Raphael Saadiq has been a torchbearer for organic bass grooves in contemporary R&B since his early-’90s breakout as Tony Toni Toné’s frontman.

Since then, he has provided basslines for East and West Coast rappers such as A Tribe Called Quest, Snoop Dogg, and Q-Tip, and he's played a key role on D’Angelo’s critically acclaimed neo-soul albums.

When asked in the May 2004 issue of Bass Player about the loose, way-back-in-the-pocket feel that he and groove masters such as Pino Palladino brought to ’90s R&B, Saadiq simply replied: “We call it the grease.”

“It’s a way of laying behind and then jumping right back on top of the beat when you feel you’re pulling back too much, sort of like a rubber band.”

And while the feel may be rooted in the pocket, Saadiq’s approach to tone is decidedly old-school. “I use old flatwound strings, backing off the treble and doing some thumb plucking. It gives me a tone somewhere between a kick drum and vintage James Jamerson.”

It was Jamerson's work on Marvin Gaye's How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You) that first sparked Saadiq’s interest in bass at age seven.

“My father and my uncle played guitar, so I was around a lot of music, but when I heard Jamerson on that song I told my dad, ’Whatever instrument that is, that's what I want to play.’”

Little did he know at the time, but family connections would bring Saadiq a lesson from one of the greatest players to have ever picked up the electric bass.

“My godfather, James Levi, played drums with Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters. He always had musicians over at his house, and one day he asked this bass player to help me out.

“The guy drove me home, came up on my porch, pulled out his bass, and started playing and giving me pointers. Years later I found out it was Jaco Pastorius.”

With additional inspiration from local hero Larry Graham, Saadiq earned his calluses in every musical setting and venue imaginable.

“I'd get on stage and play solo bass, or play with a drummer behind a rapper all night, changing my bassline every 16 bars or so.”

That diversity has stayed with Saadiq, who loves to jump from project to project, sometimes spontaneously contributing to an artist in an adjoining studio.

“The original greats on my instrument, like Jamerson and Chuck Rainey, played music that was for everybody, young and old, of all races. I’ve always wanted to make music that can touch that many people.”

“I always liked Jaco, and I felt that if I'd known him better, I could have helped him out. I recorded him once, but he was sideways.”

One of the many prophetic and profound statements made by Bill Laswell, renowned bassist for the renegade groups Material, Deadline, and Painkiller, and producer of such cutting-edge bands as Public Image Ltd, Motörhead, Iggy Pop, and the Lambomaniacs

Channelling jazz, dub, punk, and hip hop influences, Laswell remains an enigma of bass-playing history and has blazed a trail in creating his own unique style.

“All I ever wanted was for a good drummer to say, ‘He’s bad. I wanna play with him,’” said Laswell in a rare Bass Player interview from January 1992. “There are guys beating up the bass and getting a bunch of notes out of it, but no one really plays great basslines anymore.

“What I value about the bass is the way the sound and the feel relate to an environment. There's an incredible amount of technique involved in just touching the strings, and very few people are aware of that.”

Laswell scored his first commercial triumph as bassist and producer with Herbie Hancock's 1983 album, Future Shock, which included the hit single Rockit.

After that, offers started to pour in, including Mick Jagger's She's the Boss and Laurie Anderson's Mister Heartbreak, as well as projects for Iggy Pop, Féla Kuti, Sly & Robbie, Motörhead and many others.

When asked about his aforementioned encounter with Jaco Pastorius, Laswell replied: “I was making a record with Deadline, Phillip Wilson's project for Celluloid Records in 1984, and Phillip ran over to the old Lone Star to get Paul Butterfield. Jaco was there, and he tagged along. We let him play for about three minutes at the end of Makossa Rock, but it wasn't happening.

“I saw Jaco play live in his early days, when he first came out. He had a voice – it wasn't even bass guitar, it was just this unique voice. The stuff he did with Joni Mitchell was great, but then he lost it.

“He made a great contribution, but what came after him was all these idiots trying to sound like him. That's why bass players today are so fucking lame. To me, bass is some serious shit. It's like a religion or a good Western; it's beyond music – it's about character.”

Is there anything you're especially proud of in your work as a bass player?

What I'm sort of happy about is the way I sound like a lot of different people – it doesn't sound as if I'm just rescheduling the same events. Also, the way I use a lot of different instruments implies a different approach, but it's got more to do with playing than it does equipment.

I don't talk much about instruments, and I don’t have huge respect for them. They're just tools; you use them to get ideas across and put music together.

What's your attitude toward the bass?

As a bass player, I'm more influenced by religious writers like Gurdjieff or Aleister Crowley than I am by some jerks who play fusion music. And the magazines that glorify these people are just a total waste. I'm not talking about one person in particular, I’m talking about 99.9% of that shit.

There are very few bass players I can listen to; I hear a lot of people with incredible technique doing exercises on the instrument. But as far as playing great lines, playing with a great sound, incorporating it into the music, knowing how to make music really work – I hear very little of that. People are getting around more on the instrument, but that's not interesting to me at all.

Are there any exceptions to that?

Jonas Hellborg is an exception. And Bootsy Collins is a great bassist; he has a limited style, but it's real. What he plays is coming from great experience and a real devotion to a certain style, but these people doing all these acrobatics, tapping and whatever, don't play what I value: good lines and creative ideas about how to juxtapose rhythms with drummers. The feel is what's important.

You must admire James Jamerson.

Everybody likes Jamerson. He played with a natural feel, he had a sound, he had a style. I admired Jamerson when I was a teenager; I heard a lot of great bass players when I was growing up in Detroit.

Do you use both your fingers and a pick?

Yeah, but I stopped playing with my thumb because I felt that style was being exploited without being understood. When Larry Graham did it, it sounded good. And Bootsy has his own style, which is not like Larry's at all.

There was a guy named Doug Rauch who played with Santana; he had a real original style of playing with his thumb. Outside of those three people, I don't think there's anyone else I would bother listening to in that style.

As far as playing with a pick, I'm not really an authority, but it's another technique that works for different kinds of music. It's good if you're going for some kind of conviction and intensity.

Guitarist Bob Quine once said you were the best bass player he ever played with, because you listen and react so well.

Well, Quine never could stand people just dicking around on their instruments. To be honest, I'm not a fan of Quine, but I'd rather hear his stuff than some of this other shit that people are passing off as guitar playing. It sounds like typing.

Have you seen any bands live that impressed you?

I don't go to concerts; I can't concentrate for more than a few minutes on one style of music. That's why I liked what John Zorn is doing with his band, because he jumps from one thing to the next. All the events are squashed down to precise statements – shorter and shorter. I think that's really clever.

You also worked with Motörhead?

They're not that versatile, but they had a commitment to what they do, probably more than most bands. Lemmy’s really into the shit that he's doing. He’s really committed to being in a band. I’m sort of the opposite of that; I have no interest in it, but I can see why it really suited him.

What do you think of thrash bands like Slayer?

I guess in principle I like them. I'm not real excited about that music, but I don't have a problem with it. I'd rather hear that than 90% of the shit that's selling.

Has your interest in Middle Eastern, Asian, and Indian music affected your approach to the bass?

It has, but in a gradual, indirect way; I can't really pinpoint it. I've been working on a kind of North African music called gnawa music. There's a three-stringed instrument called a sintir, which has a very low register – it sounds a lot like a bass. To hear that instrument played is really an experience, and I suppose that has influenced me – to some degree.

What did you think of Paul Simon using Olodum on The Rhythm of the Saints album?

I thought the sound was nice, but I'm not a Paul Simon fan ever, under any circumstances, at all. Neither is Olodum. All the rhythm stuff on his album was well played and everything; it's just that when he put his voice and the rest of that shit on top of it, it's like, ‘Why?’

Do you feel that people at record companies are opening up to more challenging music?

I don't think the people at most record companies would know challenging music if it was right in their faces. I've been hearing challenging music since I started listening; I've heard it in the streets, in the Middle East, in Africa, in India, in Asia. The shit's been there the whole time.

Is there a particular bass you're using these days?

It depends on what I'm doing. I've got a lot of different instruments, and I use them for different areas of music.

All these magazines that talk about equipment – I think it's a waste of paper. All it does is promote equipment; it doesn't explain why people are interested in music or how they got to where they are.

Do you favor a particular method for recording your bass?

The question is: what's the music and how does the bass fit in? Sometimes I'll use a really close delay just to project the thing. Sometimes tons of pedals; other times, straight into the amp.

I use a lot of different amps: Marshalls, mostly, but sometimes SVTs for warmer stuff or a combination of different amps. You should leave yourself open to random things occurring – a blown speaker might be exactly what you need.

The 1970s is often considered the decade in which funk bass was conceived, and it’s an obvious conclusion given the invention of ‘thumping and plucking’ – later rebranded as slap bass – by Larry Graham of Sly & The Family Stone.

But by the end of the decade, fans of rock bass were also spoiled for choice, thanks to Garry Tallent of the E Street Band, Tom Petersson of Cheap Trick, Dee Murray of Elton John’s band, John McVie of Fleetwood Mac, Ross Valory of Journey, and Peter Cetera, a founding member of Chicago.

“There were so many great bassists out there,” said Cetera in the December 2007 issue of Bass Player. “But the two bass players who had the biggest impact on me in the ‘70s were Willie Weeks and Jaco Pastorius.

“Jaco actually came to hear Chicago in the mid ‘70s, and then we got together at my house, where he played this Guild acoustic bass guitar I had.

“He was totally straight then and just the nicest cat, but hearing him up close I was like, ‘I can't even call myself a bassist!’ Yet, he said to me, ‘If you ever need a sub, please call me! I’d kill to play with you guys.’”

Also on Cetera's hallowed list of essential listening is the finale of Donny Hathaway's classic 1972 Live album.

“When I first heard Willie's solo on Everything Is Everything, I was blown away; that's like the greatest bass solo ever! I got to meet Willie Weeks in L.A. and he would come and hang at my house and play that same Guild.

“Later, when I started recording in Nashville, I found out he was down there. He did my sessions and we hung out. He's the most humble guy you can imagine.”

By the time Cetera left Chicago to pursue a solo career in 1985, he had left an indelible mark not just as a bassist, but also as a lead-singing frontman and composer. That's his unmistakable high tenor on 25 or 6 to 4.

As a writer, he penned such hits as If You Leave Me Now, and he co-wrote the band's biggest singles, You're The Inspiration and Hard To Say I'm Sorry, with producer David Foster. The pair also combined for Cetera's own No. 1 hit, Glory of Love, although by that time the bass guitar had taken a backseat.

“When David Foster was brought in to produce our first album for Warner Bros., that really took bass out of the equation. He and I clicked immediately and started writing together, but the sound of pop music had changed.

“David was not only the best keyboard player I'd ever heard in my life, he was the best drum programmer and the best synth bass player. I would go to pick up my bass and then hear him play a killer Moog groove and I'd literally put the bass back in its case. It just didn't fit the music at that point.

“I also began to feel that during my time with the band, because I hadn't been able to fully focus on either singing or bass playing, both had suffered. So, when I went solo soon after, I decided to concentrate entirely on being a frontman.”

You went on to use many top players on your solo albums.

I used Pino Palladino on a couple of my albums, after hearing his amazing work with Paul Young. I've also gotten to know legends like Carol Kaye, Joe Osborn, Duck Dunn, and Chuck Rainey. I get as tickled meeting them as meeting stars like McCartney and Brian Wilson.

How about your vocal start and influences?

I had never sung in school, but when we got the band together it was just, ‘Who's going to sing this one?’ I remember the first song I sang was Mashed Potato. I got the obligatory shock when touching the mic and bass strings!

Were you given any advice at the time?

There were two key early lessons for me. The first was from a friend's father, a jazz saxophonist who took us to see people like Stan Kenton and the Four Freshman. He said, ‘Pay close attention to everyone you listen to. If you like them, you'll pick up something from them; if you don't like them, you'll learn what you don't want to do.’

The other was seeing James Brown in a mostly empty auditorium one afternoon. He could have taken it easy, given the setting, but he was jumping around, sweating and yelling at the band, just giving it his all.

What was your bass approach in Chicago?

My primary goal was to be melodic; McCartney was so in my head then that I'd try to think a little out of the box – like picking my spots for the upper-register stuff. Plus, Jamerson and my R&B roots were in my subconscious, so keeping a strong groove went without saying.

How would you get through the band's extended instrumental suites, which often had odd-meter figures?

That was a challenge because I've never been the most knowledgeable bass player; I don't really read music and if you're talking about chords, I don't go much past, ‘Is it major or minor?’

On the instrumentals, I would have chord charts to follow, and I'd just feel my way through the odd-time stuff. I also had a live bass solo in the early shows, but I can't remember the song. It was a one-chord vamp and my main inspiration at the time was Free's Andy Frasers work on Free Live.

How do you reflect on your career?

I'm very proud of my Chicago and solo careers, and I have no real regrets. At times, I wish I had become more of a formally trained musician, and that I’d learned other instruments and my way around a studio better. But l've heard Paul McCartney say the same thing – not that I'm putting myself in that class. To be told that I had an impact as a bass player all these years later is quite nice.

From his early collaborations with the likes of Bob Brookmeyer and Clark Terry to his own constantly evolving recorded work, Miroslav Vitous has continually redefined the role of the bass in jazz.

After winning a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music in 1965, he moved to New York and quickly established himself as one of the young lions of jazz bass, landing high-profile gigs with Herbie Mann, Stan Getz, Chick Corea, and Miles Davis, among others.

Yet for all he has accomplished, he is still, for many, best known for his three years with the groundbreaking group Weather Report, which he co-founded in 1971 with fellow Miles Davis alumni Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter.

Inspired by Miles' Bitches Brew-era recordings, Weather Report's first four albums explored uncharted musical terrain with ingenious improvisations.

When Zawinul and Shorter later steered the group into a more commercial musical direction, Miroslav parted ways and pursued his own path without looking back – until questions arose over his share of the royalties.

“We each wrote two songs on the first album and formed the publishing company Shoviza – short for Shorter, Vitous, and Zawinul,” said Vitous in the October 2016 issue of Bass Player. “Weather Report belonged to the three of us on paper, technically. And when it ended, unfortunately, they didn't pay me for my third; they just took it. Somebody stole my documents, and that was it.

“It was very unfortunate – the royalties were coming directly from Columbia Records to the office. One-third of those royalties were mine, and they didn't pay me for seven years, if you can believe that. Nothing came.

“Finally I had to go talk to Joe Zawinul and say, ‘Hey, this is not even a case if I take you to court. You are just sitting on my money. You have the contract with Columbia, everything is right there.’ So then they started to pay me back some of the $45,000 they withheld.”

Prior to Weather Report, you were all playing on each other's solo projects. What made you decide to get together and form the group?

For a very short while I was with Miles Davis, but that ended quickly, and I didn't want to go back to Herbie Mann or Stan Getz or the people I had worked with before. I was ready to move on. So I thought I'd start some kind of a band, and decided to give Wayne a call, who had me on his last three albums before that.

He also had just left Miles and was not doing anything quite yet, so it just happened that he was free at that time. I asked him if he'd be interested in putting a group together, and he liked that idea and wanted to think about it.

Two weeks later, he called back and asked me what I thought of having Joe Zawinul in the group, and I said, sure, that's fine; let's do that. And that's exactly how Weather Report started.

What were your thoughts on the bassists who replaced you?

