Yeah, I met Jaco Pastorius,
I think it must have been 1975. We had a concert in Miami
and this guy comes to me, with glasses and bent over forward and he said : “Hello mister Zawinul. I wanted to just tell you I enjoyed the music
and that my father was a big fan of Cannonball Adderley,
and we know your music, etc, etc. And by the way, my name is John Francis Pastorius the third and I am the greatest bass player in the world. So I told him, I said listen,
I don’t want to insult you but come by the hotel,
we stayed another day in Miami and just let me hear what you have. He came by with his brother Gregory, the next morning and brought me a cassette and I listened to the bass,
the way he played it and it was very impressive. And then, not too long after that,
Alphonse Johnson started, with the thought of having a band together with
George Duke and Billy Cobham, and he tolded, Wayne Shorter and me that he will have
that and I was starting auditioning bass players
and nobody had a thing. And then, for some kind of reason, I was with
someone, I ran into Tony Williams and I ask him if
he knows anyone and then he told me he had this guy, man,
from Florida and I should really check out this guy Jaco
Pastorius. And I said, yeah, and it was the 19 July 1975. Cannonball Adderley
had just died and I wrote a song which was called “Cannonball”
I think. I called Jaco and
I said maybe it would be a good opportunity for you to come to Los Angeles and play on this song and then maybe see what’s happening. And he did come to the studio and we started rehearsing Cannonball.
And I told him in the beginning, there is a little line I want him to play. But he was busy, he was… I said stop, I said no. just play with this beautiful tone you have cause he had sent me tapes.
He played with this beautiful melodic tone. And then we rolled the tape and the next thing is what is on the record. Peter is the cat My first meeting with Jaco… It was fun. I did not know that he would be coming to this gig. I was playing with this Maynard
Ferguson’s Big band. One of the trumpet players, on Maynard’s
band, a terrific musician named Ron Tooley was friend’s with Jaco. He played on Jaco’s first album. I think he is in the horn section of “Come on come over”. Ron had given
Jaco a phone call. And they talked for a moment. And then Ron said: hey Jaco would you come
and see the band tonight cause we were playing in Miami and Jaco said thanks but you know
I heard you guys play the last time you were in town. And Ron then said: we have a new
drummer you should check him out. So Jaco told him : ok I’ll be there. I saw Ron talking
to some guy with a Philadelphia Phillies’ baseball cap. This red baseball cap. He had
a shirt buttoned up to the top button. This stripped shirt. And he was wearing glasses.
And he had this long stringy hair. I went up to Ron and Ron went : oh Peter, this is
Jaco Pastorius. And I’m embarrassed to say that my first words to Jaco when I was introduced to him, I just looked at him and I went : Waw no shit! He was very friendly. And he said something to me that no one had ever said as it relates
to coming up to play, to perform. After we chatted for a while, I excused myself, I looked
at my watch and I said well I got to go and play now and he said : hey man, have fun!
And that was a character of our relationship. He could always cut to the truth very quickly
with something as simple as that. And that was part of the great strength of Jaco. It was very strange because. Alex Acuña he played drums at the time. And Manolo Badrena played the percussions. It was very nice.
