My lesson with Jaco

In 1985, if you were a serious electric bass player, if you’d learned all the rock riffs and grown tired of Kiss and the Beatles and you’d listened to some jazz but had come to the conclusion that acoustic basses were inarticulate overgrown artifacts from wig-infested European orchestras, well then there was only one name that mattered, and that was Jaco Pastorius.

Jaco played jazz, I suppose, but mostly in so far as the music was largely instrumental and often featured a saxophone or an entire horn section. His music differed from traditional jazz in that it had soul and funk and white-hot energy and was largely electric. He had a song called Punk Jazz, and that name pretty much summed up the sound he was after. Like a Ferrari in midtown traffic — just bristling with “I could smoke you at any minute” energy.

Jaco wasn’t all flash, though. Much of what he did was groove, restrained even. He had a very sensual way of hitting the low bits. He mostly played fretless bass, and he would slide into notes in a way that growled — two- and three-note chords. To me, there is nothing like sound of a root played on the lowest string and the third played an octave up, on the highest string. These things just weren’t done in pop music or in acoustic jazz and certainly not in the hard rock of the day where bassists would plod away on a single root note for an entire song.

Jaco’s music defined what was possible on the electric bass. He single-handedly invented a whole new vocabulary for that language. The Shakespeare of bass.

I was a sophmore in college in 1985 when I got the call (this was before email) from my drummer friend in NYC that Jaco was giving lessons at a place called the Drummer’s Collective. Why was a bass player giving lessons at a drum school? I didn’t know. Why was the most famous bass player in the world giving lessons at all? I couldn’t be sure of that either, but I had a feeling it had to do with his reputation for drug abuse and “we’re-not-booking-gigs-for-you-until-you-straighten-up-your-act” erratic and self-destructive behavior.

Jaco was 33 at the time, a mere 10 years after breaking on the scene as a sideman to Pat Methaney and joining the jazz-fusion group Weather Report. For a cool-headed professional, one’s early thirties would have been the middle years of a long career, especially in jazz, where musicians seem to ripen with age. But not Jaco. He famously burnt the candle at both ends, both in his music and his personal life. I decided I should miss some class and make my way down from upstate New York to have one of these lessons while he was still around.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into the small room was that he was kind of a big guy — at least to the eyes of a 19-year-old. And he had HUGE hands. He had a low voice, and seemed not quite awake. Late night? Hung over? I could only guess. But he was calm and polite and not at all the crazy man I’d feared he would be.

Then I noticed that the bass he was playing — an ancient sonic blue Fender Jazz — had had its neck broken right in half at some point and glued back together. The most famous bass player in the world was giving lessons to strangers on a broken bass. There was something not quite right with this scenario, but I sat down awkwardly on a folding chair and took my bass out of its case.

Jaco asked me what I wanted to “do” on the bass. Do? I wasn’t ready for that question. In fact, I hadn’t thought past the arriving part. But now I was there, and this legendary musician was asking me about life. What popped into my mind was the way he could sustain these blisteringly fast solos. These weren’t just scales. What was he playing? So I said I’d like to learn how to do that. It was a terrible answer, but it was all I had.

I offered that I had partly figured out how to play one of his famous — and famously fast — songs, Teen Town, and I proceeded to play what I had put together (incorrectly, as it turns out). When I came to the end of my rendition, he picked where I had left off. Only, where my version was meek and wobbly, his was dominating and graceful.

Watching him play up close, even in his semi-wakeful state, it was immediately clear to me why he had become famous. He had TOTAL control over the instrument, and could probably play whatever popped into his head, effortlessly. That broken old bass quite literally sang in the grip of those giant hands. His sound was utterly unique. I gulped.

“Do you read music?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied in a half-truth. “I’m going to jot some exercises down that will give you strength in your hands and get you familiar with the fretboard,” he said. “The rest will come by ear.”

So for the remainder of the lesson, he wrote down exercises in my notation book and patiently walked me through each one — exercises that left my left hand feeling like rubber and my mind numb. Another surprise: He had very neat notation. I had never equated his punk jazz career with the need for notation at all, but he had obviously done a fair amount of it.

As the lesson was winding down and my courage returning, I asked what he was up to these days. This was like an energy tonic. “I’m working on a new project that is going to blow people away,” he beamed. He described some combination of classical fugues and jazz, and I nodded dutifully, happy to have made a connection with someone I admired so much.

Then I said something I didn’t expect: “That’s good, Jaco, because there is a whole generation of bass players that are looking up to you and hoping you stay clean.” He looked sheepish. “Yeah,” he said to the kid almost half his age. “You know how it is when you hang out with certain cats and one thing leads to another.” I didn’t, and I felt embarrassed for having said it.

When our time was up, I packed up my bass and shook his hand goodbye. It didn’t even occur to me to ask him to sign my notebook, and I was still feeling out of sorts as I left the building and started my journey back upstate.

Less than a year later, Jaco was homeless, living on the streets of Greenwich Village and playing basketball at a playground on 6th Avenue, near Bleeker Street. His two Fender Jazz basses — a fretted bass from 1960 and a fretless from 1962 — had been stolen. Someone had hand-drawn a sign on a piece of paper and taped it to a pole, “Have you seen Jaco’s basses?” Today, those instruments would probably fetch a quarter of a million dollars.

A year later, he was dead. After jumping onstage uninvited at a Carlos Santana concert in Fort Lauderdale, he got into a fight at a nearby club with a bouncer who beat him into a coma. He died 10 days later. He was 35. What seemed like merely a punk-jazz lifestyle at the time turns out to have been a fatal combination of bipolar disease and alcohol. An entirely preventable tragedy. Like the mathematician John Nash portrayed in A Beautiful Mind, Jaco’s genius seems to have been entwined with a chemical imbalance that enabled him to see things in a four-stringed instrument that nobody had seen before — and that few can replicate all these years later.

The oddly neat notation in my music book took on a kind of mystical gravity after Jaco’s death. Always a serious player, I went deep into the instrument for many years, practicing ten or more hours a day, transcribing great jazz solos, steeping myself in the musical origami of Coltrane’s Giant Steps period. I could play Jaco’s exercises from my book in any key and at any tempo, anywhere on the fretboard.

Today I am 10 years older than Jaco was when he died, and the pure white-hot flame of musicianship no longer burns as brightly. But as I watch my 12-year-old son sprint headlong into the peculiar world of 3D role-playing game design, I am reminded that at a young age, we take our inspirations where we find them. Our heroes are not always role models, but they have the power to motivate and to help us imagine great things — and that is as precious a commodity as we have on this earth.