Jaco (-128)

"He who is a legend in his own time is ruled by that legend. It may begin in absolute innocence but to cover up flaws and maintain the myth of Divine Power, one has to employ desperate measures." -Arthur Rimbaud

 "The more famous you are, the more fearful you get of falling off the pedestal, letting people down." -Marilyn Monroe


Foreword

THINK OF JACO A LOT TODAY, especially in my teaching of music. I come across students who play well and have good taste, who have good time and know the language-but somehow how it's not flying. I have a body of study devoted to students who fall into that category, egory, and I have a name for this syndrome: I call it "id lock." A lot of the problem is that the emotional center, the id, is locked for these people. They know music but they're not screaming it from their heart, as Jaco did. He did not suffer from id lock at all. His id was wide open. He was fearless. And fear is really the biggest enemy of creativity. I'll tell you a story about this cat. I used to live in upstate New York, and my house was in a valley between two mountain ranges. The woods dropped down to a stream that was fed by two waterfalls that came off the mountains. The approach to the stream sloped down about 15 feet to the water, and it was rocky all the way down. You could slip and trip on the rocks, so people would walk down there slowly and even use their hands to make sure they didn't fall. The stream itself was icy cold. In the springtime, after the snow melted, it could be up to your chest at the deepest part, but in other places it was only a foot or two deep, so you couldn't really swim in it. I took Jaco to this place. And when he got to the spot where he spied the stream, he just went nuts. "Oh, man! A mountain stream! I love this, man! This is the greatest!" He was standing at the edge, which was about 15 feet from the stream but not directly above it, because the ridge sloped away from the water. In one motion, he just ripped off all of his clothes and jumped off the ledge. He didn't know how deep the water was. The water was maybe three feet deep, Jaco was about 15 feet up-and and it was all rocks on the bottom. He was already in the air as I was yelling, "taco! Nooooooooooo!" And he was halfway down by the time I got "no" out. It flashed in my mind that in a split second I was going to see him die in front of me. And I felt all this sadness. But he made a miraculous lous move-as soon as his body hit the water, he kind of glided. He somehow managed to turn all of that downward energy into forward ward energy. And Jaco was big. But somehow he straightened out, and he came up laughing, screaming hysterically. I'd never seen anything like that. Nobody got into the stream that way; everybody would put in one toe and gradually sit down, trying not to trip on the rocks. But this guy was like Tarzan or Indiana Jones. It was like a movie stunt. I saw it, and I still don't believe it. Jaco was just fearless. His id was wide open, and he experienced life on that level on a daily basis. To me, he was just the highest cat to be around. -Bob Moses