But the we let Manolo go. And then Alex wanted to follow another type of career. He ended
up playing, I think, with Diana Ross and start making money, in order. But when he left we
didn’t have anybody. We tried out a few guys. We needed a drummer who had attitude
of playing with a big ensemble. On the other hand we needed a guy who could do nice little 4/4 jazz type. Jaco came up with the idea. He had met Maynard
Fegurson’s band. And he said this guy Peter Erskine he has good power and he can swing. and that’s what it was. They needed a drummer to go to Japan and Australia
for this tour. I flew out to Hollywood and I was at the rehearsal studio. And rehearsal was supposed to begin maybe about one o’clock in the afternoon. And I was there at 10 o’clock in the morning setting up my drums... I met all the guys in the crew. Then, one of the
managers came up to me and said : well the guys are gonna be a couple hours late. Ok. Then a couple hours later he came up to me again and said oh the guys’re gonna be a
few more hours late. So they finally walk in the studio rehearsal studio about 7:30
at night or 8 o’clock almost. So I was bored at that point. Zawinul comes in… Checks me out. Shake my hand. Not being so friendly. Wayne was friendly but we just said hello. And then I saw Jaco. He just kind of waved and smiled and ran out the door again. So Joe goes to his synthesizer... and starts playing with some of the sounds. I just jumped up behind the drums. Bam ! I just started playing. Jo turned very surprised and look. I could see a little bit of a smile. And he
started playing. And then Wayne started playing. And then Jaco came back in as if he had planned this. He had a six pack of Heineken beer and he kind of went… Smiled. Put it down. He jumped up on to the stage. Turn to his left like it was planned. They threw him his bass.
He caught it. Put the strap on. And we played about 30, 40 minutes of impromptu medley of all the songs. So, the next day. That rehearsal more or less started on time. CBS records send over photographer and we are posing. And so I asked Zawinul
as we are posing and stuff. I said hey Joe ! He said: what? Can I tell my friends I am in the band? You know… he is still looking at the camera and he says: you can tell your friends you are going to Japan. I was quite excited and kind of nervous. I saw them... pouring some talcum powder, like baby powder on the stage. And I could smell it. What’s this? And one of the crew guys was about to explain. And Jaco went, like this…
He said: you’ll see. So, we start the concert. We were doing… At that time we opened with
Wayne Shorter’s “Elegant people”. So we started with… A lot of adrenaline, I am very excited and… Kind of nervous. But I felt really good being here. And when we got to that section, Jaco started doing like a moonwalk. Like a James Brown
thing as he was playing. Sliding. And that’s what the powder was for. And I just started laughing. And so the rest of the concert… Again. You know, in a way, it was like Jaco
had said to me a year or so before, you know. Have fun ! When Peter and Jaco joined Weather report…
Actually Jaco got Peter on the band. That was a very important event in musical history. And that chemistry between those two guys, is just legendary, you know. And if you listen
to the records, it’s obvious I think toanyone. They set a standard that yet has to
be surpassed in terms of innovation and just pure originality and tradition, you know.
And all those things combined… It’s very rare to hear musicians that play together on that level. He was phenomenal to play with. I mean…
Being a drummer. It was unlike anyone else. He played the bass better than anyone else
ever did or ever will. You know there was one Paganini, there was one John Coltrane, there was one Charlie Parker and there is only one Jaco. Sound I think his biggest attribute was his sound.
You know, there are a lot of guys who can play as quickly as he can but his sound is the biggest thing. When I was writing music or let’s say I
am not writing music in the sense… I improvise music, and then I write it. I like to write for the sound of people have. Wayne had this wonderful sound. Jaco had this special sound. So when I was improvising at home or whatever, I had this in my mind, this sound. And then of course, it is very easy for you to write
music or to make music when you have something. It might… As far as influencing my music, it was not. And he didn’t influence Wayne’s music either. We had what we had and he brought
what he brought. And that’s what made it so nice because he was not intervolving There was Wayne, there was myself, and there was another total person. Jaco, because he played the electric bass,
he was able to develop a sound on the electric bass that was revolutionary. It is impossible
to reproduce that sound on the acoustic bass. Cause the acoustic bass has a much shorter envelope. Jaco was able to take the sustain that comes from electric instruments and the
singing quality of the fretless electric bass and develop a sound that was revolutionary
you know. And he used it to exploit melody, and harmony like no one else had ever done prior to him. Jaco is very much there. He acts as a bit of conscience for me. He is an indelible part of the lives I think of all the people that
got to know him or were touched by his music. I mean, still when you listen to the recordings.