They were all good bass players. With Alphonso Johnson they wanted to have the bass as part of the drum section, you know, bass and drums, and play a funk kind of thing so they could put the melodies on top of that. That's what they wanted. They didn't want somebody to ‘talk’ to them any longer, so that's when the musical conversation disappeared.

But Alphonso Johnson is an excellent bass player. And I was very impressed with Jaco, because I thought he was of their caliber, for sure. He was fantastic.

I heard stories that Zawinul also had a big problem with that, because as soon as somebody was better than him or a threat to him, he started manipulating, and it would end up in a very bad way. Not for Zawinul, but for the other guy!

What was your goal with your 2016 album, Music of Weather Report?

I wanted to show what can really be done with Weather Report’s music. Like Birdland, for example: I studied that intuitively, how the phrases come after each other, and I think I found a more musical way with it than what they did.

The whole idea is about improvisation and playing music – developing the motifs, not just playing the song and going on to the next song. This is what I started to do with Wayne and Joe in the beginning.

That was a hallmark of early Weather Report, the way you developed short phrases into long improvisations.

Right, but eventually that was not enough because Zawinul wanted to be more commercial and play more funk, and he wanted more recognition and money. So everything changed, and the original idea basically stopped with my departure from Weather Report. It was not really what we started.

How did you go about deciding which tunes to record?

I picked the tunes with the melodies I liked the most and which were not too complicated, so we wouldn't have to go into some kind of serious arrangements.

Pinocchio is fantastic on this album. Nobody has ever done anything to that song; they all play the melody and then go to the races with it, but no music ever came out of it. We took it and we just made some beautiful music and it came from heaven. We developed motifs like a classical composer would.

Do you have one main bass, or do you have several?

I have several of them, but I recorded that album on the Busseto bass, which was built by Barry Kolstein on Long Island. It's actually a copy of Scott LaFaro's bass in a small size, but the fingerboard and mensur is exactly the same as on the big bass. It was made for traveling, and I like it so much that I don t play anything else now. It's like my little Ferrari.

Do you still play electric?

No, it's been in the closet for the last 15 years. After leaving Weather Report I stopped playing electric bass. I never really liked it; I had no feeling for it. There are no overtones, there’s no body, there’s no ringing. If you get used to the vibration of the body of the acoustic bass, you are hooked on it. The natural overtones are just not there on the electric instrument.

Besides, I can play twice as fast on an acoustic bass than on electric, so what the hell would I be doing with one?

You're well known for your great technique. What advice can you offer bassists to improve that part of their playing?

You have to train like a classical guy who plays the concertos, like Koussevitzky. Take any concerto, or even cello concertos – whatever you can get your hands on – so that you can develop control over the instrument.

When you have that control then you can have your own ideas and you can execute them. So you have to study the instrument from a classical point of view, because this is where you can get the education and the technique which is required for something like I do.

Best known for his work with the veteran jazz group Yellowjackets, the left-handed Jimmy Haslip discovered the bass guitar in high school, bought a standard right-handed bass, flipped it over, and immersed himself in learning the instrument while continuing to explore every great bass album he could get his hands on.

It wasn’t long before his growing interest in jazz and fusion sparked him to new levels, leading to a life-changing period when he met the great Jaco Pastorius.

“I was rehearsing in Frank Zappa's studio with a band that was being managed by Cavallo, Ruffalo and Fargnoli, who also managed Weather Report,” Haslip told Bass Player back in June 2002. “I was a huge fan of Weather Report who happened to be rehearsing next door.”

“I went to listen and was expecting to see Alphonso Johnson, but when I got there I saw this tall, skinny guy playing keys and I knew it wasn't Joe Zawinul. Wayne Shorter was warming up on the side. Alex Acuna was on drums with Manolo Bandrena on percussion, jamming with the guy on piano.

“Then Zawinul walked in and the tall skinny guy went over to the bass that was laying on the floor and they started rehearsing Black Market. I sat there with my jaw open – I'd never heard anything like it!”

“We hung out in his hotel room 'til about seven in the morning, just jamming and talking about music. We talked about Bach and Charlie Parker, bebop, ethnic music, Cuban music. I got to hear his first solo album which hadn't been released yet. He put on Donna Lee – I couldn't believe it!

“I hung out with him for a couple of weeks. He had some nice things to say about my playing which gave me a thousand confidence points at that stage in my life. I was a changed person from that point on. I started studying his shit like mad and many years later I got the courage to pick up a fretless!”

The hours of practice all paid off, as Haslip’s technique and harmonic knowledge grew by leaps and bounds over the coming years.

“One thing he told me was to play things like a horn player, with that kind of expression and feeling. I remember trying to learn this one little thing he was showing me and I couldn’t quite get it. Then he said, ‘Well, just sing it.’ So I sang what he played and he said, ‘Good, if you can sing it, then you can play it.’

“That made a lot of sense to me and that’s how I’ve learnt a lot of things when I’m having a problem with something, phrasing-wise – I just try to sing it first. Once you’ve got that, then you can kind of sing along and try to emulate that.”

“I ran into Jaco many times, and I always felt he was my friend. He did so much for all musicians, not just bass players. He had a special place in my heart.”

Michael Anthony has come a long way since his days as an exuberant kid with a battered P-Bass, ratty bell-bottoms, and three-inch platforms.

He’s been inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, sold in excess of 80 million records with Van Halen, and still has plenty to say about playing bass guitar for one of rock ‘n’ roll's most iconic bands.

Committed fans will recall Anthony’s proudest moment, a thunderous bass solo performed during Van Halen's live shows – delivered via a Jack Daniels bottle-shaped bass, following a swig from the requisite half-empty bottle of J.D.

In the November 1995 issue of Bass Player, Anthony remembered his own awe-inspiring moment – finding himself face-to-face with the self-proclaimed “greatest bass player in the world”, Jaco Pastorius.

Jaco, who was always a firebrand on stage and never predictable off it, crossed paths with Anthony while on tour with jazz fusion powerhouse Weather Report.

“It's funny – during our first Japan tour, around 1979, I met Jaco at a Tokyo hotel,” said Anthony. “I got into the elevator, and here was this guy wearing baggy shorts, a beret, and a loud Hawaiian shirt. I introduced myself, not knowing who he was, and he just said, ‘I'm Jaco Pastorius.’”

“We had a couple of drinks at the hotel bar,” continues Anthony. “And he told me about Weather Report. He also mentioned that he was familiar with our band. I don't know if he was a Van Halen fan, but he had heard our stuff. I think we were both more intent on getting drunk than anything else!”

Prior to their meeting in Tokyo, Weather Report’s 1977 epic, Heavy Weather, had sealed Jaco’s reputation as a four-string phenomenon. From the fretted bass guitar melody line line of Teen Town to the brilliance of Havona, it’s essential listening for bassists of all stripes.

Somewhere along the way, Jaco had also became the showman of the group.

“He’d take a solo every night and end it with the bass on the ground with a note sustaining,” Jaco’s close friend and contemporary, Michael Brecker, once said. “He’d do a running flip over the bass and dampen the note as he was in mid-air.”

Despite being given a similar platform to showcase his own bass-playing prowess, it’s always been one of Michael Anthony’s assertions that a great bassist should be able to speak volumes through their basslines, rather than the tendency today for bass players who feel soloing is the only way to really show the world what they can do.

“There are so many different kinds of bass players. Some of them use their instrument like a lead guitar. I enjoy listening to a few of those guys, but that’s not me at all. If you really pushed me I’d have to be honest and say that I see myself as a solid eight-out-of-10 bass player, I guess, but I’m happy with that.”

“Playing with Eddie Van Halen, he would just go off, and if you weren’t right there playing what you were supposed to it could get really confusing.

“At times it holds you back because you want to go out and showboat a bit, show the people what you can do, but the most important thing is to really be the anchor. That’s the secret, isn’t it?”

Whatever your preferred style of bass playing, you owe a debt to the late Jack Bruce, who is most famous for his bass explorations with Cream but whose importance in our world can’t be summed up in a single genre tag.

Few bassists have managed to successfully develop a style and then skilfully weave it through decades of radically changing music, but Bruce made it look easy, and was lauded as the 11th best bass player of all time in our rundown of the all-time greatest.

Having come to popular music from jazz, Bruce brought with him the sensibility of a fearless improviser. In Cream, he didn't just bend notes and stretch harmonies – he pushed the limits of what was possible on his instrument.

Even if Bruce claimed that Cream was actually a cleverly disguised form of his first musical love, jazz, his own solo releases spanned a wide range of sounds that make him almost impossible to categorise.

“Jack was one of the greatest ever,” Jeff Berlin told Bass Player. “He was an influence on everybody. He was the first virtuoso the electric bass ever had.”

No history of Jack Bruce however would be complete without a mention of his meeting with another bass guitar superhero, Jaco Pastorius – widely hailed as one of the greatest of all time.

“I met Jaco while I was rehearsing in Manhattan around 1984,” Bruce told Bass Player back in 2001. “I had seen him at the Rainbow in London with Weather Report a few years prior, and he was magnificent.”

“He sent a message to the studio saying he'd like to meet me at a little club in the Village called 55 Grand. I went down and it was him and Jerry Jemmott, so the three of us started playing.

“Jaco thought he'd put one over on me and started calling Ellington tunes and jazz standards, not knowing about my jazz upright background. Each time I knew the song, he'd go, ‘hummph!’ because he couldn't stump me.

“We talked a bit afterward, and he told me I had influenced him – but I don't know if he was just schmoozing me.”

Bruce continued the story in Bill Milkowski’s book, Jaco: The Extraordinary And Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius, “He was kind of crazed at the time. He was going up to people in the bar and yelling, ‘Hey, here's the guy who wrote Sunshine of Your Love.’ He seemed to be going in all directions at once.”

“At one point he told me there was going to be an after-hours jam at a recording studio and asked if I would come. I said, ‘Sorry, I can't. I've got something to do, but it's been really nice meeting you.’ He got really upset and ran off down the street. He turned the corner, and I never saw him again.”

In a 1998 Bass Player interview, Jeff Berlin mentioned that according to Jaco's brother Rory, Jaco was influenced by Bruce's midrange sound and aggressive lead style, and that he had bought Bruce's early solo discs and studied them.

Recalling attempts at getting his famous tone, Bruce told Bass Player, “The way I play is very personal, it’s some techniques I’ve developed because I was a cellist and then an acoustic bass player, and all of those things are not really much good to anybody else.

“Frank Zappa wanted the most outrageous Jack Bruce sound when I did his album Apostrophe – not the Cream Bruce sound, which was sort of a fart, but an extremely cranked buzz. People comment on what a great sound it is, but I was ashamed of it!”

Bruce may have been all about change musically, but his gear remained a constant. One of his early basses was the Fender IV, which he used into the early Cream days until he switched to a short-scale Gibson EB3. His main instrument became his signature fretless Warwick Thumb Bass, which he helped design.

Bruce backed off a bit on the neck pickup “for some bite,” kept the active tone knobs “basically flat,” and had the volume knob up only halfway, “because I play pretty hard.”

As sideman, bandleader or composer, Jaco Pastorius is one of those rare players who can legitimately be said to have revolutionized their instrument. With his lyrical, melodic fretless work, growling fingerstyle 16th note playing and jaw dropping harmonics Jaco had total control of the bass guitar, and a charisma and stagecraft that would put many rockers to shame.

It’s a sign of this unique status that we in the bass playing community only need to use his first name when referring to him: like Elvis, Madonna and Prince, everybody knows who Jaco was. In simple terms, there’s bass before Jaco, and bass after Jaco, and that alone is reason enough to love the man.

His work with jazz-fusion giants Weather Report is seminal stuff, but if jazz ain’t your thing then check out his superb work with Joni Mitchell to hear his bass playing in the context of more accessible songs.

Mitchell’s first encounter with Pastorius came during the recording of 1974’s Court and Spark, as she recalled during an interview for the 2014 documentary, Jaco. “One of the guys in the section said to me, ‘Joni, there’s this really weird bass player in Florida. You’d probably like him.’ He was showing off beautifully, and that’s what I wanted to bass to do. I wanted it to show off a little more.”

Mitchell had collaborated with some impressive bassists in her early years, including Wilton Felder and Stephen Stills, but Jaco was far more than simply “the bass player”; rather, he was a consummate musician, and could build up inventive basslines according to the arrangements he could hear in his head.

“Jaco and Joni Mitchell had a very unusual and tremendous chemistry together,” the late jazz saxophonist Michael Brecker told Bassist magazine back in December 1998. “They took each other to places that I don't think either of them knew they would be going to, musically speaking. She was able to hear the beauty in his playing and use it to change her own music, I think.”

Interviewed for the December 1987 issue of Musician Magazine, Mitchell said, “Until then I had started to think, ‘Why couldn't the bass leave the bottom sometimes and go up and play in the midrange and then return? So when Jaco came in, I remember percussionist John Guerin said to me, ‘God, you must love this guy; he almost never plays the root.’”

Jaco became integral to Mitchell’s new sound during the recording of her eighth studio album Hejira, playing bass on four tracks: Hejira, Black Crow, Refuge Of The Roads, and Coyote, each featuring the more sensitive side of Jaco’s playing rather than the fiery technical wizardry with which he is often associated. That said, there are some tricky harmonics involved in his bass parts.

“The band with Joni Mitchell, Shadows and Light Band, was really extraordinary,” said Michael Brecker. “It consisted of Jaco, Pat Metheny, myself, Don Alias and Lyle Mays and Joni, of course. It was a group of very good soloists who managed to play together really well. We brought a different sound to Joni's music.”

Despite his contributions, Pastorius hadn't listened to any of Mitchell's music before working as a studio musician, later recalling in Bill Milkowski’s book, Jaco: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius, “Once my kids were born, I was working around the clock and didn’t have time to listen to music.

“So I didn’t know Joni’s music, but it was really fun coming in from nowhere and adding this thing. It was a nice combination, especially on the Hejira album.”

Jaco's unique tone began with a '62 Fender Jazz bass which he promptly converted into a fretless, pulling out the frets and filling the slots with wood filler

To protect the fingerboard from abrasive roundwound strings he coated it with 10 layers of marine epoxy, providing a hard surface that gave the bass its singing quality.

He played through an Acoustic amp (model 360 X 2 with built-in fuzz) and also used an MXR digital delay and a Boss Octave Divider.

It was 1972, and the turbulent ‘60s were giving way to the decadent '70s. Nixon was in the White House, and the Los Angeles home of Hugh Hefner's international Playboy Club – newly relocated from Sunset Boulevard to Century City and frequented by the likes of Johnny Carson – was a shining beacon of swinging bachelor-pad possibilities.

25 miles away, in suburban Monterey Park, a 16-year-old wunderkind was beginning to find his groove. After starting on guitar at six and switching to bass guitar at nine, Larry Klein’s teacher, Herb Mickman, was schooling him on electric, upright, piano, and jazz harmony, and it was Mickman who suggested they go see the Bill Evans Trio – at the Playboy Club.

“I wasn't even allowed to be there, but somehow he managed to spirit me into the place,” Klein told Bass Player. “You can imagine a 16-year-old kid seeing Bill Evans and Eddie Gomez at the Playboy Club, with Playboy Bunnies walking around. I thought I had died and gone to heaven!”

However, Klein's career hadn't even begun. His broad palette and ear for pop allowed him to move smoothly from a promising late-'70s stint as a top-flight jazz sideman to a career as a versatile session ninja with film-scoring skills, capable of creating bass sub-hooks on huge '80s hits, as well as a fresh, contemporary approach to Joni Mitchell's music after her celebrated string of albums featuring Jaco Pastorius.