PREFACE

 Jaco: Man and Myth "My name is John Francis Pastorius III and I'm the greatest electric bass player in the world." THE LIFE AND MUSIC of Jaco Pastorius are legendary. endary. A potent force in modern American music, he has been hailed as a genius and dismissed as a madman. Of course, there is a fine line between artistry and autism, as the eminent Swiss psychologist ogist Carl Gustav Jung once theorized-and in Jaco's case, the tightrope he walked was tenuous at best. Like his heroes Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, and Jesus Christ, Jaco didn't make it to 40. Yet, in the relatively short time he spent on the planet, he totally revolutionized his instrument and left behind an incredibly rich body of work that will stand the test of time. In jazz schools and music conservatories all over the world, his name is spoken ken by students in the same reverential tones reserved for such gods as Bird and Mozart. As one aspiring bassist put it, "Jaco opened the door and we walked through." In New York, they still talk about his legendary gigs, his marathon hangs, his outrageous antics onstage and off. Stop in some night at the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note, Sweet Basil, the Lone Star-all showcase clubs where Jaco headlined in his heyday. Or drop in at any of the marginal joints he played during his dark years. Talk to the clubowner, the doorman, a bartender, or any of the regulars on the scene. Talk to musicians or their managers or the employees in record stores around town. Talk to jazz critics from the daily papers or correspondents from Down Beat, Musician, or Billboard. Talk to the homeless cats panhandling outside the clubs or hanging on the West Fourth Street basketball courts. Everybody, it seems, has a tale to tell. It's all become part of the ever-growing body of folklore that fuels the Jaco myth and goes hand-in-hand with his musical legacy. Jaco was to the electric bass what Paul Bunyan was to the lumber industry, what Muhammed Ali was to boxing. Like Babe Ruth and Jimi Hendrix, like Charlie Parker and John Belushi, he was a larger-than-life than-life figure who lived to excess and was worshipped by multitudes. tudes. Throughout the international music community, those two syllables-Jaco-still resound with authority, a testament to his musical genius and the power of his charisma. The rise and fall of Jaco Pastorius, the self-proclaimed "World's Greatest Bass Player," is not just a tragic tale of genius gone awry. It is also an indictment of a callous, uncaring industry that often turns its back on those who helped to build it. It is an indictment of a musicians' union that buries its head in the sand, ignoring its own. And it is an indictment of a political system that offers no safety net of health care for those who need it most. Jaco rode fame like a skyrocket to oblivion. His rise to the top with Weather Report, the premier fusion band of the '70s, was followed by a tragic fall from grace in the mid-'80s that left him spiritually broken, physically beaten, homeless, penniless, and hopelessly out of touch with reality. In the end, his bizarre behavior on the streets of Greenwich Village and Fort Lauderdale was a cry for help, an expression of his inner torment. He was raging out of control, and there was no support system, no network of agencies that could counsel him or offer aid. Even his own family and friends were powerless erless to change Jaco's perception of his condition or the world around him. "He had people in awe of him trying to help," said Bobby Colomby, the drummer and A&R man who "discovered" Jaco and produced his stunning self-titled debut album in 1976. "But something thing in his psyche, something inside of him, wouldn't let him be happy. This man was suffering from a mental illness, and his refusal to be helped was just another manifestation of that illness. We do not have a system in this country that deals with this very well. Unfortunately, in our society, if a guy sneezes or coughs, he's got a cold and we all feel bad for him. We relate to it. If a guy has a tumor, we sympathize. But if a guy has a mental illness, he's a'nut case.' We don't respond well to that. We don't fully understand that it's an illness. ness. And that leads to tragic results." 0 v 00 O In the end, "The World's Greatest Bass Player" began to express a macabre death wish. He'd drink himself into a stupor and fall asleep on the railroad tracks. He'd walk into a bar and pick a fight with the largest, meanest-looking dude in the joint, and then stand at attention tion with his arms at his side and let the guy wail on him. It was as if he were searching for his own executioner. And eventually he found him in the person of a 25-year-old nightclub bouncer trained in the martial arts, a brute who had no idea who Jaco was, what he had created in his lifetime, or what his music meant to thousands of fans all over the world. By the summer of 1986, Jaco had burned nearly all of his bridges. Plagued by wild mood swings and the emotional difficulties brought on by manic depression, a condition only exacerbated by alcohol, he drove fellow musicians from his inner circle. They simply found it too exhausting and heartbreaking to hang with him. Word of Jaco's erratic and unpredictable behavior on the streets reached the industry's movers and shakers, who came to regard him as poison. And nothing, it seemed, could slow Jaco's downward spiral. As drummer Peter Erskine so harshly but accurately put it, "It's tough when a guy sets out to join the ranks of the jazz legends who completely pletely fucked up their lives." Once a giant in the industry and the talk of the jazz world, Jaco had been reduced to persona non grata, a bum panhandling on the streets of New York City for beer money. Banned from most of the nightclubs around town-just as Charlie Parker and Bud Powell had been in the twilight of their careers-he often pawned his bass. His closest companions were the hustlers and street types who congregated gated at the West Fourth Street basketball courts and in Washington Square Park. He seemed to have what Graham Greene once called a "Cophetua complex": an emotional need for low-class people. For every old friend who offered Jaco a helping hand to lift him out of his doldrums, there was one who turned his back on him. Some would sidestep him when they spied him disheveled and red-eyed, eyed, begging for money on the street. Others would simply avoid eye contact in the cold-blooded manner that has become second nature to New Yorkers. As one colleague admitted, "It was just too painful to have to stare that shit in the face. And besides, I'd done my share of baby-sitting." What caused this deterioration? How could a brilliant artist, a loving father, a loyal friend, a spiritual person, turn into such a deranged denizen of the streets? The long answer is as complex as the human brain itself.. The short answer is simple: drugs, alcohol, and fast living-the same catalysts that hastened the deaths of such other geniuses as Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, Jimi Hendrix, and Billie Holiday.