The way he played the fretless… Even when you are listening to the very early stuff
like “Bright size life Pat Metheny ” track. I mean his intonation is absolutely flawless
on the fretless and I still haven’t heard anyone else play the fretless like he did. Nobody can play like he did. For a while it was painful to hear anyone else touch the
instrument. He made it so much his own. I think “The Pat Metheny Bright size life ” was very important one and that had come before. That did not get as much media coverage but
once the Weather Report record started coming out and the solo record started getting recognition,
people started going back and listening to the things that he had done. Even as far back
as the Wayne Cochran recordings, which was a R&B band that he played with in Florida. Jaco basically he defines what the electric bass can do. There have been lots of great players come. We are all influenced by Jaco. But I don’t think anybody really surpassed that... ...that innovative accomplishment that he did. I would not be approaching the bass this way,
the way… the thing that I am trying to develop now is utilizing the harmonic capabilities
in bass and Jaco was the one who opened the door for that. And he did it on a four-string
bass. So that was part of the inspiration from Jaco to me. To try to develop that kind
of approach to playing the bass. First time I met him was… I was playing at the “Caf’ conç’” in Paris. One night, all my musician friends came up to me and told me Jaco Pastorius is performing at the Sunset, you should come over. I got there. Jaco was at the bar with Kenny Kirkland and his manager. We introduce ourselves. And Jaco said: are you Paco Sery ? I said yes. Monty Alexander told me about you. And he asked if I could play reggae. First encounter. Wait, what? Jaco Pastorius asking me if I could play reggae. That surprised me coming from him. And I said yes, I can play everything. He said come on let’s jam together. We jammed with Kenny Kirkland and had a blast. An hour later the managers came up to me and said they wanted me on the tour with the band. And the next day we actually left on a two-year-tour. He invented everything. He invented the way to play « fretless ». His legacy lives on. It’s not complicated, after him, there is no one. It's Jaco you know ! Everybody tries to imitate him but it is impossible. Impossible. With Jaco he had like these thumbs. He had
like a deformed thumb or something. So, he could do things on the instrument that very
few people were able to do because of the physiology of his hands. And you may have seen pictures of him where he could dislocate both of his thumbs. So he could do things technically on the bass that nobody had ever seen before, that nobody would ever even attempt. Cause Jaco had this certain type of physical structure to his hands that enabled him to
produce the tones and the sounds and the magical things that he produced on the bass. The physical part of it was very important I think. Virtuosity Going back to his first solo records, I mean… The Donna Lee track… It’s something that all bands… That’s almost become a staple of every bass players vocabulary that I teach at all the universities in Southern California. All my students come in and that’s the first thing they want to play for me. They want to show me that they can play Donna Lee. And that’s an old
Charlie Parker song that goes way back to the 40’s. And it’s based on an old standard
called Back Home in Indiana. And it’s funny that they know Jaco’s recording of it. And
some of them can even play Jaco’s solo verbatim. I’ve worked on that a lot. I forgot and now I can’t execute it anymore but I was very influenced by that. They all know Donna Lee but they don’t know where the song came from and I think that it is an interesting gap between the generations. And Jaco reintroduced that music to a whole new generation of music listeners, myself included. When I first heard Donna Lee, it just sounded like a bass player playing any crazy notes he can think of... cause I did not know anything about bebop, so it just sounded like... random notes. And Jaco sound… because up to then
I had been listening to Stanley Clarke. I have been listening to Larry Graham. I have been listening to guys with a very bright sound. So to hear Jaco’s sound, it sounded very dull to me, you know… Cause I was used to a mire bright sound. But the sound grew on me. So I kept listening and listening and then I began to learn Bebop. And once I learned
Donna Lee, what it really was, then I could really appreciate Jaco’s version of it.
You know, it took me a few months to understand what he was doing. But every time I heard it, I appreciated it more. So it really grew on me. The room 219 I was in LA, I was playing with Roberta Flack, the fantastic, legendary singer and I was on the road with her. I was pretty young.
