Jaco Pastorius

For a long time the bass was understood as the instrument that holds the low end. Jaco Pastorius did not erase that role. He found sounds inside it that had not been fully heard.

John Francis Anthony Pastorius III — known as Jaco. Born 1951 in Norristown, Pennsylvania, raised in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He began on drums, moved to bass after an injury, and built his tone on both fretted and fretless instruments.

His 1976 solo album, joining Weather Report, the Heavy Weather years, and work with Joni Mitchell spread his name fast. “Portrait of Tracy,” “Teen Town,” “Donna Lee,” “Havona,” and “Birdland” are still cited. Fretless melody, harmonics, and 16th-note drive shifted what people thought the bass could sound like.

Illness and addiction ran alongside success. A bipolar diagnosis, alcohol and drugs worsened the symptoms; stable work grew hard in the mid-1980s. In September 1987 he was beaten in Florida, fell into a coma, and died on the 21st at 35. He was later inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame.

Marcus Miller recalls a hotel call while on tour with Roberta Flack: “Marcus, come up and get your lesson.” It sounded arrogant — then he went upstairs. Jaco played for him, had him play, and showed a whole-tone phrase Miller still uses as a warm-up. (Guitar World / Scott’s Bass Lessons)

When Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul brought him into Weather Report, they listened in the studio and agreed. Zawinul heard a fretless tone rich enough to suggest upright; with Shorter he judged the young player could do the job. Jaco later called them his greatest teachers.

His main instrument was a Fender Jazz Bass converted to fretless. Factory fretless models were still uncommon; pulling the frets and refinishing the board — the lineage later mythologized as the Bass of Doom — was the physical starting point of his tone. Without frets, pitch lives only in the hand; slides, vibrato, and harmonics ring longer. Jaco used that condition like a melodic instrument.

Finger touch was part of the sound. Without a pick, the right hand alone set attack, length, and dynamics. Players who stood close still recall that the sound from those fingertips was enormous — not only the amp, but the density of the moment the string is met, and the sustain the fretless board gives back.

On the rhythmic side, the drive of sixteenth notes is often cited. Lines like “Teen Town,” filling a bar with 16ths, became practice-room scripture for many bassists. Some still call him the king of the sixteenth. Not a blur of speed, but a groove where every subdivision stands clear — an image that fused with the fretless tone into Jaco’s signature.

In the Fort Lauderdale years he built a local name — stages and studios with bands such as Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders — already treating harmonics and chordal playing as ordinary sound, not a special trick. That habit became the language of the solo work.

On the 1976 solo album he moved Charlie Parker’s “Donna Lee” onto electric bass, rewriting bebop phrases in fretless tone; on “Portrait of Tracy” he stacked harmonics and low end in one instrument. After joining Weather Report, “Birdland” on Heavy Weather and his own “Teen Town” and “Havona” stayed both on fusion radio and in bassists’ practice rooms.

On Joni Mitchell records such as Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, his melodic bass moves more like conversation than floor support — less a display of technique than a reassignment of the instrument to the voice the song needs.

Later years leave light and shadow together: stage charisma beside unstable health; the 1987 death still cited with the age of 35. What this magazine holds is not myth, but the hand’s choices that changed the instrument’s conditions — and the concrete memories of players who stood beside him.

Portrait of Tracy

The first oddity in Portrait of Tracy is this: it is one bass, yet it does not sound like one person playing one note at a time.

Low notes build the floor; harmonics ring above. Sometimes it reads as harmony, sometimes as melody. That is not a rejection of what the bass was for — it is a wider reading of the same role.

Jaco did not recall learning harmonics as a special technique. He used them from the start, and at the time did not even think of them as a separate trick. He did not find them by copying other bassists. He touched the instrument, pressed notes, tried other places on the string, and built a language of his own — treating harmonics as part of what the bass naturally offered.

That stance becomes clear in this piece. Low, middle, and harmonics sit together on one bass, making harmony and melody at once — nothing like a conventional bass line strung one note after another. He also did not claim to have planned this harmonic layout in advance. He found what was already on the instrument and kept expanding it.

In a 1978 interview he also described the pitch layout: a melody centered on C with harmonics above it, fretted notes and natural harmonics stacked into several layers at once. He even tuned the G and D strings slightly sharp so the harmonics would sit in tune — workable because he used those upper strings for most of the harmonic work. It looks like a small detail. It is also the whole approach: changing the instrument’s conditions to get the sound he wanted.

The point is not memorizing harmonic nodes. It is pulling another voice from the same four strings. When the low end holds the harmonic center and harmonics open space above, the bass is rhythm and harmony and, at times, melody. Portrait of Tracy lasts not because a new instrument was invented, but because a new language was found on one that already existed.

EDITOR'S NOTE — If you reduce Jaco’s work to “a hard harmonics piece,” you miss the center. What matters is that he gave one instrument several roles at once. Technique was the means.

Tina Weymouth

What if you refuse to think of the bass only as a bass? Tina Weymouth’s playing can start from that question.

Born 1950 in Coronado, California. She met Chris Frantz and David Byrne at RISD, then picked up the bass herself in New York. Founding member of Talking Heads; with Frantz she led Tom Tom Club. Inducted with Talking Heads into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

In Talking Heads her bass does not always step forward to prove itself. It makes room for the other sounds to be heard.

