originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Lawd, and I saw him with Jimmy Witherspoon when he was 17 year old prodigy. I was into Weather Report at the time, so couldn't really appreciate it...
Oswaldo, I saw Ford with Witherspoon when
I was about 17 (they opened a show for War) at the local university. It was quite inspiring on a number of levels, culminating in an interesting story about doing a week in a backup band with Witherspoon a few years later in LA. This being a family wine board and all it'll have to wait until we meet up somewhere but let's just say that it involves guns, cocaine, comparisons between Witherspoon and Big Mama Thornton's singing abilities, Tom Waits and a kid from a small town who'd never seen any of that shit in person before, especially not onstage in a club with an audience watching.
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Sometime in the ealy 70s I was sitting in the third row of a Zappa concert in London's Rainbow Theater when he was thrown into the orchestra pit by a jealous roadie. Zappa spent several weeks in divers casts, and we never got our money back, since we got more spectacle than we had paid for.
I was also thinking about the tragic circumstances of Jaco's death, in the hands of a martial arts-trained bouncer in some dark back alley. This bouncer has not, surely, been adequately punished.
I too got more spectacle than I'd paid for at the 1984 Playboy Jazz Festival where Jaco totally flipped out, freaking the rest of the band out so much that they left the stage one-by-one about 2/3rd through the set. Jaco trashed his amp, the drumset, the music stands and tossed his bass against the back wall before Bill Cosby walked over to him, put his arm around the shoulders of the bassist and walked him offstage. I don't recall whose set was scheduled after the Pastorius Big Band's but it would certainly be a tough act to follow.
Mental illness is tough to deal with, particularly if the sufferer refuses to take meds to help with the problem. On the night he died, Jaco just fucked with the wrong guy on the wrong night the was killed - Bill Milkowski's book on Pastorius goes into it in great detail and is worthwhile reading if you're at all interested in Jaco and his influence.
By my reckoning, the "modern" bass revolution began with Jimmy Blanton in the late 40s and from there the major tectonic shifts went through Scott La Faro in the 60s. Starting in the 1970s, both Stanley Clarke (by way of Larry Graham) and Jaco Pastorius (by way of Charlie Parker) brought down a whole world of hurt onto those of us making music with four strings. There were a bunch of other virtuoso players bridging the gaps but these were the guys who radically changed the way people thought about the instrument and its place in the band.
-Eden (here's a video of Jaco toward the end in 1984....he's backed by the Gil Evans band, and I've no idea why he's covered in mud, but at least he was ambulatory and very musical)