I was probably 21 years old. As a matter of fact I was just turning 21. and we came to Los Angeles and we checked into a hotel. And, I went to my room and my phone rang
I said hello and it was Jaco. And he said: Marcus I am in room 219. Come up here and get your lesson! And I laughed you know, and I said: this guy, man, he is crazy. But I got myself up to 219. And I hung out. He was there with his wife. And we were just talking. He was very nice. He had his bass and he played stuff for me and I played for him. You know I was like… He said: yeah yeah, I can do that. I just don’t do that, you know. And I said: yeah, I know you probably could do it. But he showed me exercises for my fingers … He showed me a whole tone exercise and I still use to practice today. He kind of forced everyone to not follow what he did. If anyone tries to play like him, it feels false. One of the only guys who can do it and it does not sound false to me is Dave Carpenter. Dave seems to be playing it
from a very truthful place. He gets it. I guess you can ask what makes it so true. And my answer would be that, in the case of Dave like Jaco, these were guys that played in bands. They were real band players. He made it ok for bass players to solo. He
made it ok for bass players to use slightly thinner sounds. He really... changed things. Unfortunately he was like Billy Cobham. Because Billy Cobham did the same thing for drummers. After Billy Cobham you find all these drummers on these R&B gigs trying to play like Billy Cobham. And they were losing their jobs. They were getting fired because it wasn’t appropriate for R&B music. And I think a lot of bass players got fired from their jobs as well using that thinner Jaco’s sound and playing all those notes. So I think he had like a negative influence
too on bass players who were saying hey this is what I want to do regardless of what situation I am in. So you have to be careful. You know before Jaco, there weren’t that
many people who had personality on the electric bass. You know, they played but you never
could recognize a guy just by his sound on the electric bass except for Stanley Clark. He was the only guy that you could recognize. Everybody else sounded like… to figure out who they were. you had to listen to them
for a long time So I think he really encouraged future bass players to have personality on the bass, try to bring out their personalities. If you approach it like, oh I am going to
play solo lives like Jaco, then you are kind of missing the foundation of it. When people
imitate him, they are imitating such apparent surface aspects. It does not really get at what he did. And that’s the profound quality of his playing because it did have such a
deep strong base. B-A-S-E. Base or foundation in music. He really... He really cared about music. Dr Jaco and Mr Hands He was the first person to really exploit the melodic power of the electric bass. Really more so than anyone else. I mean, Jack Bruce and Larry Graham and Stanley Clarke and some of the people had started exploring that area. But Jaco defined it more clearly than anybody at that time. There was nobody at that period
of time playing melody on the bass with the kind of harmonic command that Jaco had developed by that time. I guess he probably was still in his 20’s but he would leap some bounce
ahead of everybody else at that point. He brought to the electric bass something what Ray Brown had brought to the acoustic bass, to open up the instrument in a total different way. He had enormous hands... He had enormous musicality... He had a great great sense of rhythm. And melodic. He was phenomenal talent. He could play very good piano. Whatever he played. He played drums really good. He played guitar. He was one of those kinds of
guys… Guys like us. Therefor he fits so well in this concept. He played very good drums...Terrific drums ! He made music with anything Jaco was a great drummer. The drumming he did on Teen Town of course was revolutionary, I mean, we were all like wawh! Listen to that!