“Before me, guys like Max Bennett – and even earlier, Stephen Stills – had played bass on her records. Joni was ready to work with someone who played in a way where the bass wasn't down at the bottom of the track. Jaco was her liberator, but she also wanted the bass to play a greater part in holding down the groove.”

Klein developed a reputation for being relaxed, sensitive, and open to new ideas, qualities that certainly endeared him to Mitchell, who first hired him in 1982.

They were married from 1982 to 1994, and Klein played on, produced, or co-produced everything she's done since the '80s, nabbing Grammys for 1995's Turbulent Indigo, 2001's Both Sides Now, Herbie Hancock's 2008 masterwork River: The Joni Letters, and its follow-up, 2011's The Imagine Project.

When the mood strikes him, Klein still reaches for a sunburst '62 Jazz Bass, a Gretsch Country Gentleman, or his longtime favorite, a Music Man StingRay 5-string, but producing is what he loves most these days.

The following interview from the Bass Player archives took place in 2014.

You took lessons with Fred Rivera and Herb Mickman, but did you have other teachers?

“Those were my two first teachers. I also took private composition classes with a guy named Wayne Bischoff, a Mr. Holland's Opus-type character, in seventh grade, and I studied classical arco technique with John Schiavo of the L.A. Philharmonic. I was really lucky all my life in finding the right teachers.”

How relevant to your career were those years of studying theory and harmony?

“All the things you absorb, whether it be a Beethoven symphony or a song you hear on the radio – all of it ends up informing your musical instincts. Early on, it may have seemed like all that disparate information had no effect on what I played intuitively, but eventually, it affected how I built basslines and how I saw bass fitting into the design of a given track.

“Everything in our world now is so abbreviated, moving at such an incredibly fast rate, people forget that apprenticeship and studying and focusing on the basic building blocks of playing and writing music are so important. I'm happy to rant on that whenever possible.”

How did your time with Joni Mitchell affect your knowledge of harmony?

“Profoundly. She crafted a sense of harmony for herself by virtue of the tunings she developed, all because she just didn't have the hand strength to finger chords in the usual way. I ended up using those guitar tunings myself to write with, so yes, she strongly influenced my sense of harmony and composition.”

You began working with Joni just after her last album with Jaco. How was that?

“Jaco was functioning pretty much exclusively as a melodic counterpoint to Joni. At the same time, she also didn't want anything that resembled a conventional approach. So l was searching for my own way of approaching both her music and the role of the bass.”

Of all the work you've done together, what stands out?

“Different tracks from all the records pop out from time to time. I like so many things, but Night Ride Home was a wonderful record to make, and I’m really proud of the bass work on there.

“I was asked to contribute to a book about Joni (2013’s Gathered Light: The Poetry of Joni Mitchell's Songs), and I chose to write about Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody from Wild Things Run Fast. There's something so profound about that track – it makes me cry every time I hear it.”

Did you get to hang with Jaco?

“Yes. As a person, he was such a walking idiosyncrasy. He was so confident and arrogant, but there was a part of his spirit that was innocent and had such a fun edge that I would never hold that against him.”

You walk into a session and hear a track for the first time. What goes through your mind?

“I hear things that tie into the melody, the chord structure, and the way the song is designed. I hear these repetitive things, and I'm sure the reason I hear them is that I've absorbed so many great bass parts by other bass players.”

Do you think bass players are naturally suited to being producers?

“We sit at the intersection of groove, harmony, and melody, and spending years providing the right kind of structure can prepare one to have a vision of how the landscape of a track should be built. But being a producer is a very complex job that changes with every record and every artist.”

Do you usually play on sessions you produce?

“I go back and forth. Sometimes, it's just too many things to do at the same time, so I have some great bass players who are also very patient with me suggesting things. I work with David Piltch quite a bit. I've been a fan of Lee Sklar since I was a kid, and I love using him on records, too.”

Is it true that you had to convince Walter Becker to play bass on his own Circus Money?

“Yes! I produced it and Walter wanted me to play on it, but I felt adamant that he play on it. People don't know – he's serious as a bass player! He's got such a deep groove, and the combination of him and drummer Keith Carlock on that record was just amazing.”

What's your take on creating a long-term career in the music business?

“Joni always used to say that the quickest way to kill your career was to have a hit, and maybe that's true. I certainly like success, but I don't make my decisions based on what I think is going to be a hit.”

What's the most crucial advice he could give after all these years of high-profile collaborations and successes?

“Hold on to your humility, and seek out great teachers. That would be at the top of my list.”

At the humble age of 18, Pat Metheny had already developed a reputation as a wunderkind, with a musical talent far beyond his years. After being offered a place at the University of Miami, the young jazz guitarist dove headfirst into the city's jazz club scene – a network that would lead him to one of the most influential bassists of all time.

“It was the happiest day of my parents’ lives because I hadn’t taken a book home since I was 14, so they had resigned themselves to me never getting into college,” he tells UK outlet The Guardian in a new interview.

“The second night after I arrived in Miami, I went to a jazz club. This guy played bass for one tune and it was like he had dropped out of a spaceship. That was the first time I met Jaco Pastorius.”

Bonded by their mutual musical obsession, the two would embark “on a series of dumb gigs with D-list celebrities in Miami Beach”. Within a year, the University’s Dean, Bill Lee, offered Metheny a professor position since the school had just introduced an electric guitar course. When Metheny turned 19, Berklee College of Music had summoned him to teach there.

“It was a crazy time, since neither me nor Jaco had any notoriety, we were just playing,” he recalls.

Metheny also appeared on the unofficially titled Jaco – the 1974 album released on Paul Bley's Improvising Artists Label, which is notably the first-ever recording featuring the talents of the bass and guitar greats.

Their collaboration continued on Metheny's debut, 1975’s Bright Size Life, which, while moderately successful at the time, didn't receive the recognition it deserved until a decade later.

“Not long afterwards, Jaco joined [pioneering fusion group] Weather Report, released his debut album and I put out my debut. That all happened within a few months,” Metheny recalls.

Relentless touring followed, triggering Pastorius’ drug addiction and worsening his mental health. In 1979, when Metheny and Pastorius had the opportunity to join Joni Mitchell on her Shadows and Light tour, Metheny notes, “Jaco was a different Jaco at that point and I thought by doing that tour I might be able to help him.”

Eight years later, Pastorius was involved in a physical altercation with a nightclub employee. He suffered multiple facial fractures, injuries, and a brain hemorrhage. On September 21, he died at the age of 35.

Metheny released Watercolors in 1977 and formed the illustrious Pat Metheny Group in 1978, with Danny Gottlieb on drums, Lyle Mays on piano, autoharp, and synthesizer, and Mark Egan on bass.

Their 1979 release, American Garage, clinched the number-one spot on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart – the start of a truly illustrious career.

With bass in hand Richard Bona speaks many languages – but catch him in the middle of a phrase, and it's as if his notes are chosen just for your ears. Add his haunting falsetto vocals, and now you're listening to arguably the most identifiable, soul-stirring voice on the bass guitar since Jaco Pastorius.

His first instrument was the balafon – similar to a xylophone – which he learnt to play at age five. By 11, he was a guitarist in bands in Cameroon and by 14 was adept at jazz. Subsequent moves to Paris and then New York added to his story: he took up the bass following an epiphany when he first heard Jaco.

“The first time I heard Jaco, I was 14 and everything changed,” Bona told Bass Player. “I listened to every record of his I could find and I learned every note.”

While Bona's multi-layered rhythmic approach and sheer lyricism have earned him bass guitar hero status, he has also parlayed his singular vocals into a career as a globally successful solo artist, selling thousands of albums worldwide.

His 2005 effort, Tiki, served up fat fretless phrases, and ghost-note-enhanced world grooves. “I wanted to make a record about how closely Brazil and Africa are related musically, culturally, and in so many other ways. When you play Brazilian music in Africa, people start dancing right away. I wanted to sing about that relationship: the things we smell, touch, taste, and hear in our everyday lives that bring us together.”

South American influences notwithstanding, Tiki also features an intense, neoclassical version of Jaco Pastorius's Three Women orchestrated for strings. “I didn't want to record a famous Jaco song, but Gil Goldstein found this tape for me; it was just Jaco playing the tune on piano.”

In the September 2006 issue of Bass Player, Bona talked us through the ins and outs of his rhythmically intense fourth solo album, Tiki. The 15-track disc features Bona's usual cohorts, keyboardist ATN Stadwijk and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, plus special guests like John Legend and Djavan.

Please Don't Stop

“John Legend and I did this track for Puma's collaborative album Africa Plays On. I wrote the music, and I told John that my idea for the song was about trying to convince a girl to stay. Не came up with the lyrics in an hour and then sang the hell out of it! He's an amazing musician and artist.”

Dipama

“A good example of a song I wrote on guitar that all the other parts came from. I'm singing about learning. You learn more by listening to others; most of the time it's better to be quiet and just listen.”

Tiki

“This establishes the album's theme: the connection between Africa and Brazil. Feel-wise it's sort of a baion groove with a bassline thats more makossa, and there are elements of Indian music, as well.”

O Beta O Siba

“The title means ‘up and down.’ It's a love song for a lady who is running away from a man who loves her. The groove is sort of reggae funk, which Vinnie Colaiuta embellishes with his rhythms. I palm-muted my Fodera 5-string.”

Esoka Bulu (Night Whisper)

“What every woman whispers to her lover at night, when it gets quiet. It's a jazz ballad in three with Ari Hoenig, who is the greatest brush player in the history of drums. He could sweep up all of Brooklyn in an hour!”

Listen out for Bona's ear-grabbing fretless fill behind George Colligan's piano solo at 2:18. Reaching for the chord's 9th on the downbeat, he follows up with an arpeggio that touches on 6th and 10th, as well.

O Sen Sen Sen

“I see music in colors, and I like my records to be in a lot of colors. This track combines salsa, African rhythms, and accordion from Brazil. The song is saying, ‘You ain't seen nothing yet!’”

Manyaka O Brazil

“This is the main song when it comes to telling the story of this record; the groove is very open and can go anywhere. I wrote it thinking of Djavan, and I was so blessed that he came and sang it.”

Three Women

“I didn't want to do a famous Jaco song – I wanted a surprise. Gil Goldstein found this tape for me; it was just Jaco playing the tune on piano. We came up with a feel and a string arrangement. Gil brought in the Flux Quartet and I played my fretless New York Bass Works 4-string.”

Ba Senge

“The song addresses learning about differences in order to understand others. I's pretty much a funk groove. I'm not a great slapper, but I enjoy it. I used my 1966 Fender Jazz Bass.”

Akwa Samba Yaya

“This song celebrates Black heritage in Brazil. I's a Salvadorian samba mixed with African guitar and percussion. It's my usual global affair!”

Calcabao de Copacabana

“I call this a samba cancon groove. It's what I feel inside while staying in Rio de Janeiro and walking along the beach. I made friends in Brazil on my recent visits and I wanted to record at least part of the album down there.”

Samaouma

“Samaouma is a tree in the Amazonia jungle that Indians used for many purposes. They used to communicate by hitting the tree. Musically, everything is in here: Argentinean tango, Colombian cumbia, a bit of Pat Metheny, African guitar, and even classical music.”

The blistering melody is first heard at the 2:25 mark, doubled by keyboards, violin, and Bona's voice. In addition to the terrifying tempo, the phrase's four-beat length (and four notes per beat) against the 3/4 meter adds to the tricky traversing.

You may have seen the 2014 documentary Jaco, produced by Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo. It's an astonishing tale, which follows Jaco Pastorius from his early life through to stardom with Weather Report and as a solo artist, before his struggle with bipolar disorder and his tragically early death in 1987 at the hands of a nightclub bouncer.

Along the way, the most commonly-seen bass guitar is the famous 1962 Fender Jazz Bass, which Jaco defretted and used to devastating effect on many seminal recordings. Stolen from him in 1982, the bass vanished from the public eye until 2006 or thereabouts, when it resurfaced in a New York music store.

Asked for a huge sum to repurchase it, the Pastorius family were aided greatly by Trujillo, who purchased it on their behalf. Although he's the technical owner of the bass. his stated intention was for the 'Bass Of Doom' to reside with Jaco's family, where it remains to this day.

Felix Pastorius is an extraordinary bass player himself, as you might expect, given the legacy of his late father. “This bass was like a lost relative,” he told Bass Player. “It was something I had been around all my life in terms of listening to and hearing stories about it, but I had never met this ‘thing’ you know?”

In August 2020, we asked Felix about the resurrection of the Bass Of Doom.

Tell us the story of how your family reconnected with the Bass Of Doom.

“It was during the process of litigation. My brother and I were in New York – this was before I moved up there – and we were given the opportunity to see the bass in person. The person that had it wanted verification from the family, and the luthier who refurbished the bass. They wanted us to put the stamp of approval on it so they could get a bit more bang out of it.”

This must have been incredibly emotional for you.

“It was a very tumultuous experience. Here we were, with the opportunity to finally see this instrument, with me as a bassist, and the rest of my family all musicians. We were able to touch it, plug it in, and experience this instrument for the first time in 30-plus years. At the same time, it wasn't ours – at this point it was in someone else's possession.”

Were you aware of its history between it being stolen from Jaco and turning up at a store in New York?

“That whole process, from my father to these guys who had it... Who knows? There's no real log of what happened. There are stories that have been told, and there are people who were around, but there's no definitive receipt of sale.

“So my brother and I show up to see the bass, and the owner is there. The guy who brought the bass in the first time didn't believe it was ‘The Bass’ when he saw it, so they sent him away or that's what they tell us.

“Then the guy comes back, and then they get a little more curious about it, because now he's mentioning a few things that make a little more sense – naming some people who are locals, who have been in New York for a while. They ended up purchasing the bass.

“The guy who owns the store, his brother is a bassist, and he apparently started bodyguarding it. It was in his apartment and he wouldn't let it go anywhere. So we walk into this music store, and the owner is there and he's making sure that we didn't turn up with a lawyer – or some kind of backup!”

What happened next?

“He makes a phone call and Chris Jisi from Bass Player magazine turns up, he makes another call and the store owner's brother turns up with a gigbag. I know it's in the bag, and it's 100 feet away from me, and then it's 50 feet, then 10, then five... And then it's right next to me.

“The guy pulls the bass out, looks around and tells me I have five minutes, which was a completely weird situation – like finding a lost relative, but only having five minutes with them. I played it and I was shaking. I didn't know what to play on it, I was so dumbfounded.

“The five minutes passed and that was it – the owner's brother took the bass away again, and we continued to talk to the owner.”

So when did it come back to the family?

“I didn't see it again for a few months, because we were going through litigation – and then Robert Trujillo came in and saved the day. We went to the office of the lawyers who were representing the music store, and they had the bass there. We signed a few things, I took the bass and we went to our own lawyer's office and had a little party. I plugged it in and played a bunch of stuff.”

How did it feel?

“It felt amazing. I was awe-struck by the energy that surrounded this instrument, and the way it still sang – notes were pouring out of it. Any early-'60s Jazz already has its own character, and even though this one had been refurbished, it still had stories, like an old sailor. It was a great party, and it felt awesome.”

“From then it's gone back and forth between him and me. Robert played it at a Metallica show in Yankee Stadium in September 2011, which was amazing. I used it to record a Yellowjackets album called A Rise In The Road.”

That's great to hear.

“From day one, Robert has always said, 'This is your bass as much as it is mine.' He believes in it the same way I believe in it. The only reason this bass has any value, aside from it being a Fender Jazz, is because of one person. If it wasn't still being shared by that person's family, it would be sacrilegious.

