Jaco Pastorius

Jaco Pastorius (1951–1987) was an American electric bassist and composer who helped bring fretless electric bass into jazz and fusion through his solo work and membership in Weather Report.

Fretless bass: A bass guitar without frets, whose smooth fingerboard allows continuous pitch changes and expressive glissandos. Pastorius made the fretless electric bass a prominent solo voice in jazz.
Weather Report: An American jazz fusion group founded in 1970 by Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter. Pastorius’s membership from 1976 to 1981 marked the band’s most prominent period for electric bass.
Fort Lauderdale: A city in southeastern Florida, United States, where Jaco Pastorius grew up. Its South Florida music scene formed the setting for his early professional work.
Upright bass: A large, vertically played acoustic bass with a deep body and strings traditionally tuned in fourths. Pastorius brought the expressive authority of jazz upright bass into an amplified electric instrument.
Bass guitar: A low-pitched string instrument, usually amplified, that anchors rhythm and harmony in popular and jazz music. Pastorius expanded the instrument’s role from rhythmic foundation to melodic lead.
Heavy Weather: Weather Report’s 1977 album, featuring Jaco Pastorius and the hit composition “Birdland.” Its success brought Pastorius’s bass playing to a broad international audience.
Wayne Cochran: An American soul singer and bandleader known for his flamboyant stage presence and R&B performances. Pastorius played drums in Cochran’s band before establishing himself as a bassist.
Fretted bass guitar: An electric bass with raised frets that divide its fingerboard into fixed semitone positions. Removing the frets gave Pastorius continuous pitch control unavailable on a conventional fretted bass.
Harmonics (music): Pitches produced by lightly touching a vibrating string at particular points to emphasize its overtones. Pastorius used natural harmonics to create bell-like passages on electric bass.
Birdland (composition): A jazz fusion composition by Joe Zawinul, first released on Weather Report’s 1977 album Heavy Weather. Pastorius’s bass part anchors one of Weather Report’s best-known recordings.

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