We never heard something quite like it. Jaco was a fearless musician. I mean for all the
self-doubts that he might have had which seemed to have become more apparent later, as I got to know him. He had a recklessness a fearlessness about him. this is a great feature for a drummer to have. Jaco was always adventurous. And yet, his musical roots were very deep with the Caribbean and Florida's influence. We also, I think had listened to the same
music and we had a common history of listening to a lot of music of television shows Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Thad Jones & Mel Lewis band… His tastes were so broad. You know he has music that has depth. But he is also, he plays things that catch a young ear. You know what I mean… he plays harmonics,
he plays with distortion. He plays with all the things that a young person would go : oh it’s cool, you know. But after they get initially brought in, then they can start to really appreciate the deeper aspects of his music too. So he had an appeal on every level. And I think that’s what makes his music last. There is music before Jaco and music after Jaco. Because he influenced way more that just bass player. He influenced composers and all musicians. He influenced the way we think about music and the way we think about the bass function in contemporary music. He is a musician. A real musician. You can listen to his music in 30 years and feel like it’s brand new. To get there… It is... There is no word. It is magical. Fresh ideas A musician his most valuable asset is his imagination, you know. And Jaco had a tremendous imagination. And that’s what separates him from everybody
else that has a sound like him. They have the technique, they have the proper bass,
they have everything. But they just don’t have anything interesting to play. And this is a problem. You have to study music. So I’ll tell guys who say I am a bass player,
so I say good, can you play the piano ? And he goes no. So I say : well so you know Charlie Mingus, Stanley Clark, Jaco Pastorius, they all played the piano and they learned harmony, they learned music. And not just on the bass. When they pick up their bass, they know how their instruments fits in with the rest of the music. Word of mouth is a stunning piece of art. It’s an incredible recording. The sound and the technology, I mean… This was before automation. There was no digital console. There was no memory. Jaco was playing the mixing board like an instrument. And all the ideas he had for overdubbing and mixing sounds and creating textures using voices, woodwinds and strings… You know he really was the jazz version of the Beatles. For me, his legacy has more to do with his improvisational spirit, with that fearlessness, with that real love of coming to terms with the musical truth that he was looking for. He embraced the sounds of so many different
musics and instruments and cultures. Jaco was probably the first eclectic bass player because he was not only influenced by jazz, but by R&B music, pop music and rock
and very influenced by classical music. So he had an eclectic background in his musical upbringing. Respect elders You know I remember when we were working on
the “Word of mouth” album. As he was mixing it. We were at A&M studios and Burt Bacharach, the great song writer was in the studio, Jaco found out and he was thrilled that Burt
Bacharach came to the studio we were working in and Jaco could play “Tree views of a secret » for him. So there was a childlike enthusiasm. He loved to play his music for other people. He always showed great respect to his elder musicians. Despite the stories you might hear. I was there, I saw him with the members of the New-York philharmonic when we were on tour. And we all met up in Osaka Japan or when we would do a jazz festival. Ray Brown picked up his bass. I have a wonderful photo of ray Brown playing Jaco's bass. And Jaco is just looking at the camera like … You know, so proud and happy. I have known Gil for a long time, and I have always liked his music. Especially his arranging definitely, you know… I was very influenced by him as much as any arranger ever in my own writing or arranging. His legacy is a living one. all the music that he wrote it is still being played today. They called me to participate in a tribute album for Jaco. And it was being released in Japan. And they said chose a song that you would like to do. It is very difficult to cover a song by Jaco because, you know, you don’t want to simply play it the same way. What’s the point? His records are very clear and very well recorded so there is no use in just trying to recreate it. And you’ll never do it as well. But at the same time, you don’t want to change it so much that nobody recognizes what it is and away the beauty of what it is. So it is tricky.
