6. Jaco Pastorius
So, Weather Report – then, of course, Jaco. Jaco used to be the bass player [in Weather Report] and he had been replaced by someone else, and I was like, what the heck had happened to him? It’s all around the same period, ’cause it was only then I realised Jaco was no longer in the band, so it made me go and look for what the heck is Jaco doing now. So I went out and discovered this album, and I was like, man, goddamn, he’s on his own, doing his own thing. Okay, well done. Cool, man.
The track on that album is ‘Donna Lee’, when he played with Don Alias. This is a Miles Davis and Charlie Parker tune. And I loved what he did with this particular track. We started playing this track at a lot of the jazz concerts I found myself at, and with the bass player who I write with currently, we used to go into places just to purposefully tell everybody to shut up. "You ain’t playing jazz. Now we are going to play some jazz!" And then we would play this tune, which was really, really… you can hear it, it is not straightforward. You have to do hours of practising to be able to play it from A to Z. So it would just be piano, bass and drums and we would play. [sings melody] Sometimes I would double the melody with him and then we used to play it at a high tempo – real bebop speed, you know? So that used to make me really feel cool. If I wanted to check the standard of my playing, I would just see if I could play this from the beginning to the end without making a mistake. And if could do it? Then oh yeah, I’m on form!