“It was a really unusual experience, even more so from the perspective of being a bassist. I think of everything we went through as a family, working towards making sure our father's estate is protected, which was not an easy thing, because there was a lot of turmoil in the family. To go through all that stuff and find ‘The Bass’ was the icing on the cake.”

The electric guitar featured on Kate Bush's 1978 debut Wuthering Heights is expected to fetch up to £10,000 at auction.

The 1974 Les Paul Custom belonged to guitarist Ian Bairnson, who played the solo at the end of Wuthering Heights while his arm was in a plaster cast.

Bairnson passed away last year, aged 70. His collection of 12 guitars, including the 1974 Les Paul Custom, and gear including vintage Marshall stacks and a Soldano head, is being auctioned off by Gardiner Houlgate auctioneers in Wiltshire, UK. The total collection is expected to sell for around £30,000.

Guitar expert and auctioneer Luke Hobbs commented: “Ian Bairnson was a musician’s musician, and his guitar used on Wuthering Heights is very relevant to today’s market, considering the enduring appeal of Kate Bush.”

A 20th Anniversary model – as indicated by the 12th fret inlay – the guitar features a Cherry Sunburst finish, with only minor buckle rash and dings. Its original tuners were replaced by a Schaller set, while two coil switches were installed to the control area.

The guitar comes with a Pilot-stenciled hardcase, as well as five sales award discs presented to Bairnson for Pilot singles Magic and January.

Ian Bairnson was a Scottish session guitarist and multi-instrumentalist, best known for his work with Kate Bush and Alan Parsons Project.

In 1973, he joined the Scottish rock group Pilot, scoring UK top 20 singles January and Magic. During his time with Pilot, he met Alan Parsons and later featured on every Alan Parsons Project album, including the 1984 offshoot Keats.

He went on to play on Bush's first four albums, and session with Kenny Rogers, Tom Jones, Sting, Paul McCartney and Stanley Clark – where his Les Paul was invariably slung around his shoulders.

“Guitar players broadly fall into two main groups – those who consider themselves as Strat players and those who are Les Paul type players,” Bairnson wrote on his website. “I have always loved Les Pauls. Ever since I was about 14 years old I wanted to play one. I prefer the sheer power and kick of a Gibson Les Paul.

“I bought mine as soon as I could afford one. It came from a shop called Take Five in Shaftesbury Avenue in London and cost me 315 pounds in 1974. It is a Custom model but over the years I have changed bits and pieces and now it looks more like a Standard. I suppose it is true to say that I built a career using only a Les Paul and a Marshall 50-watt amplifier.”

“Ian was always ready to play a stylistically perfect solo for every track he was involved with,” Alan Parsons told Guitar World. "The usual process was he would just play it through a few times and I would give him vague directions like ‘Let’s try it starting low and working upwards’ or ‘Let’s try it simpler – less notes.’”

In addition to Bairnson's Les Paul, the auction will also feature Eric Clapton-used prototype 000-28EC acoustic guitar, a collection of Bernie Marsden's guitars, a Jaco Pastorius-used Zemaitis bass, two guitars previously owned by Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green and two of Gary Moore’s Gibson Les Pauls.

For more information about the auction, visit Gardiner Houlgate.

In interviews throughout his career Jaco Pastorius often acknowledged his bass guitar influences, and perhaps to the surprise of some of his jazz-leaning fans, nearly all were R&B players – James Jamerson, Jerry Jemmott and Bernard Odum were often mentioned. A deep foundation in R&B permeated Jaco's feel and sense of rhythm, separating him from many of his bass-playing peers in jazz.

I Can Dig It Baby was recorded by Florida soul artist Little Beaver (real name Willie Hale) and appears on his 1974 album Party Down. Perhaps more notably, it also features on Portrait Of Jaco: The Early Years, 1968–1978, a collection of producer Bob Bobbing’s personal recordings of a young Jaco.

“Jaco was exposed at an early age to some of the funkiest stuff that South Florida had to offer,” Bobbing told Bass Player. “He already had his signature tone and touch, and a few of his signature licks, too.”

Recorded a year before he was discovered by Blood Sweat and Tears producer/drummer Bobby Colomby, I Can Dig It Baby finds Jaco in his prime, laying down a 16th-note groove as a foundation for this smooth soul record. 

During the two-bar intro Jaco plays simple root notes for each chord, but decorates the Bm7 with a harmonic chord: F# at the ninth fret of the A string, A at the seventh fret of the D string and D at the seventh fret of the G string. These three notes are the fifth, seventh and minor third of the chord respectively.

The main groove enters in bar 3 and will be familiar to any bassist who owns a copy of Jaco’s self-titled debut album. The line is virtually identical to Jaco’s bass part during the soprano sax solo section of his song Opus Pocus. Pastorius was well known for recycling his grooves and this is an excellent example.

The line itself is built around the chord tones of the underlying Em7 chord. Jaco plays the root, minor third and seventh across the A, D and G strings, then jumps back down to the low E for the second half of the bar, playing a 16th-note passage that makes good use of percussive ghost notes. 

Be aware that during these sections of the line, Jaco often plays his notes so staccato that they almost become ghost notes – his approach to staccato was an essential factor of his fingerstyle funk playing and must be mastered in order to imitate the same feel that he uses here. The second bar of this two-bar phrase is mostly identical, but features a descending line that moves down to the low E. 

As the chord progression begins to move, Jaco opts for a simpler part that allows the vocal to take centre stage. His bassline during this section is predominantly based around root, fifth and octave, but it’s far from simple to execute. Ghost notes are put to good use, as are chromatic passing tones and rests.

Beyond the main bassline, there are a couple of other licks that are worthy of your attention. The first occurs at 02:46 and sees Jaco throwing in just one bar of another of his popular fingerstyle funk grooves.

The second occurs at 03:58 and is another nice funk groove that features all of Jaco’s trademarks – syncopation, ghost notes, slurs and staccato notes.

When learning to play this song, learn the first three verses as accurately as possible, then improvise your own line using what you have learnt as a basis. The track rides out on a long vamp and Jaco improvises a line around the main groove throughout this section.

It’s been more than four decades since a 24-year-old Jaco Pastorius took the music world by storm with a singular style and sound never before heard on the electric bass guitar.

Although the skinny kid with the odd name and mind-boggling technique seemed to emerge overnight, Jaco had, in fact, spent all of his late teens and early 20s developing his unique bass concept and amazing chops, playing night after night in music clubs around Florida.

By 1976, his local reputation as a four-string phenomenon had exploded into international acclaim, and Jaco was suddenly the new revolutionary of modern jazz bass, due in no small part to a series of groundbreaking recordings both as solo artist and with jazz fusion powerhouse Weather Report. 

Weather Report leader Joe Zawinul, who had heard rough mixes of Jaco's solo album, brought him in to play on two tracks from Black Market, alongside existing bassist Alphonso Johnson. The album also introduced two new faces in the drum chair in Narada Michael Walden and Chester Thompson.

Although Jaco's arrival in Weather Report was lauded by the jazz community, his musical vocabulary was surprisingly not born in the jazz tradition. His feel for the instrument grew out of his love of rhythm and blues, which dominated his repertoire in his formative years.

“Jaco, as brilliant as he was, didn't swing well,” Thompson recently told MusicRadar. “He was very straight, accurate 16ths and that sort of thing. But the feel that Alphonso Johnson and I had together was more swung. We both grew up playing a lot of funk and jazz and stuff, so there was a lot of that in what we did. Well, that’s just not natural to Jaco at all.”

While Johnson had already announced his intention to leave Weather Report in order to join the Billy Cobham-George Duke band, his legacy was assured thanks to bass-centric workouts on tunes like Cucumber Slumber, Mysterious Traveller and the five tracks he recorded on Black Market, including Zawinul’s Gibraltar, Shorter’s Elegant People, and his own 11/4 excursion Hernandu.

“Alphonso had been there for three years, they had been saying to him, ‘Yeah, you're going to become an equal member.’ But then they got new managers and the new managers said, ‘Absolutely not, only Joe and Wayne.’ 

“So Alphonso was a bit frustrated, and it's not like we were going to be able to retire from playing with Weather Report, you know what I mean? The money wasn't the best, but you just did it for the love of music. By then Alphonso had his own recording contract and unknown to me, suddenly there's Jaco.

“So, it's time to start rehearsing for the tour, we sat down and I started to play what I played on the recordings. I’d have to say, I don’t think Jaco was too comfortable with that. I’ve never heard anything he did that had that particular feel to it. Jaco was a virtuoso, no question, but most of his stuff was straight 16ths. Boy, we got in rehearsal and it was like oil and water.”

“By then, it was like, ‘Okay, this trip is over.’ Which, you know, was fine. I mean, I totally respected Jaco's playing, but that aspect of it – I find it amazing that, as well as he played, he had a lot of trouble with that sort of 16th-note triplet funk kind of thing. It just wasn't in his repertoire.”

For a Stateside tour, which commenced in April, 1976 at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Weather Report announced a new touring lineup, with Pastorius on bass, Alex Acuna on drums and Manolo Badrena on percussion. It was the beginning of a new era in the band's history – the Jaco years.

When Berklee Bass Chair Steve Bailey hears the passing train at the beginning of Barbary Coast, the first original tune Jaco Pastorius recorded with Weather Report, he remembers a valuable lesson he learned from the bass legend.

Late one South Florida night in the early '80s, Bailey was in Jaco's Volkswagen Beetle, along with steel-pan savant Othello Molineaux, returning to Molineaux's house. Upon arrival, Jaco was reaching in to pull the seat forward, when he said, “Listen! Do you hear that?” Bailey strained his ears into the distance and said, “Yeah, it's a train whistle.” To which Jaco replied, “No, man, that's music.”

Barbary Coast was, in essence, the worldwide debut of Jaco's R&B groove side. While Pat Metheny's Bright Size Life, released at the very end of 1975, turned many an ear to the emerging Florida bassist, 1976 would be Jaco's breakout year, with his landmark self-titled debut solo disc, Joni Mitchell's Hejira, and an appearance on Al Di Meola's Land of the Midnight Sun. But before those albums came his unveiling with Weather Report, on Black Market. 

Revisit Jaco's isolated bassline on Barbary Coast below.

Alphonso Johnson had left the group before the album was completed. As a result, Weather Report leader Joe Zawinul, who had heard rough mixes of Jaco's solo album, brought him in to play on Cannonball and Jaco's own tune, Barbary Coast, in what was essentially his audition for the band.

According to Pastorius historian Bob Bobbing, Jaco had originally named the tune Coast to Coast, with his flight from Florida to L.A. to record with Weather Report in mind, but Zawinul influenced the name change to Barbary Coast to make it more suitable for the album concept of Black Market. 

The track was recorded at Devonshire Sound in L.A., in the early fall of 1975, with Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, drummer Chester Thompson, and percussionists Don Alias and Alex Acuña. Jaco played his famous fretless sunburst '62 Fender Jazz Bass of Doom, with Rotosound roundwounds; it was recorded direct.

Following the track's 18 seconds of train sounds, Pastorius breaks into a percolating, 16th-note boogie groove. Steve Bailey sees several dichotomies here: “The opening groove sounds like it's in E major – with a pentatonic flavor – modulating to D. But if I bend my ear another way, I can hear the Eb-F slide on the downbeats and the Fb on the pickup to beat three as the bluesy and natural 3rds in the key of Db, which is what I think Jaco intended.”

“Another duality is throughout, the bass is prominent both musically and in the mix, while supporting fragments of melodies. The bassline itself can be viewed as the main melody, with the fragments on top serving as countermelodies.”

Bailey also theorized that the three-minute piece may have been part of a longer jam that was cut considerably, and that the bass track or a rhythm track may have come first, with through-composed melodic material – written mostly by Pastorius and played by Zawinul and Shorter – added later.

The keyboard/sax melody – a big band shout-type of phrase undoubtedly written by Pastorius – is repeated, while Jaco settles into his ghost-note-rich soul groove. As noted in Bill Milkowski's biography, Jaco, around 1968 Pastorius heard Carlos Garcia, a bassist with the Florida R&B band Nemo Spliff, using left-hand muting to get staccato notes, and he began emulating the approach. 

Bailey points out that in the odd-number bars 7 through 15, Pastorius alludes to the IV chord with some subtly place Gb's, another common R&B device. 

A new big band-like horn hit inspires four bars of cool solo bass groove, including the lick in bar 28, which Pastorius also played in his solo on lan Hunter's All American Alien Boy. As Jaco returns to the earlier root-dominant-7th shape, in bars 30 to 34, listen for a melody in bar 33 he later used in Liberty City. 

Jaco again embarks on developing of his part, offering an opportunity to check out his use of passing tones. “Jaco instinctively knew where to put the ghost-notes and passing tones, and he's consistent with them. His groove is so driving and relentless, it's like a fingerprint – nobody can duplicate it.”

From bar 42 to the start of the fade and reemergence of the passing train sound, much more is happening on the track, above the bassline. “The whole piece is like a train ride, building and taking on new musical ideas as it goes.” 

The influential reach of Jaco Pastorius is immeasurable, spanning generations of bassists in all corners of the globe, in a multitude of musical styles. Just a few weeks after seeing Jaco perform with Weather Report at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in October 1978, Norman Watt-Roy found himself in the studio with Ian Dury & the Blockheads, suggesting a surging 16th-note bassline for Dury's self-proclaimed anti-violence song Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.

“In rehearsal, we had the tempo, the chords, and the eighth-note piano riff, and having just seen Jaco, I got the idea to double up the bassline and play 16ths,” said Watt-Roy, who has been cited by everyone from Pino Palladino to Jamiroquai's Paul Turner as a key influence.

“There was bass before Jaco and after Jaco; his playing turned my whole life around by showing me that I have an orchestra in my hands. I first heard him on Weather Report's Birdland, and then I found my way to his 1976 solo album, but seeing him live was a whole other experience.”

Born in Bombay, India, in 1951, Watt-Roy moved with his family to North London at age four. With the sounds of the Beatles and the Stones in his ears, he followed his older brother Garth, a lead guitarist, and began playing rhythm guitar at ten. When the bassist in his brother’s band “couldn't take the blisters,” Garth suggested the 14-year-old Norman take over bass guitar duties, which he did, first on a Rosetti Hofner and then on a Fender Jazz Bass.

Inspired by Paul McCartney and the Tamla/Motown rumble of James Jamerson – “because they always had a counter-melody going on in their basslines” – Watt-Roy got serious tutoring from Steve Miller's lefty bassist, Gerald Johnson, while touring the U.S. in 1970. Making his mark on vinyl back home, Watt-Roy formed the soul horn band Greatest Show On Earth with his brother, joined Glencoe in 1972, and then formed Loving Awareness with drummer Charley Charles. While doing a 1976 session with Charles, they met Ian Dury and Chaz Jankel, recorded the 1977 album New Boots and Panties!! and officially became the Blockheads.

Although the band fell under the new wave/punk banner, the Blockheads incorporated other idioms into their singular sound, including funk, reggae, jazz, disco, music hall, and Dury's quasi-rap vocal style – all elements that can be found on Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.

Having rehearsed a week prior, where the tune was introduced, co-writers Dury (on scratch vocal) and Jankel on piano, drummer Charles (playing to a Roland Beat Boxloop), Mickey Gallagher on Hammond organ, guitarist John Turnbull, and Watt-Roy assembled in the main room of the Workhouse Studio on London's Old Kent Road to cut the track live.

