Jaco: In defence of the clones

(Photo of Jaco with Joni from Ingrid Pastorius’s website)

The thing I said about not being able to play a 12-bar blues is true. One post-pub afternoon in the 1980s I jammed with drummer Ric Lee, formerly of Ten Years After and latterly of Chickenshack. It was an audition for a blues band he was forming for fun. Ric drank in the same music biz pub as I did. At least I can now say I played in a band with someone who played at Woodstock, even though I was crap and he’s a legend. Ric sort of forgave me; he even came to my 21st birthday party at a Turnham Green house, a landmark in my life without which I’d never have ended up in New Zealand. But I never really did get the hang of playing an improvised 12-bar blues. You see, like most things about music, it’s much harder to play it than it sounds. Unless, like Jaco and a few people I’ve known, you’re a natural.

A few years before my ‘Woodstock humiliation’ I had started learning to play Donna Lee, the Charlie Parker bebop tune that opens Jaco Pastorius’s eponymous first solo album. OK, there’s some controversy over whether it might be a Miles Davis tune but, to my ear, although Miles may have suggested the chord changes, the tune is all Bird; there are way too many notes for it to have been a Miles melody. (Update: Sean Malone, whose reasonably accurate transcription of Donna Lee can be found in his book of sheet music, A Portrait of Jaco: The Solos Collection, credits Bird and says it is a contafract based on the Ballard MacDonald and James Hanley Tin Pan Alley standard Back Home Again In Indiana).

I got the sheet music for Donna Lee in London when I began taking evening classes in jazz harmony with the double bass player Peter Ind, and painstakingly started trying to work out the melody. At first, to my ears Jaco’s version had been little more than a jumble of absurdly fast bebop with little discernible rhythm; for someone like me, who started out playing Deep Purple and Cream riffs, that was no less impressive. Then, one night, with a little chemical assistance, Donna Lee began to swing and suddenly made absolute musical sense. But that’s another story.

Jaco’s rendition was an eye-opener for bass players in all styles. No one had had the audacity to try playing anything like this on a bass before him. And his arrangement of the tune was almost impossible to play well. The phrasing is so precise, the speed so helter-skelter, the positions so frustratingly finger-knotting that it can drive you mad just trying. In the years that followed the 1976 release of that album a global army of Jaco clones sprung up, people who wanted to imitate Jaco to brag about their chops.

It sounds pretty damn impressive once you can play a bit like Jaco. But there’s more to it than that. Pastorius, a hero of James Dean-like stature for many bassists, died young in unbelievably tragic circumstances. Towards the end of his short life, he had begun to get justifiably angry about the imitators cashing in on his sound by just “wiggling their fingers”. He hated it that a thousand records featured fretless bass to the point that it became a 1980s cliché, not far enough removed from Fairlight synthesiser stab chords, shoulder pads and mullets. The instrument was de rigeur and then, as if to coincide with Jaco’s death, a musical embarrassment.

In spite of Jaco’s bold yet entirely reasonable claim, there were links to Jaco’s bass style in many of his predecessors. But Andy Fraser and Boz Burrell, to name but two, didn’t sound the way Jaco did. Trying to sound like him became an obsession to many. Norman Watt-Roy’s bassline from Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick owes an obvious debt to Jaco.

Sounding that way was reasonably easy in some respects; you bought a Fender Jazz (not the cheapest bass guitar, but affordable to most professionals), perhaps picked up a secondhand Acoustic 360 amplifier setup and an MXR rack-mounted digital delay to approximate that chorus sound and a footswitch so you could do those looped effects if you were a complete Jaco fanatic. If you went so far as having the frets ripped out of the Fender and practising your vibrato and muting until all the fingers on your left hand were callused and the muscles in your right hand swelled up and ached, you could even approximate some of his lines.

That other dead bass player I mentioned earlier, the one who introduced me to Jaco’s solo album, taught me the verse line to his song Come On, Come Over when I was about 16. Except he got some of the notes wrong. It’s actually taken me about 20 years to realise that. Again, it’s nowhere near as easy to play it right as it is to listen to. And even some of the guys playing the tune on YouTube get it wrong — even playing it at a slower tempo.

It will sound like the worst kind of musical snobbery when I suggest that you can’t really appreciate a musician until you try to play his or her instrument — as though musicians are privy to some higher form of musical appreciation than the rest of the populace — and I don’t think that’s true. But what close analysis of any well-played piece of music reveals is that a good portion of the original performance wasn’t just about getting the notes, phrasing and intonation right and then playing them in time. There’s some indescribable, magical component you will neither quite put your fingers on nor capture in written notes on paper. Most of the transcriptions I’ve seen of Jaco’s basslines contain at least one error; usually because the musicians doing the transcribing forget that Jaco had huge hands with double-jointed thumbs and could stretch across about nine frets where most bassists would struggle to cover seven. Which leads them to surmise, “There’s no way it could be that note. He must have played it like this…”

Underestimating Jaco is a big mistake.

These days, with digital technology, you can analyse every phrase Jaco recorded minutely, meticulously slowing each bar to half-speed while retaining the original pitch. But even should you have the identical equipment and practise for eight hours every day, even if you play those muted notes with the same amount of attack, you will only ever get close. You will never be on the money. And so even the ‘Jaco clones’ will never be mistaken for Jaco. Some wouldn’t ever want or expect to be. We’re happy in our impersonations; happy to recognise our idol’s true stature. We’d love to have just a tenth of his skill and dexterity, we long to have his musical ear, but we concede that we’ll never be as good as he was.

I’m guessing here, but I suspect Stephen feels similarly about Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour. There’s so much more to learning one of your favourite songs note-for-note than wiggling your fingers air-guitar-style in front of a mirror. In karaoke there’s a phenomenon known as a Jūhachiban where you show off your best song. Learning to play a song or a solo by your musical guru is more like going on a pilgrimage than bragging.

There’s a lot of pleasure to be had from playing music without going to these lengths. But Jaco and the other greats will always be out there to remind you of all the things you will never be. That’s why the closest to a stage most ‘clones’ get is their bedroom.

My stage days are over, too. But I dragged my fretless bass out again and, although it’s a few steps up from my old Fender Jazz, I’m still only at bar 36 of Jaco’s Donna Lee. Most days, it sounds like shit and I swear I’m going to give up again. On others I struggle through the melody without scuffing up. I still have 94 bars to go and I haven’t even reached the start of the solo yet. It’s taken me about 28 years to get this far. I’m 48, so I’ll be lucky if I can learn the whole tune before I die. I know I’ll never play it as fluently, beautifully, magically as Jaco did. And yet with every note I play, I love Jaco more. If that makes me a weirdo, a ‘Jaco clone’, so be it. I am honoured to have lived on the same planet as someone who felt and made music the way Jaco did. And even though I never met him I miss him every single day. I have friends I don’t feel that way about.