But dig beneath the surface, get beyond the stereotypes, and you'll discover a myriad of reasons for Jaco's downfall: unresolved anger about his parents' early breakup, guilt about his own failed marriages, riages, and the sadness of being estranged from his children-all coupled with an innate need to pay penance for those "sins." He also felt the constant pressure of maintaining his self-declared status as "The World's Greatest Bassist" and had a deep-seated fear of running out of new ideas. He harbored a lot of inner rage toward the hordes of "Jaco clones" who latched onto his technique, copped his personal voice, and got gigs at a time when record-company executives tives and clubowners were turning their backs on him. (But as Jaco would say, with a tone of righteous indignation, "I know what I invented.") He had problems with alcohol and cocaine, but the heaviest cross to bear was his illness, a manic-depressive condition coupled with a chemical imbalance in his brain that caused him to involuntarily flare up and lose control. It was probably inevitable that Jaco would meet a violent end. Those close to him had seen the signs for years. They had witnessed his gradual decline from the glory days with Weather Report to a sad state of homelessness on the streets of New York. They had seen him panhandling, sleeping on park benches, stalking around the streets of Greenwich Village dazed and confused, muttering incoherently and confronting pedestrians with bizarre, provocative behavior. Those who didn't witness it first-hand heard all the unsettling gossip through the grapevine. Every week there was some new horror ror story, some tale of Jaco showing up drunk for a gig with warpaint on his face or mud splattered across his body, falling off a balcony in Italy, riding naked through Tokyo on a motorcycle, hurling his bass into the sea, trashing a stage, getting his teeth knocked out in some ugly barroom brawl. And the whispering spread like wildfire from one musical community to the next, helping to fuel the Jaco myth. "Unfortunately, whenever you heard about Jaco, it was always in connection to some bizarre thing he had done," says Victor Bailey, the bassist who replaced Pastorius in the Weather Report lineup in 1982. "And it seemed like people just delighted in telling these Jaco stories. They would come up to you with big smiles on their faces and say, `Did you hear what Jaco did?' But I think those people were ignoring the fact that he was sick and needed help." w v-. 41 E 0 z 00 all 9 Drummer Brian Melvin lived with Jaco for four months at the end of 1986, a particularly dark period in Jaco's life. "Everyone was saying ing that Jaco was crazy," remembers Melvin. "They would talk about how he shaved his eyebrows and walked naked down the street, how he did this and that. His reputation was that he was capable of doing anything at any time. That became the norm for Jaco. The people around him helped to create this reputation through all their gossip, but I think he perpetuated it himself. After a while, he had this `bad boy of jazz' image that he had to live up to." Guitarist Pat Metheny believes that Jaco ultimately got caught up in his own myth. At one point during my 1984 interview with Metheny, we found ourselves trading Jaco gossip. Suddenly, Pat stopped the conversation and said, "See, this is exactly what Jaco loves. He gets off on the idea that people are sitting around talking about him all the time. And that's part of his problem." Many fans outside of New York were naively unaware of Jaco's painful final years. And when the sad details finally became known, they could only shake their heads in disbelief and wonder: "How could this terrible thing have happened to someone so gifted, so