Jaco Pastorius: The Bright Comet That Burned Too Fast

Some bend the strings; Jaco Pastorius bent the entire instrument.
He brought the electric bass out of hiding, stripped the frets off of it, and coaxed it to sing like a Coltrane horn or Mingus’ heartbeat. With Weather Report, Joni Mitchell, or just soloing on stage with battered Jazz Bass in tow, he wasn’t playing notes—he was painting with thunder.

But like so many brilliant comets, Jaco’s was turbulent. He struggled with bipolar disorder, stupendously self-medicated, and carried an intensity that could not be contained within small clubs or polite speeches. By the time he was 35, in 1987, his spark had burned too brightly. A violent fight outside a Florida club broke him; ten days later, the world lost him.

And yet-listen to Teen Town, Portrait of Tracy, Continuum. That’s not a man departing. That’s a force that never did. Jaco reimagined what the bass was: melody, rhythm, groove, air, poetry. His fingerprints are on every slap, every harmonics-based solo, every bassist who musters the strength to step up front.

Gianni Papa told me half in awe, half in sorrow, once that Jaco was “the Coltrane of the low end.” He wasn’t wrong. Radiopeng plays Coltrane regularly, but when Jaco’s basslines break through between the saxophone whirlpools, they’re talking across time: two wayward spirits, both too unmanageable to last very long in this world, but living in the grooves.

Shake a glass, blow low, and hear loudly. Jaco may have left in a storm, but storms are the manner by which we remember the sky.