It begins with Watt-Roy’s pulsating 16ths leading the groove over Charles' kick-drum quarter-notes and some funky piano and guitar comping. For the first verse, Watt-Roy continues his 16th pace by playing through the changes using chord tones, generally two-at-a-time. Upon arriving at the IV chord (Db), the Jaco influence really emerges, as he quotes a familiar Pastorian boogie pattern utilizing the dominant 7th of the chord, and a chromatic passing tone. 

The first chorus finds the feel shifting to contrasting eighth-note octaves (born of Jankel's dance hall stride piano and the disco of the time), which allowed Watt-Roy to ground the groove while getting a break from the steady 16ths. He also doubles up some of the down-beats to keep the energy intact. 

A key to the bassline, which Watt-Roy plucked with two alternating fingers and occasionally his ring finger, is how he subtly swings the line, mainly through the use of legato, long tones punctuated by periodic shortened notes.

Watt-Roy used his Sunburst ’72 Fender Precision, which, he reported, had a thinner-than-usual P-Bass neck, an added Jazz Bass pickup, and Rotosound strings; the instrument was recorded direct to the API console, as well as via a mic on the studio's small bass amp. The group did 11 passes, eventually settling on one of the early takes. 

He made no punches or fixes, while overdubs included Dury's final vocal, Davey Payne's sax solo (playing two saxophones simultaneously at times), a second snare drum part by Charles, and Turnbull’s synth guitar.

Reflecting on Rhythm Stick, Watt-Roy offered, “The challenge is to be pushing and leading the track with the 16ths, while also sitting with the drums in the pocket. Locking with the drummer is always job one. As Jaco famously said, women and rhythm section first!”

Heavy metal fans of a certain age will remember the rise of Judas Priest, the perennial quintet which has ruled the metallic airwaves from 1974 onwards in a variety of lineups. 

In a half-century of the British heavy metal institution, bassist Ian Hill (who has been in Priest since 1970) has seen it all. “People ask me, ‘Did you ever think Priest was going to last this long when you started?’ I tell them that when we started the band, the concept of somebody doing this sort of thing in their 70s just didn’t exist.”

Having rolled out Trial By Fire – the second single of their upcoming album Invincible Shield, which is slated for March 8th, 2024, the mighty Judas Priest has also announced a series of European shows alongside Saxon and Uriah Heep. 

We asked Hill to name five albums that helped him along the righteous path to metal glory, and left an indelible impression on his musical brain.

1. John Mayall with Eric Clapton – Blues Breakers (1966)

“This was the pinnacle of British blues in my opinion: John Mayall was such a huge figure when it came to that music. Of course, the bass was played by John McVie, one of the all-time classic British blues bassists. He’s so underrated and yet he’s played in so many bands, including Fleetwood Mac, of course. I think John is overlooked as a bass player, for some reason, perhaps because all of the great musicians in Fleetwood Mac like Peter Green and Mick Fleetwood.”

2.The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) 

“Any musician of my age who says he wasn’t influenced by this album is a liar. It all comes together on this LP and it’s such high-quality pop music. McCartney is great on it. There are barely any solos, it’s all about the songwriting, and McCartney was fantastic both as a bassist and a writer. It epitomised the the music of its era. Everything that came after it looked back to it, somehow. Mind you, I tried one of those Hofner violin basses once and I thought it was crap.”

3. Cream – Wheels Of Fire (1968) 

“Jack Bruce is my all-time idol. He went through John Mayall’s band too, of course, as did Eric Clapton. What those two did in Cream with Ginger Baker was just amazing. If there was one album that I had to take with me to a desert island, this would probably be it. It’s an absolute peach, and they were so young when they did it. Listening to it you’d think they’d been playing together for 30 or 40 years, but no, they’d just started.”

4. Quartermass – Quartermass (1970)

“Johnny Gustafson was on bass and vocals on this album, and just as a vocalist he was great, let alone his bass playing, which was superb. He was one of the Liverpool musicians from the ‘60s, I think, and he did some work with Roxy Music as well. Neither he nor Quartermass ever got the attention they deserved, which was a shame because they were a great band. In Judas Priest’s early days, when we had Al Atkins on vocals, we used to do a few Quartermass numbers.”

5. Weather Report – Heavy Weather (1977)

“Roger Glover of Deep Purple first played me this album when we were with him in the studio. Jaco Pastorius was a breath of fresh air. You Absolutely knew when you heard it that he was an amazing player. It was such an awful waste, what happened to him. I know I play heavy metal, but I’ve always loved jazz. My dad was a jazz double bassist and he used to play it to me all the time. It’s a great form of music if you want to express yourself as a musician.”

Invincible Shield is available to pre-order. See www.judaspriestinvincibleshield.com for tour dates.

“Come here and take a look at this.” The request came from legendary engineer Ron Malo, whose recordings at Chess, Motown, Capitol and other labels ranged from Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones and Billy Joel. He was speaking to young engineer Brian Risner. On the other side of the glass, an equally youthful Jaco Pastorius had just plugged in for his Weather Report audition track: Cannonball, from the album Black Market. 

As Risner relates, “Ron said, ‘All I have is maybe 3dB of peak limiting and almost no EQ, and it’s not even going into limiting. There’s only one other bass player I’ve ever worked with who got this great a sound from his hands, and that was James Jamerson.’”

Needless to say Jaco passed the audition, and Weather Report’s 1977 epic, Heavy Weather, sealed his reputation as the self-proclaimed “greatest bass player in the world.” As drummer Alex Acuña told Joe Zawinul biographer Brian Glasser, “Havona is my favourite Jaco track on the album. That, for me, is how I always want to play, that kind of a conversation. Everything was improvised in that moment – it’s almost no overdubs. When I hear that tune, I still get the chills."

Peter Erskine, who succeeded Acuña in Weather Report, added: “It's a perfect track and one of my all-time favorite Jaco performances. Oddly, it was one of the few tunes that the band didn’t rehearse or try to play live when I was in the group, but it’s definitive Jaco: incredible rhythm, new and fresh harmony, virtuosity – flawless execution and intonation, including his Stravinsky quote!"

Brian Risner, who engineered Heavy Weather with Malo, and also did live sound for Weather Report from 1972–1983, shared some details of the session. “It was late 1976, and we were at our usual spot, Devonshire Sound Studios, in North Hollywood. The room there is like a live echo chamber, which is why there’s so much ‘air’ in Weather Report recordings. There was no need for tight miking or much miking in general, with the room supplying all that ambience and an open, accurate, spatial sound.” 

Jaco played his 1962 Fender Jazz Bass, with its fretless rosewood neck and new Rotosound roundwound strings. Risner recalls that while Jaco’s Acoustic 360 rig was miked against the upper grille with an Electro-Voice RE-20, that was only 25 percent of the sound; the other 75 percent was his direct signal through a stock M.C.I. board, with a “drop” of limiting in a few spots, via a Universal Audio 1176.

“Jaco brought the song in new, so they were all reading it,” says Risner. “I remember it was the most challenging song on the album. They ran it down a few times, and in those days a reel of tape was 15 minutes, so you’d play the tune twice in a row for each take. I can’t recall how the bass guitar solo was done, but there were at least three tracks of bass available, so Jaco could have edited it together from different passes. I just remember that Jaco, Joe and Wayne were always present, for overdubs or punches.”

“The whole track sounds like it’s coming from another dimension," said jazz bassist Mark Egan. "Jaco revolutionized the instrument like no one had before him, and – as far as I’m concerned – like no one ever will again.”

"Jaco grooves Havona with that trademark 16th-note figure he loved to play," Marcus Miller told BP. "And his solo is beautiful – it’s more like a composition in that it’s well thought out and flawlessly executed. Gil Evans used to get a real kick out of how shamelessly romantic Jaco’s phrasing could be, and this solo has some great examples – especially the opening lines."

Heavy Weather is available to buy or stream.

A prolific career as both a sideman and a Grammy-winning solo artist has established Marcus Miller as one of the most important players to pick up the bass guitar since Jaco. Having performed alongside the likes of Chaka Khan, Luther Vandross, David Sanborn and Miles Davis, his credentials have remained unrivalled since he first broke into the New York session scene in the late 70s, just as Jaco was sealing his own reputation with Weather Report as the self-proclaimed ‘greatest bass player in the world.’

Speaking with Scott'sBassLessons founder Scott Devine, Miller recalled running into Jaco at the Sunset Marquis Hotel while on tour with Roberta Flack. “The phone rings in my hotel room and it’s Jaco,” says Miller. “He said, ‘Marcus Miller, it’s Jaco Pastorius. I’m in room 265, come up here and get your lesson!’”

“I was feeling like I was a pretty good player in my own right,” Marcus later wrote. "I thought to myself, ‘Man, I don’t need no lesson from Jaco!’ …..then I got my butt to room 265! Jaco played for me. Then he had me play for him. He showed me a whole tone lick that I still use as my warm up today. He was a pretty competitive guy, but it was cool because, without saying it, he let me know that I was cool with him.”

It’s fair to say many have wrongly assumed Marcus and Jaco were rivals and not on good terms. Yet nothing could be further from the truth: they not only had a great relationship, but also played together on several occasions. “Jaco would come sit in with my group when I did gigs in NY,” said Marcus. “One time we jammed all night and played Continuum together.”

Anyone who heard or saw Jaco on tour with Weather Report was instantly spellbound by his virtuosity. And yet the group’s founder, Joe Zawinul, was seemingly not an easy man to impress, even if you were Jaco Pastorius.

“Jaco and Joe Zawinul had a love-hate relationship,” recalls Miller. “Apparently they had a blow up and Jaco quit the band. Michal Urbaniak, who’s a Polish violinist who had a good relationship with Joe, calls me and says, ‘stay by your phone because Joe Zawinul’s going to ask you to play bass in Weather Report.’ I told him he must be out of his mind, and that replacing Jaco in Weather Report was a beat down waiting to happen! So I just stayed away from my phone until Jaco and Zawinul got things back together.”

On October 18th, 1989 at Chelsea Studios in New York City, Marcus recorded a song with Miles Davis that he dedicated to Jaco, who had died two years earlier. Titled Mr. Pastorius, it was released as the final track from the album, Amandla, and also featured Kenny Garret on alto sax.

“When I wrote that song I had two titles,” said Marcus. “One was Mr. Pastorius and the other was Rain, in case Miles wasn’t feeling like making a dedication to Jaco that was really from me. I wasn’t sure how Miles felt about Jaco at the time. We didn’t discuss him much. I told Miles that I named it Mr. Pastorius, but I could come up with another title if he wasn’t cool with it. Miles said, ‘No, I think that’s really nice to name this for Jaco.’ I felt great about that because now I could honestly feel like the tune came from me and from Miles too.” 

Amandla is available to buy on Amazon. To find out more about Marcus Miller visit marcusmiller.com.

There is no other bass guitar player like Jeff Berlin. Educated, passionate, uncompromising and someone who has accompanied a stellar cast of artists throughout his career. “I’ve always played with guys who never sat still, it was all around me,” he says. "Michael Brecker never stopped practicing. I was in New York with Steve Gadd and he played and practiced, they all did."

And the importance of practice and study is where some people go wrong when they think about Jaco Pastorius. The myth is that Jaco was self-taught, a natural. The reality is a little more complicated. “Look at Jaco Pastorius," says Jeff. "Clearly a genius, but misunderstood about where his musical ability was developed. He was self-taught, but he also studied with a hundred different guys, and studied composition and different principles of playing. The myth that Jaco burst forth playing like that never happened. He worked hard to become what he became.”

It’s a sentiment that hints at the highly competitive musical environment of the time. “I never had a good groove, because I always wanted to play fast and play a lot of notes – which instantly turned off most people from using me,” he says.

Here’s a great clip of Jeff Berlin and Jaco Pastorius onstage in 1985 at Musician's Institute in Hollywood.

“Once that little light went off in my head, I went to groove, something that I never studied, but simply focussed on, because out of a pragmatic manner I wanted to play and I wanted to work. All I wanted to do was play like Brecker on the bass – which is an impossibility – but if I aimed at it from about 85 or 90 degrees, I probably hit it about 30. That was significant to me, it guided me to get better and better as a bass player.”

Jazz, a mystery to so many rock players, is the key to Jeff Berlin’s perspective on what makes great bass playing, and why learning some theory will benefit all of us. “Frank Zappa was an odd, strange, quirky, brilliant guy: he stopped a rehearsal we were doing once to talk about cheese. You know, what do you say? 

“I read his music and I practised it. I used to go to Steve Vai’s house so he could teach me how to subdivide it – because I never saw anything like it. I found a lot of Frank’s music was written and based on quarter notes. He would play things like 5, 7, 11, 4. How did I know? Because I was academically trained.”

Jeff goes on to name-check several iconic musicians who were his classmates at Berklee in the 1970s. “John Scofield was my classmate, Gary Burton was my teacher. I studied and played with Pat Metheny; Vinnie Colaiuta and Steve Smith were there studying drums. Bill Frisell was there. So what I learned from each of them is something that made me what I am today.”

Find information on all of Jeff Berlin's tour dates and upcoming releases at jeffberlinmusicgroup.com.

The legendary Tony Levin is truly a bass player for all seasons. Who else straps wooden sticks to their fingers when they play? Having spent many years supplying basslines of impeccable quality in Peter Gabriel’s band as well as holding down tours with perhaps the most innovative of all the old-school prog acts, King Crimson, Levin’s credentials speak for themselves.

In between all this bass magnificence Levin also plays the Chapman Stick, the most intimidating musical instrument ever devised, in a variety of ensembles including the self-explanatory Stick Men. “I don’t really think about the crossover between the two instruments,” he says. “Some songs just seem right for the stick, and others for the bass guitar.”

Asked to recommend 4 albums with killer bass playing, Levin gets listing…

1. Oscar Pettiford – Oscar Pettiford (1954)

"Oscar Pettiford’s Tricotism is an album I grew up with. I’m not really sure the name is right – it’s really a series of albums with the same players, Julius Watkins on French horn, and Charlie Rouse on sax. It has great, tasty playing, especially by Pettiford – he always hits the right notes, and they’re always placed perfectly for maximum groove."

2. D'Angelo – Voodoo (2000)

"D’Angelo’s Voodoo made me want to go back to school, figuratively, as a bassist. It was a new kind of groove (to me) that broke all the rules I grew up with, but was amazingly cool. I raved to my fellow players about it, and tried to introduce that kind of playing to some of my music – I couldn’t do it… so it’s still on my list of ‘got to learn this, dude.’" 

3. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum – In Glorious Times (2007)

"Then there’s Sleepytime Gorilla Museum’s In Glorious Times. I love this style of music – it has great power, great musicianship and great bass playing by Dan Rathbun, sometimes on instruments he built himself. One thing you gotta love about music: this band may have been influenced a bit by King Crimson, but then I, a member of King Crimson, was very much influenced by them! With Stick Men, I insisted we do a piece of theirs for our first year on the road, though it was tough and not a great rendition, just to get us thinking in that vein."

4. Joni Mitchell – Hejira (1976)

"Finally, there’s Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. Jaco’s playing before that had impressed me, but it didn’t move me, maybe because it was so far from the styles I played. But the bass playing on this album is sublime: to me it is the apotheosis of fretless playing behind a singer. It is beautifully melodic on its own, but never interfering with the great vocals, unique harmonically, with a style of its own, and impeccably in tune… I put the fretless bass away for 10 years!”