famous?" How indeed. In 1978, at the age of 27, Jaco was sitting on top of the world, riding the crest of his international notoriety. As Peter Erskine put it, "At one point, he was like the biggest thing in the music business, like the Michael Jackson of jazz or something. He made such an incredible impression. For a creative instrumental musician to have that kind of impact is really unheard of. Here was someone who had what seemed to be the most unbelievable potential. tial. He really had the world by the tail." With his large hands, long fingers, and double-jointed thumbs, Jaco seemed to be born to play the bass guitar. In his prime, he had the speed and dexterity to create solos that matched the explosive genius of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. His revolutionary approach to the instrument-playing melodies, chords, harmonics, and percussive effects all at once-was wholly unprecedented. And his theatrical stage presence-doing flips off his amplifier, throwing his bass up in the air and then whipping it savagely with his strap-was was a direct nod to the rock performance ethic. For me and for thousands of other fans around the world, Jaco was a beacon, an educator, a great unifier who single-handedly bridged the gaps between R&B, rock, jazz, classical, and Caribbean music. He was the personification of fusion music, turning on rock crowds to new music by providing the links between Bird's blazing bebop ("Donna Lee"), Duke Ellington's classic jazz elegance ("Sophisticated Lady"), John Coltrane's explorations ("Giant Steps"), and Johann Sebastian Bach's contrapuntal brilliance ("Chromatic Fantasy"), while blending in Jimi Hendrix's cathartic feedback squalls ("Purple Haze," "Third Stone from the Sun"), James Brown's infectious good-foot foot grooves ("The Chicken"), Bob Marley's reggae lilt ("I Shot the Sheriff"), and the Beatles' harmonically sophisticated pop ("Blackbird," bird," "Dear Prudence"). No one before Jaco had transcended so many idioms. No one had so expertly woven together the essence of those disparate worlds into such a seamless package. And he presented it with a demeanor that was decidedly punk-an unprecedented stance in the jazz world. He even named one of his songs "Punk jazz," an apt description tion of his music. As he told Damon Roerich in a 1980 Musician interview: "I'm a punk from Florida, a street kid. In the streets where I come from, a punk is someone who's a wiseguy. And I'm sort of a wiseguy, inasmuch as I don't give a shit!" In that interview, Jaco went on to say: "Punk is not a bad word. It's sort of someone you respect because he's got enough balls to stick up for himself. It has nothing to do with the punk music movement that's coming out of England now, where people are sticking needles through their noses. I've been calling my music Punk jazz for ten years, since long before this English music came along." (Ironically, fellow bass innovator Stanley Clarke once referred to Jaco as the "Sid Vicious of jazz," a reference to the doomed bassist of the Sex Pistols, the band that spearheaded the punk movement in the U.K.) As Jaco rocketed into the consciousness of the international music community, he quickly attained a larger-than-life status. Stories of him walking up to the likes of Ron Carter and Rufus Reid and introducing ducing himself as "The World's Greatest Bass Player" are the stuff that legends are made of. In a relatively short period of time, Jaco had gone from complete obscurity as a self-described Florida beach bum to worldwide renown, winning critics' polls in Italy, Germany, France, Japan, and the United States. Full of a gunslinger's swagger, he was always quick to point out that "it ain't braggin' if you can back it up." And he could.

