John Patitucci – Double Bass

I remember vividly when I first heard John Patitucci. I used to listen to a UK BBC Radio Jazz programme called Jazz Today which was hosted by the late Charles Fox. He used to play some really eclectic stuff and I used to record the programmes onto C90 cassettes (this is the 1980s) and still have most of them today. Loads of great stuff on there including some really rare UK sessions by people like John Paricelli, Django Bates, Tim Brady (Canadian guitarist), Vienna Art Orchestra – really brilliant stuff. On one memorable episode, Fox played ‘Got A Match’ from the then recently released eponymous ‘Chick Corea Elektric Band’. The keyboard/bass unison head and Patitucci’s solo immediately captured my imagination and I literally went out the next day and bought the album. I didn’t realise it at the time but I had heard Patitucci before on the Manhattan Transfer ‘Vocalese’ album where he plays their arrangement of Clifford Brown’s ‘Sing Joy Spring’ but the Elektric band this was something else and more in keeping with where my head was at at the time.

Fast forward several years by which time I was listening to a lot more Jazz and had come across a Dave Grusin album of big band arrangements of Leonard Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story’ that included ‘all the cats’; Weckl, Patitucci, Dave Valentin, Brecker, Ritenour, Bill Evans (saxophonist), Arturo Sandoval and Gloria Estafan who I adore. The arrangements are fantastic and I always wanted to try and get the bass parts written down but, pre-Moises’ this was quite challenging and I never got to it. Well, now I have. Another ‘bucket list’ transcription. This is the complete john Patitucci bass performance of ‘Prologue’ from the 1997 Dave Grusin album, ‘West Side Story’. Its a readable chart but there is a lot of counting, some challenging stabs and a couple of Patitucci fills that most of us will not be able to execute without practice.

If you haven’t heard this already, you’re gonna love it.