Jaco Pastorius: the bassist so good Joni Mitchell thought she dreamed him up
Every artist can only hope to have reasonable backing musicians on their albums. When working solo in the studio, any artist will need help articulating what their music is supposed to sound like from time to time, with most session musicians hanging on their every word to make sure they can play for what suits the song. Although Joni Mitchell may have had access to the best players in the world, one of her favourite bass players felt he was descended from the musical gods.
Compared to the usual folk songs that Mitchell had laid down in the 1960s, the next few years would see her expanding her craft, dipping her toes into the world of jazz and fusion on albums like Hejira. While Mitchell was toying with new ideas within each of her tracks, Jaco Pastorius was already reinventing how artists thought of the bass guitar.
Born out of jazz traditions, Pastorius was making sounds on the bass that no one had ever heard before. Taking cues from artists as diverse as Tower of Power and Jimi Hendrix, Pastorius saw his bass as a way to inhabit the music rather than play notes precisely as they were written on the page.
When working in the jazz fusion outfit Weather Report, Pastorius delivered a clinic on being a virtuoso bass player, adopting traditional and fretless basses to get whatever sound suited the song. After playing with fellow jazz players like Larry Carlton, it was only a matter of time before Mitchell picked Pastorius to appear on her own projects.
Despite his contributions to Mitchell’s music, Pastorius would recall not listening to any of her work before working as a studio musician, later recalling in the book Jaco, “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.”
As work began on Hejira, Mitchell felt like she and Pastorius had their unique shared language, later recalling, “It was as if I dreamed him because I didn’t have to give him any instruction. I could just kind of cut him loose and stand back and celebrate his choices.”
While Pastorius’s work on songs like ‘Coyote’ and the title track could be considered flashy by some, it never came at the expense of the track. Compared to Mitchell’s melody, Pastorius is all over the fretboard, often filling in the gaps left in the music by nimbly dancing around the chord changes.
Given his track record, this was Pastorius doing what he knew best. Across his first solo record, his internal sense of rhythm and fretboard acrobatics on songs like ‘Continuum’ was unmatched by any of his peers, approaching the bass like a lead instrument rather than something that fills out the low end.
Although Pastorius was able to lend his skills to Mitchell’s masterpiece, he wouldn’t be able to share his gifts for long, passing away at the age of 35 after sustaining injuries in a fight at a club. While Pastorius wasn’t long for this world, his impact can still be felt in the bass community on Mitchell’s work and beyond.
