Among the many unstinting endorsements of Jaco’s playing in this book, the only seriously curmudgeonly note is sounded by fellow bassist Will Lee. History, in the persons of thousands of emulators, has shown that Jaco’s wholesale reinvention of the electric bass was a major landmark in modern jazz. Milkowski, a friend and confessor to Jaco in his last years, fills in plenty of detail around the origin and development of that style, but the insights into the man behind the music form the most fascinating aspect of the book. One question that must have been asked by Jaco admirers in their thousands is ‘How could one so massively gifted fall so low and how could his friends allow it to happen?’
Without actually addressing this question, Milkowski provides the answer. Jaco’s personal life is laid out in full: His birth to a bibulous, shadowy, but idolised lounge-singer father and a strict Catholic mother, the massive egoism which led him to align his destiny with those of Jesus Christ, Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix, his rapid, largely autodidact progress on the bass, his early dedication and abstemiousness and the triumphs of Weather Report; then, the first broken marriage, the sabotaged concerts, the bizarre inklings of incipient psychosis, the alcohol and cocaine abuse and the descent into manic depression. These later years, post-1981, are the saddest, as the man who had indeed come to be widely regarded as the world’s greatest bass player slid painfully and inexorably towards chaos. By the mid-eighties, Jaco was living on the streets around the West Fourth St basketball court in Manhattan, hustling up local gigs and the occasional foreign tour and talking often of his imminent comeback. The comeback never happened, thwarted by a personality turned sour and self-destructive. The same personality repelled numerous attempts by friends to arrest the decline, and, no doubt, provoked Jaco’s violent death at the hands of a bouncer at Florida’s Midnight Bottle Club in 1987.
An entirely excellent book, recommended in particular to those who hold sagely that jazz lost its ‘characters’ long ago.
Jaco – The Extraordinary And Tragic Life Of Jaco Pastorius, by Bill Milkowski. Published by Miller Freeman Books. 600 Harrison St, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA. (Tel 415 905 2736; fax 905 2239). Hb, 264pp, 40 b/w photos. US price $22.95. ISBN 0-87930-361-1
