta is cooked. On one thing, however, there are none: the greatest bass player in the world was Jaco Pastorius. Anyone who is questioned on the subject brings up his name, from Flavio Paulin, former singer and bassist of Cugini di Campagna to Red Canzian of the Pooh, who after seeing Pastorius live got a fretless and introduced it into Italian pop, up to Pino Palladino and Robert Trujillo of Metallica, which not surprisingly took four years to produce Jacobthe documentary about his life.
He is usually credited with innovating the instrument and perfecting already existing techniques (such as the use of artificial harmonics or muting, but above all the fretless, the fretless electric bass that we remember was invented by Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones and not from him). On the other hand, few focus on the visionary aspects of his being a composer, on the fact that he was so advanced that he wanted to dematerialize music into pure noise, by pictorial addition. Filling the voids until you hear nothing but chaos, but harmonic chaos.
It’s evident on the record Holiday for pans, who turned 30 this year. Posthumously released on a Japanese label and recorded in 1982, it should have been Pastorius’ third album. Instead, it was rejected by the record company for being too esoteric. We are not surprised, the disc is a kind of journey into the mind of an individual who has gone beyond the barriers of reality: psychedelic like Barrett, autistic like Miles Davis, fast like a sequencer (so much so that his influence will also extend to the IDM , in particular with Squarepusher), especially obsessed with the use of steel drums played by his protégé Othello Molineaux in an obsessive way, obtaining an effect similar to the soundtrack of Alice in Wonderland of Disney thrown in a drum of MDMA.
The horrified record companies decided to replace it with a compilation of covers performed live entitled invitation, which diminishes the caliber of a real genius. Frustrated and certainly not present to himself due to the immoderate consumption of drugs and alcohol and due to an increasingly split personality so much so that he found himself living as a homeless person, Pastorius could not descend to more meek advice, but only get worse in his unpredictable and borderline. As a free artist as he was, the cages of jazz were tight for him and indeed represented an existential problem, with the tragedy of constantly having to face an audience that wanted to hear the tightrope walker, but not what he really had to say.
Exemplary are his solos based on the use of the delay used as a rudimentary but effective loop station and above all the use of the distortion combined with a harassing chorus modulation, the result of which is to all intents and purposes noise ante litteram. His attempt to surpass Hendrix in the specular electric bass version is evident, but his passion for feedback overflows into harsh territories not yet explored in jazz, and which leave no way out. The public generally reacts violently to his surges and on some occasions Jaco paralyzes himself in a fetal position on stage, managing to win everyone back by returning to the comfort zone of jazz-rock. Also famous are the fights with Joe Zawinul in the Weather Report, when suddenly, in the middle of a piece he sounded anything but going off on his own business, which in itself would be consistent with a Coleman-style harmolody, but a thousand miles away from a fusion who was starting to show his nerd flaws in the classroom.
Jaco had no stylistic barriers, and the whole of New York resonated in his bass, which was his homeland for a very long time. So also new wave, electronica, post hippie, Suicide, rap (sometimes his phrasing on the bass really seemed to make the instrument speak): in short, everything that exuded from the walls of a city whose streets were – literally – his only home.
To be precise, it was he who identified the concept of punk jazz (as per the homonymous manifesto piece of his repertoire, originally written for Weather Report on Mr Gone), a way of playing outside the box, moody and instantaneous, in which there is tension even in apparently chill moments and the harmonies are daring. Pastorius is the jazz equivalent of Sid Vicious in punk. One is hyper-technical but fickle, the other doesn’t even know how to put his fingers on the keyboard but tries in every way to play, both are unmanageable and treated as outsiders because they are unable to go straight in the respective environments that have given them fame.
Flea no doubt mimicked the punk jazz attitude of Pastorius and then found his way within that path. So much so that Jaco is – to give an example – closer to Les Claypool of Primus rather than some high-sounding jazz name like John Patitucci (who confesses that he hasn’t touched a fretless before the age of 20 out of respect for Jaco and that he one dreams at all of imitating him for fear of not being up to par). If we think that someone like Mick Karn of Japan was precisely influenced in the development of his technique by Pastorius, or even Sting in the Police, we understand that perhaps Jaco was misinterpreted: he was for everyone and no one.
Probably the one who managed to understand and channel his creative chaos was Joni Mitchell. Strengthened by an artistic relationship that satisfies them in an almost erotic way, the two put together a series of albums (from 1976 to 1979) which only apparently maintain folk or jazz structures, instead entering de facto into an experimental territory that has the flavor of no wave (in particular the one imbued with “Latin” and South American influences, which can be found in Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter) and certain intuitions of Captain Beefheart revisited with a fusion eye.
After years of losing sight of the bass player, in ’81 Mitchell goes to a club to hear him. Jaco recognizes her and immediately puts her in the middle. “We ended up playing for barely a minute. I started improvising on an electric piano. At one point Jaco spun down a cable so that he ran across the fretboard from middle C. In trying to move it, I inevitably made a crap and someone in the audience yelled, “Never mind the mistakes, Joni.” Jaco was laughing. On that particular evening, he had been a saboteur.’
Here, the right definition for Jaco is perhaps a saboteur of musical predictability, a crazy black diamond in which all the colors of sound were absorbed and coexisted together. And still today, alas, he is looking for the right ears in which to reflect them. On the other hand it is the sound of his destiny: the bass of doom.
