Jaco Pastorius – Bass

This is the album that changed it all. I was only 13 when this album came out and I was not any where near playing the bass at that age. It was some time before this guy appeared on my radar and I can’t recall when I first heard the name. As my ears started to turn towards Jazz-Rock as it was then called (the term Fusion came later), I started to hear much more sophisticated players like Jeff Berlin (I think I may have heard him first as I was a Yes fan and got hold of the Bruford album, ‘Feels Good To Me’) and Percy Jones (I remember seeing his fact in Musicians Only, a UK based musician’s paper (think Melody Maker for musos) but, following that course, it was inevitable that I would happen upon the self-proclaimed ‘greatest bass player in the world’. I do remember getting hold of the Jaco LP and hearing those first notes of ‘Donna Lee’; it wasn’t the chops that initially got my attention as much as the sound but, like every other bass player at the time, I started taking on board the whole thing. Because this predated the technology available now, it was harder to get to the details but we tried: play, rewind, play, rewind, play, rewind…. if you know, you know.

The track ‘Opus Pocus’ was defined by the main sliding double-stops but there was a line in there that I just couldn’t get at the time. I had long forgotten in but, today, I revisited the album and heard it again. I am not doing full transcriptions at the moment for practical reasons but thought I would have a crack at getting this excerpt down. The main them riff that starts the transcription is at roughly the two minute mark and it features a classic Jaco groove that I have never looked at this closely. I find that some of the modern players (Bona? Feraud? Willis?) fill almost every space in their lines with ghost notes but Jaco left a lot of space in his lines which, for me, made them funkier. Or maybe I am just hearing it that way.

From the 1976 album, ‘Jaco Pastorius’, this is a choice excerpt from the tune, ‘Opus Pocus’. Give it a try. it is playable.