Tony Levin will soon be joining Peter Gabriel's long-awaited i/o – The Tour. Tickets for the 2023 run across Europe and North America are available from Peter Gabriel's official site.

Jaco Pastorius will be forever remembered as arguably the number one bass player of all time. Even today, his aggressive but melodic upfront style, demonstrated in such inspired fashion on his 1976 self-titled debut, stands as a reference point by which modern bass guitar playing divides into ‘pre-Jaco’ and ‘post-Jaco.’ The album became to the electric bass what Are You Experienced by Jimi Hendrix was to the electric guitar.

“I think it’s impossible to pick up a fretless electric bass and not think of Jaco Pastorius,” says jazz bassist Christian McBride. “Much in the same way that you can't pick up an alto saxophone and not think of Charlie Parker. At some point you either consciously try to avoid that or you address it without even knowing."

Our clip features a roll-call of bass players from jazz, rock, blues and funk who each cite Pastorius as an inspiration, speaking of an artist who changed the game. “When I first heard Jaco's solo record it stopped me in my tracks," said bassist and bandleader Laurence Cottle. "He employed techniques that had never been executed on the bass guitar before. Joe Zawinul once said that Jaco had that magical thing about him, like Jimi Hendrix had. He was a real superstar.”

Laurence first met Jaco in the early 1980s. “Weather Report were playing in Boston and just as we were going into the theater he was walking out," says Laurence in the clip. "We talked about music and all about the gig. He said that he was a keen juggler and I was as well, so we went out onto the common and had an afternoon of juggling. Jaco was a superstar and embraced everything that went with it, but in his formative years he was completely dedicated to music. Music was everything to him.”

Jaco's 1976 debut album is available to download. For more info visit jacopastorius.com. The full 90 minute Beneath The Bassline documentary is available to download and stream.

Having replaced Jaco Pastorius in Weather Report at just 22 years old, the late Victor Bailey, who passed away in November 2016, is still widely regarded as one of the bass world's greatest ever players.

Much like Jaco, Victor was raised on a wide-range of musical ideas thanks to his father Morris Bailey Jnr’s job as a top-flight composer and arranger to the likes of Patti LaBelle, The Stylistics, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes and legendary jazz singer Nina Simone. His father was also an acclaimed sax player, recording and performing live sessions with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Smith and Lee Morgan.

It’s perhaps thanks to his father’s open-minded approach that Bailey was able to embrace Jaco’s legacy in Weather Report, while stepping into those shoes to replace him in the very group that made Jaco a household name. Yet Jaco’s influence on Bailey was more spiritual than technical, and he was unflinching in his criticism of the hordes of bassists claiming him as an influence.

“It’s interesting how many people are supposed to be influenced by Jaco who have no groove and no soul!” said Victor when I interviewed him in 2010. “Everything the guy ever played always had a groove, always a feeling, and it wasn’t always a million notes all the time! I try to remind all these young guys – and they’ve got his records and they’re always mentioning Jaco – none of his songs are complicated. 

“The two tunes that everybody wants me to play, they always want me to play Teen Town or Donna Lee really fast. They are not fast! The way he played Teen Town is not fast; his version of Donna Lee, he didn’t play it that fast, and it’s just as hard to articulate the way he did it and with that feeling. Needless to say he could do incredible things, but everything he wrote was full of feeling and soul.

"I understand that to young guys the guy who is fastest is always the best, but I was always a music guy, and I always point this out – there are guys that are heroes on YouTube … I mean guys that do unbelievable things on the instrument, that I have never seen on a gig and I’ve never seen in anybody’s band. Do you want to be that guy or to play bass with people?”

It was through his connection with drummer Omar Hakim that Bailey was offered the much coveted but no doubt intimidating position of bassist with Weather Report and Joe Zawinul. His authoritative playing was more than a match for Jaco’s benchmark-setting energy and agility, yet bolstered with his own uniquely growly bass tone. “I’m a real groove guy, but groove to me doesn’t mean repetition, it just means feeling. So if we are waltzing three, I want to hear that three; if we’re playing a swing funk I have to feel that the whole time.”

Bailey obviously had immense respect for his former Weather Report boss. “When I first played with Joe Zawinul one of the first things he told me, and it’s something I’ve never forgotten.

“He said, 'When you have a band make sure your music is together enough that you could do an entire show and nobody plays a solo, that you knock the people dead because the music is that together.' Joe and Wayne, especially Joe, were always picking the music apart – all day, every day. Teeny, teeny little points to constantly improve the quality of it.”

Among Victor’s many sideman gigs his work with Madonna is among one of the more high profile, taking him right to the top of the pop tree. "All I ever think about with a gig like that is, 'I’m going to play my ass off!' If I’m playing the bassline to Like A Virgin I’m going to play the hell out of it! The same way as if I were playing Teen Town, there's really no difference.

"With Madonna it was a phenomenal band, with Omar Hakim on drums, Michael Deering the keys player, and we approached it the same way we approached Weather Report’s music – we rehearsed it and we went out to kick ass!"

To listen to Victor Bailey powering through Weather Report classics like Procession, Two Lines and Fast City, there's a live album entitled Live in Cologne 1983 that's available as a download and as a DVD.

Here's our interview with Jaco Pastorius from the May 1983 issue of Guitar World. The original story by Peter Mengaziol ran with the headline The Wild Man of Bass Comes Clean: A Whacked-Out Interview, and the story started on page 32.

The last thing I expect when interviewing a serious musical visionary is to find a very funny man. After all his pensive poses, the critics' litanies of praise and philosophical reviews, Jaco Pastorius came up to our photographer's studio armed with more one-liners than Henny Youngman.

Nobody was ready for that! It made getting a straight answer kind of tough – because he would follow a profound question with an off-the-wall wisecrack that took ten minutes to register as perfect sense. Often his remarks went over our heads, and other times they hit us at street level.

He also brought along a sidekick, who played the part of straight man: Victor Bailey, Weather Report's new bassist. Theirs was the funniest historical meeting ever.

There was something funny, too, about how we got with Jaco. A series of late-night phone calls from Florida to the Guitar World offices. An invitation to the famous electric bassist to fly to New York. Jaco hemming, hawing, hesitating, resisting. Ten minutes later a return call: "I'm on the next plane." The next day, GW staffers picked him up at a Soho jazz bar.

Jaco walked into Jonathan Postal's studio with his famous Fender Jazz bass slung on a strap. He led Victor into the room. I didn't expect to interview two of the most important bassists at once; such luck is rare. Jaco and Victor had met just that day, but they seemed to be longtime friends, teacher and student, based only on previous brief, backstage encounters. 

After rounding up some beer, Jaco dove into the photo shoot, thereby giving me a chance to rethink the questions I'd prepared.

Who is Jaco Pastorius? I knew that he had recently left Weather Report, and the memory of his wonderful concert with his own orchestra, named for his recent self-produced Warners album, Word of Mouth, was vivid. But nothing I'd read prepared me for his wit and insight, combined with the slightest hint of urban anger.

Although now living in Florida, John Francis Pastorius was born in Philadelphia 31 years ago. He moved to the Fort Lauderdale area at age eight, and in his teens developed his skills as a player (on several instruments) and arranger, becoming an in-demand bassist for Wayne Cochran and his C.C. (Chitlin' Circuit) Riders, and other acts passing through South Florida. He wrote charts for the University of Miami stage band, and taught bass there for a time.

His first album, Jaco Pastorius, was released very soon after he joined Weather Report in 1976, replacing Alphonso Johnson in the premiere fusion jazz ensemble. Jaco then guested on Joni Mitchell's Hejira album; here his new, thick bottom sound was as much part of the songs as Mitchell's voice – and she has continued to collaborate with him, notably on her tribute album to the late bassist and composer Charles Mingus.

Jaco's first album on Columbia with Weather Report was Black Market; Heavy Weather showed his impact, featuring a bolder band sound, largely due to Jaco's bass playing, writing and production work. Birdland from that album became the closest thing to a Top Ten hit for Weather Report, Jaco's contribution – a deep bass riff – figuring heavily in the mix.

He also became the showman of the group. One of his tunes described his music to a degree: Punk Jazz was not an attempt at jazz by a non-player (We've heard plenty of those since then) but a real jazz player's stab at a brave new music, a fusion with energy but without overkill.

Somewhere along the way, Jaco became the state-of-the-art electric bass player. To be more accurate, he pushed the state of the art to the point where he defined it. Six years later, he remains the measure of any electric bassist's accomplishments, whether Jaco is actively playing or not.

What he did with his instrument was expand it way past its original function of merely supplying the harmonic underpinning to a composition. While there were other electric bassists with the technical ability to do more, Jaco was probably the first to make the listener aware of a musical idea first, and the instrument playing second.

In fact, one really didn't notice that it was a bass at all; it could have been a guitar or a synthesizer or an electric piano he was playing.

Victor Bailey supplied the history: "If I may interject, the thing that happened was: Stanley Clarke says, 'I don't want to be in the background and be a bass player; I want to play some music.' Then Alphonso Johnson says, 'Okay, but I can do more with the bass.' And then Jaco says, 'Hell with being a bass – let it be whatever I want it to be!'" Victor himself has the hardest act to follow in bassdom.

As a matter of course, Victor supplied some of the best commentary of the evening, as thoughts and jibes bounced between the two bassists. What was amazing about the duo was the camaraderie between them, considering that this was the first time they'd spent together.

You might think that Jaco and Victor would not be so chummy, one replaced by the other in a world famous, often recorded, and from its inception all-star band. This wasn't the case at all, though. Jaco is still chummy and connected to, if critical of, his former bandmates.

"I have not left Weather Report, and I am not 'Miscellaneous Personnel,'" he maintained. "Victor, I guess, is going on tour, and he's a very lucky cat to get that position." 

"Joe Zawinul does overkill, and his technological overkill sucks, but there's no friction between us; I just say, 'Look,' and that's it. Do you have any idea how much music I learned from him? I played a D-seven-sus-nine for Joe once and he said, 'Hell, that sounds terrible; only Duke Ellington can do that!'"

Jaco continued, "One of the important things Joe taught me is that the media actually is helping you if you permit them to help you." 

Let's help him clarify: some critics felt that Jaco was getting too big to be the bassist of Weather Report, that his conception of music overstepped his ability to be a team player. He said, "My concept is not bigger than Weather Report. I am Weather Report. It comes through me; I do not create nothing. It comes from being a child and listening to the radio every day of my life.

"See what happens: Joe Zawinul on the planet today. And Joe knows what he wants – he's an Aryan, he's Germanic and I don't care if everybody knows it. Joe Zawinul can play like nobody! Joe Zawinul and Toots Thielemans, in my opinion, are the only Europeans who can play rhythm-and-blues.”

Composer/keyboardist Zawinul and saxophonist Wayne Shorter are, of course, the founding members of Weather Report; guitarist/harmonica virtuoso and whistler Thielemans contributed his composition Bluesette to Jaco's Word of Mouth.

Jaco still harbors a warm ambivalence toward the band he was with for six years and half a dozen albums, including Mr. Gone, 8:30, Night Passage and Weather Report. He implies that their business sense never matched the quality of their music or their personal relations.

"My momma told me when I joined Weather Report, 'They've got the worst managers in the world.' Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter are my best friends, and Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams, too. I mean, they will never lie to me. If I need some help they tell me right to my face. And that's what nobody understands. You see, I grew up on the tracks; to me, white and black – there's no difference, bro."

What about Jaco's contribution to the electric bass? He took time to talk about the fantastic Chromatic Fantasy – a transcription of a Bach organ piece he performed on electric bass on Word of Mouth.

"I will say one thing: I invented the electric bass, and everybody knows it. The Chromatic Fantasy, that don't mean shit. I just want to play the blues – in F," he laughed.

But he plays it fast. This interchange began:

Jaco: "I don't play fast!"

Victor: "When you listen to a person whose objective is to play fast you go, ‘Wow, That guy can really play fast.'"

Jaco: "I have never tried to play fast in my life."

Victor: "But when you listen to someone like a Jaco, and you're a musician, you hear the music. I think his objective was to learn the piece, not 'I'm gonna play this fast.'"

Jaco: "I practiced Donna Lee [his version of Charlie Parker's chop-busting bebop standard is on his eponymous first LP] and the Chromatic Fantasy for eight years before I would play them in front of anybody. 

"When I first did the Chromatic Fantasy originally, I did not use an open string. It was so hard, but I did it because I was such a purist and people were always putting me down for being an 'electric bass player,' though I was so pure. I'm an acoustic musician. Mister V. said it earlier: Nobody understands how much we are correcting the music world. 

"Look at Sting [he pointed to the cover of an old issue of Guitar World], Sting is a playing mother! 'Cause he and I know how to treat the bass. The bass is the number one instrument in the world, because it hits the sound right where it belongs.

"Hey, man," he grinned, "all the greatest bass players come from Philadelphia: Alphonso, Stanley, Victor, me – we're all from Philly. It's the City of Brotherly Love!"

Since we were talking about bassists, I asked him about the famous Fender he uses, sunburst with the frets pulled out. That bass, although looking rather abused, sounds like no electric bass before it. 

Even other bassists had thought it was an acoustic bass, when their backs were turned away from the stage or recording booth. Jaco played it during the photo session ("You never know, one of these shots might work!” he joked), and when I put my ear near it, there was the sound! I tried to get him to discuss his instrument – it's almost a Jaco trademark.

"Ninety dollars with a case! The most I've been offered for this bass is $80,000! That was in Europe. When I got this bass, I'll show you right here, these are the only scars I put on, just my thumbs. Everything else was exactly like this, just like I got it. I throw this thing around, I do flips on it, but I've never, ever, hurt this bass, ever! It looks like I demolish it every night, but I've never touched it; I've had it now for eleven years.

"I own 245 basses. In performance I have three or four basses on stage nobody knows about – not even Zawinul knows it sometimes. I'll take a bass I bought for fifteen bucks that day (and nobody knows it) and do a Pete Townshend or Jimi Hendrix routine, lighter fluid it and all that. Man, that's the easiest thing in the world!"

I asked him if there were any special tricks to the bass that made it sound that way – acoustic – since live he uses an effects rack – basically a compressor, a fuzz tone and a digital delay, put on infinite repeat for his climactic renditions of Purple Haze.

"The secret to the sound is to drop it on the floor!" he answered. "As I told you, ninety bucks with a case, and the frets were out. See this shit that looks like somebody chewed it up? That's the way it was when I got it. Petit's Poly-Poxy, that's what I put on the neck, but that shit won't go away."

Jaco hasn't put out a solo album since Word of Mouth and the last Weather Report album with him on it was released over a year ago. He has recorded much more than he has released, so he does have a backlog of tapes, some of which must be interesting, indeed.

"I have a record you will not believe," he claimed, "Holiday for Pans, which I adapted from David Rose's Holiday for Strings and arranged for Othello Molineaux, the steel drum player who's with me on Word of Mouth. And I have about 24 master tapes that I paid for myself. [Holiday for Pans would eventually be released in Japan in 1993, six years after Jaco's death, after it was rejected by Warner Bros.]

"You don't understand; everybody's gotta give respect to the music industry, but you have to know how to deal with the mothers, 'cause they're just like us: they care about music, they're good people, but you've got to be ready to deal on their terms. I am commercial. I don't complain anymore 'cause I can deal with it."

Then, a turnabout: "The reason I don't record enough is because I don't record enough, I'm an American Indian; I don't believe in photography or recording, I like to play everyday live!" 

