The artist Sting thought changed bass-playing: “He totally recalibrated what it was”
No amount of goodwill amongst bandmates will ever change the bass player’s perceived importance. Many artists have revolutionised what it means to be on the low end of the musical spectrum, but unless your name is Geddy Lee or Les Claypool, saying that the four-string is the most important instrument in a group is usually bound to get a chuckle out of every rock and roll fan. Sting managed to toe the line by being both the bassist and the singer, but he knew that everyone worshipped at the altar of Jaco Pastorius.
Before The Police had even hit it big, Sting was well-versed in the world of rock and roll. The golden age of the 1960s had come and gone, and now they were in the midst of the punk movement, which practically emphasised the fact that being dreadful at playing an instrument could work to one’s advantage with the right idea.
That wasn’t what Sting was after. Whereas the punks were groups trying to weasel their way through a decent version of a rock song, Sting was unafraid to sound like an adult, which meant throwing in a few elements of jazz into the mix when he started writing his hits.
After all, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers were both well-versed in jazz styles, and the number of strange chords running throughout songs like ‘Message in a Bottle’ was already confusing a lot of punks trying to figure out what they were doing. While Summers had a jazzy edge on guitar, Pastorius was everything someone could ask for in a bassist.
Compared to every other jazz fusion act playing circles around the rock community, Pastorius approached his instrument almost like a lead guitar. Looking through any of his famous pieces, songs like ‘Continuum’ or his take on ‘Come On Come Over’ are some of the purest forms of bass finesse anyone had ever seen, especially when he broke out the harmonics on his signature hits.
Sting could certainly appreciate jazzy textures in The Police, but maybe the main reason he kept away from Pastorius’s playing was because it was too good, saying, “When Jaco came, about that time, he totally recalibrated what it was to be a bass player. He could play Charlie Parker chromatic lines on the bass guitar: nobody had thought of that before.”
That didn’t stop him from bringing his sound back to traditional bass playing. Looking through songs like ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ and ‘Every Breath You Take’, seeing Sting trade in his usual electric bass for an upright sounded like he was going back to the raw essence of what it meant to be a jazz player. It also probably didn’t hurt that the fretless neck sounded much closer to Pastorius’s style when he tore off the frets of his instrument.
More than anything, Pastorius taught every musician who heard him the importance of melody. Yes, he could play a million notes when he wanted to, but he would have gladly ditched any of them if they weren’t right for the song.
