Throughout this course, we have been evaluating borders in terms of separations between individuals, but, as I hear Jaco Pastorius, my favorite bass player of all time, playing in the background, I am forced to considered borders as they apply to art. I mean this as it applies to the borders we create between genres of art, as opposed to something like the lines in a piece of physical art or the evaluating punctuation as a form of a border. This especially applies after our recent introduction into modernist literature, which looks to eschew genre. For the sake of my argument, I am going to frame this in terms of musical genres and their respective borders.
Most of the time, when we hear a new song, we try to place it in some genre. It could be rap or blues or rock or jazz or funk or pop. But these seemingly innocuous labels can be problematic. Rock is heavily influence by the blues, and many of the greatest rock bands like “The Beatles” and “The Rolling Stones” drew heavily from the great blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. This is not to say that genre cannot be a useful tool in finding and indexing music, but it can be somewhat limiting as far as artistic production goes.Take, for example, a young musician who considers themselves a math-rock guitarist. Math-rock, and its heavier spinoff math-core, is a new form of music that prides itself on being technically complex and almost hellish to play that many of the students I met last summer at Berklee were really into. Most math-rock songs are riddled with random key changes, odd time signatures, polyrhythms, and extended arpeggios. Now, say someone were to only listen to bands like Chon, Jawbox, or Upsilon Acrux, they run the risk of developing a really narrow mind in terms of what musical inspiration they have to draw on.
This is one thing I love about Jaco Pastorius. Jaco is regarded as one of the gods within the electric bass world, and is known for his work as a jazz fusion bassist with the group Weather Report as well as his solo work and the Jaco Pastorius Big Band. Right off the bat, the title “jazz fusion,” and what these musicians were trying to do, plays into to this idea of borders as they relate to artistic expression. Bands and artists like Weather Report looked to synthesize a wide range musical influences from rock to afro-cuban to funk and combine them with certain aspects of jazz, including expert improvisation and wicked technique, or chops, to produce an incredibly unique sound.
Biographically, Jaco’s life and musical journey embodies this blending of musical genres as well. Growing up in South Florida, there were stories of how a young John Francis Pastorius III would lie awake at late into the night listening to Cuban music on a small AM radio. The son of a musician, as the young bass player grew up, he would sneak into the traditionally black neighborhoods of Fort Lauderdale as he sought to play with the best musicians around. So much of this comes through in Jaco’s playing, and I think my bass teacher, Patrick Pfeiffer, sums things up nicely in the track notes of a tribute he did to Jaco on his most recent album: “From the lyrical Continuum to the crisp and funky Teen Town, from the fluid Donna Lee to the R&B-flavored Chicken, and finally to the contemplative Amerika (which is also an ode to my adoptive country and its magnificent people), Jaco combined commanding technical ability with beautiful melodies and an unmistakable underlying funk attitude. He gave everything.” (Patrick Pfieffer, Soul of the City)
Thank you all for listening to my rantings about music and bass.
As an added bonus, please enjoy one of my favorite Jaco songs, Havona off of the album Heavy Weather: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMQUFvv0WRY Jaco’s mind bending solo starts at 2:35.
As a second added bonus, please enjoy my high school jazz band try to play Havona last spring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpHzI8Fzgjo my feeble attempt at Jaco’s mind beniding solo starts at 3:47. Headphones are required. Apologies for the low frequencies.
–Sammy Dubner