Again, a switcheroo: "Sometimes I have a very bad point of being too obnoxious. I am not too obnoxious. I mean, I just try to make things more peaceful. Me being obnoxious makes a lot of things more peaceful.” Snap, snap, goes the camera shutter.

Jaco may be the greatest living electric bassist, but he certainly isn't the richest. He explained the reality and the reasons for this situation: "People do not understand how hard a jazz musician works for a living. I'm not putting nobody down, but I'm telling you nobody understands how hard jazz musicians work. Jazz is not big in the US, because the States are too worried about Pac-Man and The Police."

Victor affirmed Jaco's point of contention: "And the record companies, most of them, want to sell us a million records, instead of selling us significant music."

Jaco: "I don't want to sell shit. I want to do what has to be done. I'm a musician. And musicians are the peacemakers."

Is there a chance for a solo electric bass LP anytime soon? Jaco said no, for several reasons: "Because the timing ain't right and Victor hasn't learned how to play it yet and Jimmy Blanton's dead!" Blanton was the Duke Ellington Orchestra bassist largely credited with turning the acoustic bass into a soloing instrument.

So I asked Jaco how he sees himself as a musician. He's been considered one of the most creative players to emerge in the '70s, and has been heralded as an innovator, but when confronted with those opinions he takes an evasive maneuver, one outrageous statement after another, leading to a truth:

"I am not an original musician; I am a thief. Like Igor Stravinsky said, man, 'No good composers borrow – they steal!' I told the French press I want to be the Charles Aznavour of the bass – I am a very bad imitation of Gerald Jemmott [Motown's masterful bassman]!

"You see, I rip off everything. I have no originals. Only animals and children can understand my music; I love women, children, music, I love everything that's going in the right direction, everything that flows... I just love music. I don't know what I'm doing! 

"If I practiced reading for one week, I could sight-read anything, but that's not my thing. I'd rather go in and just be Jaco. I improvise all the time; hopefully, I think, I never play the same thing twice. I'm not a magician, I'm not a politician, I'm a musician. I have no goal. You don't get better, you grow. I am a musician, and I finally realized it!"

We’re so used to thinking of our fingers moving towards the floor when we play an ascending bass part that it comes as something of a shock to see the unique former Yellowjackets bassist Jimmy Haslip in action. 

Not only does he play a left-handed bass guitar, he strings it upside-down – in other words, his low B string is physically lower than his high C. Add to this his phenomenal ability when it comes to fast soloing, and your brain ends up tied in knots.  

Fortunately we have the great Grammy-winning bassist right here, 69 years old and full of energy, ready to talk about his unorthodox technique, some of the many albums on which it appears, and his memories of taking bass lessons 46 years ago with a certain J. Pastorius... 

Have you done much recording from home in the pandemic, Jimmy? 

“I have two studios that are a stone’s throw away from my home here in Venice Beach. For that reason I’ve dragged my feet about getting a home studio set up, but in February 2020 it started looking a bit crazy with the virus, so I realized that I needed to get some gear together to allow me to work from home. 

“I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with it. I don’t profess to be a very good engineer, but I can actually sit here and record electric bass, and even some keyboards, so I’m happy.“ 

What is your go-to bass gear these days? 

“Aside from the Roscoe basses that I’ve been using for some years, I also have a bunch of old Tobias basses and some newer MTDs. I’ve been in touch with [luthier] Mike Tobias for a long, long time and I absolutely love his instruments. I feel connected to them, just as I do with Keith Roscoe’s basses. 

“I met a luthier in Japan named Hirotaka Kiuchi who has a boutique company called Inner Wood, and I hooked up with him. I introduced him to Keith Roscoe’s company, and he ended up being the rep in Japan for them. We became friends, and he built me three beautiful instruments. 

“They’re pretty straight-ahead: off the top of my head, I would just describe them as souped-up Fender basses with great-quality sounds. You plug one of those into a direct box in the studio for a session and engineers and very comfortable with it.“ 

Tell us about the reissues of your albums Red Heat and Nightfall. 

“I was originally signed to a small label named Unitone, and I did the original version of Red Heat for them in the early Nineties. I did that record with [pianist] Joe Vannelli, having already worked with him on a variety of projects. 

“At the time, my father wasn’t well, and he had always wanted the Yellowjackets to do a Latin-influenced album, which – as I told him – would be difficult because the band was a consortium of four musicians, and I wasn’t comfortable pushing a certain genre of music on the band. 

“When he took ill, I thought it would be a good idea to do a project of music that was influenced by my Latin roots, which are not especially deep, because I grew up in Long Island.“ 

You weren’t an aficionado of that culture?

“The culture that I got from Puerto Rico was really from my parents and my cousins; it wasn’t as steeped in tradition as it would have been if I’d been born and raised in Puerto Rico. 

“I did learn a lot as a young kid, being around the culture and the music, from Tito Puente to Mongo Santamaria and Ray Barretto, and I saw a lot of these bands play in New York, which made a big impact on me when I was growing up and studying music. 

“So I made the decision to focus Red Heat on anything I could bring to the party that concerned Latin music and culture. It was my own take on it. It was a wonderful experience to work on that album, and to have my father be the focus of the emotion that I put into it. 

“Unitone did a good job and it achieved some success when it came out. Joe was right there with me: He put 1000 percent into helping me put it together, just as he did with Nightfall some years later, which I wrote when my daughter was enduring a health crisis. There was no real support for that album, which is why I decided to reissue it, along with Red Heat, on Blue Canoe Records, where I’ve been A&R-ing for a while.“

Do you ever listen back to a recording and feel that you could have done better? 

“Always, haha! Even on the day I finish a session, I think maybe I could have done a better job. As I get older I feel like I’m changing as a bass player on a daily basis.“ 

In a good way? 

“I hope so! I feel like I’m progressing as a musician and becoming a better one as time goes on. I still put in a lot of time with the instrument, just as I’ve done in the past. Do you know the theory of becoming good at anything you want to do as long as you put at least 10,000 hours into it? 

“I know I’ve put at least that many hours into it already, but I’m still not satisfied. I’ll be happy to put another 10,000 hours into it, although I don’t know if I’ll have enough time, because I turned 69 this year. Thanks to the pandemic, I’ve put in at least 1000 hours this year alone.“ 

With the way you string your basses, do you think that upper-register fills are easier to play for you, because the higher strings are closer to your fingers? 

“It’s very possible. I really haven’t analyzed that at all. I look at playing any instrument as a difficult task. To get proficient takes time and energy, as it does to get comfortable with the instrument and to get a sound out of it, and then to start getting into the technical and mechanical aspects of playing it. 

“In my case, I always felt that because I play the bass guitar unconventionally, I was always having to deal with some unconventional hurdle, to play the instrument correctly. 

“And at this point in my life, I know I don’t play the instrument correctly, haha! I’ve sort of abandoned some of those kinds of rules and just tried to find my own way of expressing myself on the instrument, for better or for worse. That’s led me down some interesting paths and studies.“

Tell us about your lessons with Jaco. 

“That was an explosion of an experience. You know how things just happen, by coincidence or fate or chance – all these things that come into a lifetime of experience? It so happened that at the time in 1975, I was just settling in to Los Angeles, having moved here from New Orleans. 

“The goal was to get a record deal, and I ran into a drummer that I had met in New York but got to know in New Orleans. He invited me and our guitar player to come to Los Angeles. The drummer was Carmine Appice, who is a force of nature. I’ve been friends with him ever since. 

“He graciously put us up, and I think he wanted to play with us, but he was committed contractually to his band KGB. He introduced us to his brother Vinny, and we formed a trio. He then introduced us to these guys Cavallo, Ruffalo and Fargnoli, who had a huge management company. 

“At the time they were managing a new artist called Prince, as well as Earth, Wind And Fire, and Little Feat, who I loved – and Weather Report, who I had always been in awe of.“ 

Not a bad artist roster. 

“Right! They took us on, and we were managed by them. They were very interested in what we were doing and they were seeking a record deal for us. In the process we ended up in a rehearsal hall that belonged to Frank Zappa. It had two rooms, a small one that we were in because we were just a trio, and a larger one with a stage with Weather Report in it. 

“They were rehearsing at the same time as us, so I was incredibly excited, and I snuck in to watch. To my surprise, I saw this long-haired guy playing bass, and I was thinking ‘Who’s this?’ because I was expecting to see Alphonso Johnson. But I’d never heard anything quite like this new guy, and he blew me away. I waited around, and when they finished I went up to Jaco and introduced myself and asked if he gave lessons. 

“He said ‘Well, I’m going to be in town for the next 10 or 12 days, so if you want we can get together and have some lessons’. I said ‘Great!’ and with that I took probably a half-dozen lessons with him, as well as some regular time just hanging out with him. In the first lesson he said ‘I just finished my first solo project, do you want to hear something? It’s not out yet but it’s coming out soon’. I said ‘Sure’ and he stuck some headphones on my head, and the first thing I heard was Donna Lee.“ 

Was he impressed by your playing? 

“I was astounded that he said I actually had pretty good technique. I took that as a very high compliment, coming from him, and it was very motivating. Now that I’ve done a lot of teaching, I understand that the job of a good teacher is to motivate the students. Jaco was right to do that, although whether he meant it or not, I don’t know! I did feel like I had some things going on in my favor at that point, though.“

What were they? 

“Well, people ask me all the time how I play fast, because I’ve had that skill from when I first started playing, although I don’t know why that happened. I guess learning to play when you’re an impatient 13-year-old might be one of the reasons, though. Jaco told me to start out slow and build up speed over a period of time, which was a good lesson for the impatient 25-year-old that I was. 

“I was always trying to learn things at speed, and sometimes that would be frustrating. It was a revelation to me that I could slow all the notes down and play at a slower tempo, before building up again once I was comfortable.“ 

What else did Jaco teach you? 

“He suggested some ideas after he watched me play for a while, and he also asked me if I had any thoughts about what I wanted to do. At the time I was trying to work on some melodic things that I was having a little trouble with, and he gave me this great tool that I use to this day. 

“He said, ‘If you can sing something, you should be able to play it.’ He also asked me to listen to more horn players, which was good advice when it comes to soloing, and he told me to study Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias, which I was unaware of until he told me about it. They were very technically challenging.“ 

You also played with Allan Holdsworth. 

“That was an incredible experience. Being able to tour and perform with Allan was unmistakably one of the highlights of my career, and being able to get inside his head a little bit and to understand what he was about, was an eye-opening experience. 

“He was a genius, and it’s been said many times that he actually changed his instrument. You can count those people on one hand. I’ll always revere that experience and never take it for granted. And playing with a gentleman like Gary Husband was incredible too, because he’s not only a great drummer, he’s also an amazing piano player, which is unique. There’s really not too many of those people on the planet.“ 

Tell us about the online masterclasses that you’ve been doing lately.

“When I started doing them, I looked back at some improvizational exercises that I’ve been working on over the years, because I thought they would make a good lesson. They’re just things that I’ve done off the top of my head without thinking about it – just trying to find personal ways for me to express myself on the instrument. 

“As I analyzed these things, I came to realize that there were a lot of technical aspects to them that I’d never really thought about, harmonically speaking. People would say ‘What are you doing there?’ and I had to say to myself, ‘Yeah... what am I doing there?’ Ha ha! 

“I’ve spent a lot of time on really researching what I was doing to try to make sense of it, and it’s led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, but fortunately I have a lot of books here that I work from, as well as my own book that I put out in the early Nineties, The Melodic Library For Bass.“

What were your intentions when you assembled that book? 

“It was my attempt to put on paper how I organize scales, and it stemmed from when I was 18 years old and playing in a Top 40 band in New York. This guitar player showed me the way he organized pentatonic scales, and he showed me these patterns, which were basically inversions of a major scale. 

That was a really cool lesson about harmonic structure – a very basic structure, but an extremely useful one that is used in a lot of different music all the time. So if you study that, you’re going to have a vast knowledge of music. He also showed me an interesting way to organize the modal scales, which is another scalar system that deals with the major scales and the seven inversions of those.“ 

Most of us are terrified of modes. 

“Well, I might suggest looking at The Melodic Library For Bass in that case. I tried to make them as simple and clear as possible in that book. I wrote out every scale in the modal system, in all 12 keys, with a numbers system for root, third, fourth, fifth and so on, and also in letters and notation. I felt like that took the pressure off anybody that didn’t read music.

“Reading music is important, and it should be studied in my opinion, but I’m not gonna bust anybody’s chops about reading if they don’t read. I truly believe that the music is the most important part of anything that we’re dealing with here, so if you can play music on a toothpick and a rubber band – then my hat goes off to you.“

• Jimmy Haslip's Melodic Bass Library: Scales and Modes for the Bass Guitarist is out now via Alfred Music.

Warwick, NY-based Felix Pastorius was born, along with his twin brother Julius, in 1982, five years before the premature death of his father Jaco Pastorius, arguably the most influential electric bassist of all time alongside James Jamerson and Paul McCartney. 

A superb bassist himself with a long list of recording and performance credits behind him, including a stint in the Yellowjackets from 2012 to 2015, Felix plays in a handful of elite bands and delivers clinics and bass guitar lessons. 

He’s also the author of several books, including Hot Dog Dinners For 4 String Electric Bass, Just A.S.I.P. Of Coffee & The Chromatic Scale and Scales From Rhythm And Outer Space... Aka Tetra Cocktails.

Our questions for Felix are arguably aimed at his late father just as much as they aimed at him. Although Jaco didn’t live to see his son follow in his musical footsteps, the inevitable associations of that unique surname connect their creative mindset to a profound degree.

Consider the case of the late John Lennon and his sons Julian and Sean; it’s not too much of a stretch to consider the two father-son relationships as parallel.

To Felix’s immense credit, he responds to our questions with tolerance and good humor – exactly, we hope, as his dad might well have done.

You play live with a number of interesting projects, Felix.

”Yes, I’m very fortunate that way. I have a touring band called Hipster Assassins, and I’ve done a lot of tours over the last 11 years with the drummer Cindy Blackman-Santana, who is such a great person to play and work with. 

”We’ve just recorded a live album with her band. I also play with Jazz Is Phish, which has a lot of musicians in it from bands such as Ghost Note and Snarky Puppy, and I’m a part of a group called Social Experiment. 

”I really want to mention Venture, which is me, Mike Clark on drums, Mark Sherman on vibraphone and Chase Baird on saxophone: we’ve recorded an album and we’ll be touring when that becomes possible again. There’s also a collaboration with Keith Carlock, Nir Felder, and Jeff Coffin which I’m really enjoying.”

What’s your current gear setup?

”I’ve been with Aguilar for amplification, pedals and pickups for over 13 years, and I also want to put one of their preamps into one of my basses. I don’t have a very large collection of basses; they’re more of a ‘story line’ of who I am and where I’ve been.

”I don’t collect basses, but I’m very interested in the idea of having a relationship with an instrument, whether it be a boutique, multi-thousand dollar instrument, or a little scrapper that you find. 

”My main instrument is a Fodera, who have been close friends of mine and my family for a long time. It’s wonderful to have those guys in my back yard for any needs that I might have.”

Sounds like a tried-and-tested setup.

”It is, yeah. When I practise, I use a Warwick Alien six-string, and I also use LK Straps, D’Addario strings and Dunlop gear. I’m also using a bass by Soame, an Argentinean company which makes me a five-string. It’s for gigs where a simpler visual aesthetic is required for the bass. I have it strung with a regular B string.”

How old were you when you got your first Fodera?

”My mom brought me to the shop for the first time when I was 14 or 15, along with my brother Julius. Vinny Fodera recalls it like it was yesterday. I just remember how sweet everybody was, and how excited they were to have us in the shop. 