But I felt like I could do a good job with “Portrait of Tracy”. Teen Town, I have been playing that since that Heavy Weather album came out. And I have been playing with my thumb so much that it
was pretty much pretty natural to me to play with my thumbs. I was doing a television show
with David Sandborn. David Sandborn had a tv show, a tv special and Eddie Pamieri. Eddy Pamieri was his guest and he was playing a piano, acoustic electric piano very loud. We had decided to do “Teen Town” and I said: Man! I can’t hear myself. So I began to play with my thumb. And we got so many letters. People wrote to the TV station and said : how is he doing that, that’s fantastic. So I just thought, oh people like that so I decided to put that on my album that I was working on. So, that’s how I got to do Teen Town. These mood swings life is not always a positive. Not everything is always: hey that was great and that was unbelievable. It was. But it became more and more a part his illness interfered with his and our progress. Near the end when we took this incredible big band, this “Word of Mouth” band to Japan… I remember speaking with a couple of the guys and they were saying: this is such a great band and Jaco is doing everything he can to sabotage it. Yet it was still sounding pretty
good. But we were really regretting that at that point we couldn’t have fun. The focus of every day was wondering what would Jaco do next. And this wasn’t the same Jaco at
that point you know. His problems had really come out to manifest themselves in a way that wasn’t easy. In other ways it was always challenging because he was demanding. You know it was a lot of fun, but he had very high standards. And the most I remember about Jaco was his humanity more than his music. His music was there.. unbelievable but that’s not what I remember about him. I was really impressed by his good manners. Very good manners. You could tell he had a good upbringing. coming from a nice family. Jaco really cherished family. You know he came from a broken family. His parents divorced when he was quite young. But he was like the other guys in Weather Report too Joe and Wayne, our parents were a real important part of our families of our lives. And Jaco sent a postcard to my mother when I first joined the band which was all thanks to him recommending me. It was a postcard written with felted pen magic markers with different colors and it just said : Peter is the cat. And he sent it to my mom and the letters kind of trailed off. And I have that in a scrap book. Whenever I look at that, it’s a really nice memory. I remember his sense of humor I think the most. He is a true guy... besides Jaco Pastorius the bass player humanly inside it's a real one I remember him being one of the nicest people in the world. Real Christian kind of guy, you know, good for everybody. Too good ! And God bless his soul, you know, he was special. Mr Pastorius. The last time I saw him... was before he died. Maybe three months before he died. He wasn’t doing so well. He was in the village, Greenwich village in New-York. He was just hanging around kind of like looking kind of homeless you know, He invited me to his house which was very small. It was inside of this area. But he said: hey man I just want to let you know man how much I respect you man. I think you are a fantastic musician. And I was very honored that he would say something like that to me, And you could tell that he was saying something he wanted to tell for a long time. And so, I very much value that. And like I said a few months later he died so that was the last time I saw him. That’s the last thing I heard from him. It was very nice you know. I wrote the song, I wrote it for Miles to play. I wrote it for Jaco but I was hoping Miles would play it. And when I brought it to Miles, I didn’t know how Miles felt about Jaco cause we never talked much about him. So, he said: Marcus what is the name of the song? We were already kind of playing it. He said what is the name of the song and I said: well, I’ve got two titles. One is we can call it Mr. Pastorius or we can call it Rain. Simply rain cause it started off with the sound of water, you know. And he said, no, I think it would be very nice to do that for Jaco. And I was very pleased that Miles wanted to do a song that was a dedication to Jaco as well. So that’s how it happened. I miss him crashing into my gigs, you know what I mean. I miss him. He used to show up at my gigs, man unannounced. And just plug into my amp and turn all the knobs and just start jamming. He did not care. He knew he had free rein with me. So he just come in and go crazy. It was fantastic to hang out with him and talk to him, and... I think that’s what I miss the most. Jaco he is still there. It was my brother really. And thank you Jaco! If you're listening Your brother says thank you very much. And I miss you, To all of us, moreover. This is my last question. You and I both know that he's listening to us right know At this very moment what would you like to tell him ? That’s assuming that we both believe in an after-life. Just tell him that I still love him. A person like that is never gone. Cause time is only… Time as we know, it is not really time. I think that there is only one time. One time… And when you speak about someone, and when you think about someone, in the moment now, then that’s what it is now. Not that it was almost twenty years ago, but it is now. And therefor these people will never die. And there is nothing to miss about the whole thing. It was fun, And one should never cry that it is over with... one should be happy that it was.
