AAJ Review: Jaco Pastorius, Modern American Music...Period! The Criteria Sessions

[jkelman]

My review of Jaco Pastorius' Modern American Music...Period! The Criteria Sessions, today at All About Jazz.

1976 was, for electric bassists, the year where everything changed. Jaco Pastorius hadn't quite emerged from nowhere, and the few prior recordings on which he could be found may have provided some hint of what was to come, but it was the quadruple punch of fellow legend-in-the-making Pat Metheny's leader debut Bright Size Life (ECM, 1976), singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell's classic Hejira (Elektra/Asylum, 1976), fusion super group Weather Report's Black Market (Columbia, 1976) and, most notably, the bassist's own Jaco Pastorius (Epic, 1976), whose opening track—a duet look at Charlie Parker's "Donna Lee" with percussionist Don Alias that spoke of instrumental mastery and remarkable conceptual sophistication —that caused bassists around the world over to look up from their instruments. Who was this guy? Where did he come from? How did he emerge, seemingly out of nowhere, so fully formed and, even more significantly, well-informed? Modern American Music...Period! The Criteria Sessions goes a long way to answering those questions.

If anything, these eleven tracks—culled from the bassist's March, 1974 demo sessions at Miami's Criteria Studios, recorded 17 months before he entered Camp Colomby Studios in New York City to lay down the tracks for Jaco Pastorius--demonstrate that this remarkable youngster, who'd cut his teeth on the South Florida nightclub circuit with Wayne Cochran's CC Riders R&B revue, was already not just a monster bassist on an instrument that had its frets removed and the neck coated in marine epoxy to protect it from the Rotosound round wound strings that, all things combined, gave him his distinctive tone; he was also a composer who, well beyond promise, was already more than delivering.

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[FrippWire]

This is the most coveted Record Store Day (4/19/14) title for me.

Jaco = autobuy.

[wideopenears]

Indeed, if anything is an AutoBuy for me, this one is...