”I remember Vinny not letting us leave the shop until he ordered us a cab – he wouldn’t let us take the train. So I’ve known them for a long time, and I’ve played a few Foderas over the years, but my main bass for most of my clinics and gigs over the years has been a Fodera Emperor 2 six-string – 33” scale, rosewood fingerboard, box elder burl top. I put in Aguilar DCB ceramic bar pickups – I love those.”

What was your first bass?

”I started with a Fender Jazz four-string, that I still have parts of today. My second go-to bass in my collection has the body of that Jazz, because it’s one of the first four bodies of my father’s signature basses. When Fender started mass-producing it in 1999, they gave one to each of my dad’s four children. I guess the most important bass at my house at the moment is my father’s fretless, though.”

Did you study music?

”I never went to music school and never had a proper teacher – so I’ve always tried to approach my teaching as the way that I taught myself and I continue to teach myself. That can be detrimental to my profession as a teacher, because I tend to say way too much information straight off the bat, but that’s because I really do enjoy sharing information. 

”I don’t think about music all the time: I like sports, and I have responsibilities, but I do it because I enjoy learning music and practising as well as it being my profession. Luckily, I’ve been able to survive in New York as a musician. I’ve done other gigs along the way but I’ve been very fortunate to play music for most of my life.”

How did you get into playing bass? Was it inevitable, given your heritage? 

”No, I think bass is a by-product of the encouragement that my mother gave my brother and me to play music. I don’t think she specifically wanted us to play bass. We took up violin first, which didn’t last very long, and then we played piano. 

”After that, my brother switched to guitar and then to drums, while I went to bass. As 11-year-olds, jamming on guitar and piano wasn’t half as much fun as jamming on bass and drums, especially with our lack of theory and music knowledge.”

What was it about bass that spoke to you?

”It was just an instrument that I gravitated towards. I knew that I had the bug when I started teaching myself music theory on the bass, and I loved the way the bass looked and sounded. I’m very visual.

”My brother and I were encouraged to be artistic all the time, and most of my stuff was fairly angular, whereas my brother’s art was free-flowing. We’re twins, but polar opposites – similar in many ways, but opposites too. I just remember having a lot more fun playing bass, although I loved figuring music out on piano.”

What kind of music did you play in the early days?

”There’s a cassette tape of my grandfather Jack, who was Jaco’s father, on drums, my older brother John on piano, and me on bass. That’s one of my very earliest memories of playing bass. I don’t think I’d ever had as much fun in my life before that.”

Who were your inspirations when you were growing up?

”We obviously listened to our father a lot, but also Stevie Wonder, and Earth, Wind & Fire, because R&B and soul were huge for us, growing up in our house. I’m an early- 80s kid, though, so I was introduced to post-punk, which then became alternative rock and then grunge. 

”Primus was huge for me: the first two albums I bought with my own money, when I was 11 years old, were Sailing The Seas Of Cheese and Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I listened to them over and over and over again. They were huge for me. I was constantly blown away by what both of those guys were doing.”

It was a great time to be learning bass.

”Definitely. The early 90s was also the progression of the ‘bass personality’. You had a whole slew of kids who were now creating new sounds and new ideas – the Michael Manrings and Victor Wootens of this world. 

”I started getting introduced to these guys through other musicians who said I should check them out. That was a rabbit hole that I definitely fell into, getting Bass Player magazines for the first time, and checking out what was going on out there.”

Do you find there is a weight of expectation from people when they meet you, because of who your father was?

”If there’s ever pressure on me to be a musician, I don’t think anyone could put more on me than I do myself. It’s not even based on who my father was. Even if he wasn’t my father, I’d still be comparing myself to other bassists. I think it’s more difficult for the person who is expecting something than it is for me; my role as a musician is to fulfil my obligations as a bassist in the band I’m in. 

”The last thing I want to do is to fuck up a tune: I’m way more concerned with who I’m playing with in the band. That’s what I love about live performance and live music, being in that moment and having that opportunity to step up and do what is necessary.”

Your father’s legacy is huge – perhaps the biggest legacy of any bass player.

”I get that. My father wasn’t around for a very long time, so a lot of people didn’t get the opportunity to see him live. Maybe people think it’s their chance to see a ‘Pastorius’ when they come to see me, but maybe they’re robbing themselves of the opportunity to experience new things.

”I’m not going to be my father. I don’t pretend to be my father, and I don’t intend to be him. There are other bassists that would like to be in my position – not necessarily to play like him, although there are a lot that try to – but because they want to carry on what he was doing. I don’t know if they grasp the importance of being an individual.”

How do you pursue that goal?

”I just do my best to have a good time and put on a great show and play great music. To me, my father could have been an astronaut or a basketball player, and he would have had the same impact – because he was a unique individual and carried himself in a unique way.

”He ‘felt’ in ways that were different to how people normally do – so if you’re coming to my show, I hope you don’t expect to see my dad, because he’s not here any more. But I don’t hold that against anybody. He was ‘The One’. You love him, and I love him.”

Bass wizard Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner has made a name for himself playing with everyone from Flying Lotus to Kamasi Washington to Kendrick Lamar, not to mention with his own impressive solo output.

But while everyone seems to love Bruner’s basslines, what basslines does Thundercat himself hold in high esteem?

In a recent sit down with Pitchfork for its Under the Influences series, he revealed some of his favorites, beginning with D’Angelo’s 1995 song, Lady.

“This is the beginnings of me learning about feel and the importance of how things sit in a song,” Thundercat explains.

“It took me a long time to really wrap my mind about the part where this guy’s only playing three notes but this song grooves so hard.”

From there, Bruner dissects the basslines from numerous classic songs, including The Brothers Johnson’s Strawberry Letter 23 (“If you ever wanted to know what pimpin’ was, play this song,” he says) and Jaco Pastorious’s Portrait of Tracy.

He also singles out Jack Bruce’s “iconic” bass part in Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love.  

“This is one of those driving basslines that you can’t get away from,” Thundercat says.

Additionally, Thundercat spends plenty of time ruminating on the positives and negatives of slap bass, and highlights Graham Central Station’s Hair as a high point of the technique.

“Larry Graham invented slap bass,” he says. “This is a known fact.”

In the end, no matter what approach you take to the instrument, “If your feel sucks, you just suck,” Thundercat says. “There’s nothing you can do about that.”

Whether you take your Billy Sheehan as a member of Mr Big, as a solo artist or as a session gun for hire, he needs little introduction. A master of his instrument to almost otherworldly levels, Sheehan has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most accomplished bassists – so we can all learn from the five albums that influenced him.

1. Yardbirds - Having A Rave-Up (1965)

"Paul Samwell-Smith was one of my first influences as a bass player. The US version of the LP had the whole band on the cover, and Paul was holding an Epiphone Rivoli bass with black nylon tapewound strings - a duplicate of which I have at my home right now. It sounds just like the bass on the album: the strings have a really cool, unique tone to them. 

"I love it when bass players step out of the herd and try different things. His playing was all great and spectacular, but on side two were some live versions of Here It Is, I’m A Man and She’s So Respectable. On all of them, he just blazes, and the bass has this deep low end because of the neck pickup that washes out the compression from the master mix. It takes over the whole band."

2. Vanilla Fudge - Vanilla Fudge (1967)

"Tim Bogert was a huge influence on me and a lot of other players. Vanilla Fudge were an amazing band. Their first album was all covers, and Tim was all over the place on the bass - but everything he did worked. It was such an inspiration to me, because it was an integral part of the arrangement of the song. 

"Years later I was lucky enough to befriend Tim and I asked him about it, and he said that basically it was a psychedelic version of James Jamerson, which made a lot of sense to me. They had a very heavy Motown influence: go and listen to Jamerson after you’ve heard Vanilla Fudge, and you’ll see what I mean. He was a huge influence, and I like to play those albums to people as much as I can."

3. Jethro Tull - Stand Up (1969)

"Glenn Cornick was another great player who had a Rivoli bass, with that amazing neck pickup. He played great, great bass solos in Bourée, the Bach piece that Ian Anderson played flute on. He had a similar tone to Paul Samwell-Smith and, while it wasn’t a tone that I went for personally, I liked it because it had a real cool, woody body to it. He did some great playing on that record. 

"After this album, which I just loved, I went back and got This Was (1968), which was just great. Aqualung (1971) was okay, but then they lost me, which wasn’t uncommon for me - a lot of bands had amazing first records but they’d lost me by the fourth. I don’t know if it was because of me or because of them!"

4. Jaco Pastorius - Jaco Pastorius (1976)

"I think Jaco really defined what a bass player should be about, in that he played songs on the record and solo pieces that were actual pieces of music. His tone and approach were legendary, of course. I daresay that to this day it’s difficult for fretless players to play without people instantly thinking of Jaco. As soon as you hear that note, you go ‘Jaco!’ 

"I play a bit of fretless: I’ve recorded fretless on two songs in my life. We did the Cat Stevens song Wild World and a very famous fretless player called me up and congratulated me on my playing on the song, because it was a hit on the radio - and I said, ‘Well, there’s only one problem: it’s my regular bass, not a fretless!’ I do a lot of bending: we covered Birdland, and when it goes D-C-D, I bend the C up to the D, just to mimic that fretless tonality. Sometimes the bass just lands like that."

5. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

"When I do clinics, I always tell people ‘Go and learn the whole of Sgt. Pepper – you’ll come out of it a better bass player.' McCartney was a singing bass player - I think all of these might be, although I don’t know much Jaco and Paul Samwell-Smith sang. McCartney’s bass playing was unorthodox and wild, he was all over the place. It was fantastically perfect, musically. 

"I have some bootlegs of the sessions and again, he had that neck pickup with that super-deep low tone: you can only hear the fundamental of the notes. It’s like he’s running a single oscillator, real down low. He was just a great player with a real sense of how to use the bass in a really musical way. It was brilliant."  

During our usual perusing of the ol' interwebs, we here at GW came across this remarkable cover. A year or so ago, Snips—a jazz/fusion trio from Palermo, Sicily—tried their hand at Jaco Pastorious' fusion classic, "The Chicken." The results—which you can watch above—are pretty astonishing.

"The Chicken" was written by Pee Wee Ellis—a former member of the James Brown Revue—and was first released as a B-side to Brown's 1969 single, "The Popcorn." Pastorious later added his own touch to the piece and recorded it for his 1983 album, Invitation. Another one of Pastorious' live versions of the piece would end up on his posthumously released 1995 album, The Birthday Concert. You can hear the latter version below.

Snips features Matteo Mancuso on guitar, Riccardo Oliva on bass and Salvatore Lima on drums.

For more on the band, head on over to their Facebook page.

Today, GuitarWorld.com presents the exclusive premiere of Rodrigo y Gabriela's new cover of "Continuum," a classic Jaco Pastorius track from his self-titled 1976 album.

Rodrigo y Gabriela's new interpretation of the song is one of the highlights of Jaco: Original Soundtrack, the soundtrack album from Jaco, a new documentary by Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo and Jaco's eldest son, John Pastorius IV. The album will be released November 27 via Legacy; it boasts 11 songs by Pastorius, along with three new recordings.

You can check out the complete track list below.

The film chronicles the brief-but-extraordinary life and career of Pastorius, the remarkably talented Weather Report bassist who died in 1987 at age 35. Jaco became the state-of-the-art electric bass player. To be more accurate, he pushed the state of the art to the point where he defined it. What he did with his instrument was expand it way past its original function of merely supplying the harmonic underpinning to a composition.

While there were other electric bassists with the technical ability to do more, Jaco was probably the first to make the listener aware of a musical idea first, and the instrument playing second.

For more about the film, watch the trailer below and visit jacopastorius.com.

Jaco: Original Soundtrack Track Listing:

• 01. “Come On, Come Over” – Jaco Pastorius
• 02. “Continuum” – Jaco Pastorius
• 03. “River People” – Weather Report
• 04. “Teen Town” – Weather Report
• 05. “Portrait of Tracy” – Jaco Pastorius
• 06. “The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines” (Live) – Joni Mitchell
• 07. “All American Alien Boy” – Ian Hunter
• 08. “Liberty City” (with Herbie Hancock) – Jaco Pastorius
• 09. “Okonkole Y Trompa” – Jaco Pastorius
• 10. “Barbary Coast” – Weather Report
• 11. “Crisis” – Jaco Pastorius
• 12. “Longing” – Mary Pastorius
• 13. “Nineteen Eighty Seven” – †††
• 14. “Shine” – Tech N9ne
• 15. “Continuum” – Rodrigo y Gabriela
• 16. “Come On Come Over” – Mass Mental (Robert Trujillo, Armand Sabal-Lecco, Flea, Whit Crane, Benji Webbe, Stephen Perkins & C-Minus)

Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo has released the official theatrical trailer his new Jaco Pastorius documentary, Jaco. You can watch it below.

The film chronicles the brief-but-extraordinary life and career of Pastorius, the remarkably talented Weather Report bassist who died in 1987 at age 35.

His first album, Jaco Pastorius (Epic), was released very soon after he joined Weather Report in 1976, replacing Alphonso Johnson in the premiere fusion jazz ensemble. Jaco then guested on Joni Mitchell's Hejira album (Elektral Asylum); here his new, thick bottom sound was as much part of the songs as Joni’s voice—and she has continued to collaborate with him, notably on her tribute album to the late bassist and composer Charles Mingus.

Jaco's first album on Columbia with Weather Report was Black Market;Heavy Weather showed his impact, featuring a bolder band sound, largely due to Jaco's bass playing, writing and production work. "Birdland" from that album became the closest thing to a Top Ten hit for Weather Report, Jaco's contribution—a deep bass riff—figuring heavily in the mix.

He also became the showman of the group. One of his tunes described his music to a degree: “Punk jazz" was not an attempt at jazz by a non-player (We've heard plenty of those since then) but a real jazz player's stab at a brave new music, a fusion with energy but without overkill.

Jaco became the state-of-the-art electric bass player. To be more accurate, he pushed the state of the art to the point where he defined it. What he did with his instrument was expand it way past its original function of merely supplying the harmonic underpinning to a composition. While there were other electric bassists with the technical ability to do more, Jaco was probably the first to make the listener aware of a musical idea first, and the instrument playing second.

The film will be available via VOD, streaming services, and digital download November 27, along with the official DVD/Blu-ray release in association with Record Store Day and Black Friday 2015. That same day will also see the long anticipated release of Jaco: Original Soundtrack, Sony/Legacy's official musical companion to the film.

Stay tuned for a GuitarWorld.com song premiere from the new album.

It seems a planned 3D film isn't enough for the incredibly busy members of Metallica.

Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo recently told USA Today that he's funding a biopic about the late bass legend Jaco Pastorius.

“Jaco was my hero growing up," Trujillo said. "Hearing him was like hearing Eddie Van Halen doing ‘Eruption’ for the first time: You thought, ‘What instrument is that?’ I loved jazz fusion and branched out from there. But Jaco had an edge that far exceeded his jazz persona. He was funk, he was rock, he was soul. And his whole attitude was punk.

"The film for me is from the heart," Trujillo continued. "I wanted to rescue him, but I learned that Jaco didn't want to be rescued."

Pastorius was bipolar and wrestled with substance abuse. He died in 1987 after a beating he suffered outside a Florida bar. Although he was only 35 when he died, he had revolutionized the world of electric bass with his multi-note fusillades and chord-based harmonics.

The documentary, which is tentatively titled Jaco, will be directed by Stephen Kijack.