The brash, cocky manner in which he strutted around onstage, the way his energetic presence filled a room, the way he played his instrument with such force and invention-all of this fed the Jaco myth. As one fan said, "I always thought of Jaco as being invincible, as someone who could bounce back from anything. That's why, when I heard he was in a coma, I just figured he would pull out of it and go back to being Jaco again." But what did it mean to be Jaco? Was it merely a persona he created, ated, a role he assumed like some theatrical professional wrestler stepping into the ring? Where did John Francis Pastorius III end and Jaco begin? And, one could ask, would he still be alive today if he had been content to be simply John Francis Pastorius III rather than Jaco? "Maybe he couldn't deal with the pressure of having to be Jaco every day, of having to take the next step musically," speculates Peter Erskine. "There was always the question of 'What's Jaco going to do next?' and all the pressure that went along with that. To me, that's what destroyed him." Drummer Ricky Sebastian offers another take on that theory. "One day I saw him lying on the sidewalk and said, 'What are you doing, man? Get up from there.' And he said, 'No, it's all over, man. I'm never gonna top what I've done already. I'm just living on my past.' In hindsight, I really understand what he was saying. I mean, can you imagine the pressure? Fame is something you dream of for so long and work so hard to attain, and then all of a sudden- boom!-you get it, and everybody is talking about you and you're winning all the polls and stuff. For that not to go to your head takes a really strong personality, and Jaco had a big ego to begin with. So you can imagine the effect all the sudden fame had on him." In his glory years, Jaco had tribes of followers in cities all over the world. All he had to do was step off the plane-they were always waiting for him, like disciples waiting to touch the hem of His garment. ment. But what lay beneath the myth was a complex, tormented individual. vidual. Jaco was an utter enigma, easily misunderstood and often maligned by those who observed his unpredictable behavior from a safe distance. As one friend sadly commented, "I wish people would have had more sympathy and compassion for him. I mean, the cat suffered toward the end. They called him crazy, but they didn't have to walk in his shoes. Some people never got a chance to see the real person, before he became the sideshow that was `Jaco.' A lot of people ple saw only the asshole-the rude, obnoxious person they'd rather forget. It's a shame, because he really was a good guy and a loyal friend." Like a lot of people, I still harbor mixed feelings about Jaco's passing. ing. Sadness for the torment he endured. Anger for leaving us. I grieve over the talent wasted, the promise unfulfilled. If he were alive and healthy and living a productive life right now, what kind of music would Jaco be creating? Would Jaco, who was acutely attuned to the concept of groove, be turned on by the current fusion of jazz and hip-hop? Jaco loved funky James Brown tunes, often pointing to saxophonist Maceo Parker's early work on All the King :s Men as "the real deal." Those same grooving bass lines and funk rhythms are the basis (via sampling) for much of contemporary hip-hop hop music. Might Jaco be collaborating with Public Enemy or A Tribe Called Quest today? Or would he have gotten into some new conceptual cross-fertilization of hip-hop and jazz on his own, something thing like the direction that such young jazz composers as Steve Coleman and Greg Osby have taken? Or would he have put his bass aside to concentrate on orchestral works? We'll never know. We've lost our chance to discover what he might have achieved as an artist. And those of us who knew Jaco also feel the loss on a more personal level. We miss the wise-cracking prankster who seemed to embrace life with such a passion, enriching ing our lives in the process. Jaco once confided, "I'm not a star. I'll never be a Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley or Ray Charles." Then-in a rare, revealing moment-he he added, "I'm really not even Jaco." Peter Erskine seemed to pick up on that sentiment when he said to me in a 1986 interview, while Jaco was confined to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, "I just hope he does whatever it takes for him to come back and be happy and use that beautiful mind of his to make music again. And he doesn't even have to be Jaco again, as far as I'm concerned. He doesn't need to be anything but himself, which is John Francis Pastorius torius III, a pretty remarkable human being and a great guy." When word of Jaco's demise came down, those in the know back in New York sighed a deep sigh for the inevitable. Perhaps guitarist Hiram Bullock expressed it for everyone when he said, "I'm shocked, but I'm not surprised." "The World's Greatest Bass Player" slipped off to that big jam session sion in the sky on September 21, 1987-ten weeks short of his 36th birthday. John Francis Pastorius III is gone, but his spirit prevails. It's in the music. Just listen.

Bill Milkowski. Jaco: The Extraordinary Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius (Posición en Kindle129-160). Edición de Kindle.