She has pointed to the J.B.’s and Stax players as references — not for how many notes they played, but for how much space they left. The sparser the arrangement, she said, the larger each sound can feel.

That is a hard idea for many bassists. We want to fill. An empty bar invites another note; a chord change invites motion; a hard kick invites a harder hit.

Weymouth chooses otherwise. What not to play — that question builds her groove.

On Remain in Light she did not treat the bass only in the traditional sense. She has described thinking of it like horn lines, later like tuned percussion. The name stays “bass.” The role inside the music shifts.

She did not shrink the instrument’s presence. She changed how presence works.

Once in a Lifetime

Who made this groove? Once in a Lifetime is credited to David Byrne, Brian Eno, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth. Credits alone cannot explain how the track was built.

Talking Heads and Brian Eno partly left conventional songwriting behind: grooves improvised and recorded in the studio, then shaped. One of those ideas became Once in a Lifetime.

Weymouth has credited a rhythmic idea from Chris Frantz’s jam as a starting point for the bass line — his solid time and hi-hat swing at the core.

The point is not to name a single “composer.” Chris offered rhythm; Tina put it on bass; Eno heard it and edited differently; the band played the result again. The music was not finished in one head and executed by others.

Eno’s push to soften or drop the obvious downbeat on the bass is a useful case. Weymouth later described the disagreement as musical, not personal.

The line is hard to assign to one author. That is part of what makes the track interesting.

Paul McCartney

Early on, bass often meant a simple job: follow the chords, hold the rhythm, leave floor for everyone else. Paul McCartney did not stay satisfied with that job.

James Paul McCartney, born 18 June 1942 in Liverpool. Guitar first, then The Quarrymen; after Stuart Sutcliffe left he took the bass — a role he has said he did not initially want. The left-handed Höfner violin bass stayed with that image.

The full Beatles story belongs in a later issue. One point here: when early bass was often heard as roots and floor, he was not satisfied with that post.

He has said he began to realize the bass need not only play roots. From C to F you can connect with other notes; you can hold a note across a change; you can use tones outside the chord; the line can become a small melody.

He names that as a central discovery. Around Sgt. Pepper it grew stronger. He has pointed to Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds as a clear example of an independent bass melody.

That is not competition with guitar or vocal. It is doing what they are not doing — moving in the space between.

What he found was that space.

Bass as Composition

If the bass need not play roots, how far can it go? McCartney’s answer is almost simple: try a melody.

On a C–F–G progression you need not play C, F, G. You can stay on C, rest on G, use non-chord tones, or let one independent line travel across the changes.

The skill is not “harder notes.” It is choice — knowing what is possible, and deciding what is needed.

A strong bass line does not use every option. It uses the right note at the right moment. Then bass becomes part of composition: not only support, but a line that helps decide where the song moves.

McCartney has called the Sgt. Pepper period among his most inventive on bass, and has named James Jamerson and Brian Wilson as influences. A musical language rarely appears from nowhere. It is heard, understood, moved to another instrument, and rewritten.

Who Owns a Bass Line?

McCartney has openly said he once took another player’s bass line whole: on I Saw Her Standing There he used the riff from Chuck Berry’s I’m Talking About You.

He did not only call it influence. In his telling he played the same notes. What matters is that he did not hide it — and suggested a bass riff need not always be brand-new.

That raises the old question of influence and authorship. You hear something; it stays; you use it. Copy? Influence? New work?

Music history rarely answers cleanly. Bass lines are especially interesting: a short riff can link songs, feel like one track’s identity, and still belong to a shared vocabulary.

The useful point is not “who stole.” It is that he said so — and left the harder question open.

When the Bass Changes the Player

We usually say the player chooses the instrument. The reverse also happens: the instrument changes the player’s body, hands, and approach.

McCartney has described how weight and build shaped how he played — a light Höfner inviting a lighter, more guitar-like feel; other basses asking for something heavier and deeper.

The question is not which bass is “better.” It is that the same person on a different instrument can make different music. Scale, weight, neck, string response, and amp all feed back into the hands — and into the music.

Choosing an instrument is not only choosing a sound. It is choosing a way of playing. We play the instrument; at some point the instrument also plays us.

For Vol.03: Fretless and Free. Like Late-1970s Jazz Fusion.

The Player Changes the Instrument

The bass may always have had a job: low notes, time, harmonic floor. But the history of an instrument is not only the history of wood and wire. It is also the history of what players believed they could hear on it.

Jaco found a harmonic world already inside the bass. Tina treated space and pulse like a drummer’s decision. McCartney stretched the idea of independent melody on the low end.

None of them started from nowhere. Someone hears, rewrites, and the next player rewrites again. Clear beginnings are rare.

A riff moves to another song; an idea becomes another instrument’s language; an instrument gains a new role. What may matter most is not only what the instrument is made of — but what the person holding it believed it could become.

The bass remains the same instrument. What we think we can hear on it keeps changing. At the start of that change there is always a player — someone who chose a note the usual way did not ask for, and someone who heard it and thought: that could work too.