On 2004-01-04 13:01, Joxer the Mighty wrote:
What a sad experience it must have been to see Jaco like that. I'm a bassist, and Jaco is one of my musical heroes. I never got to see him play live, but I'd rather not have seen him at all than to see him in the state that Nestor witnessed.
BTW, his biography is a great read.
I would like to tell you some more about this sad night in Paris:
Jaco would come a go to a very small room, behind the a small scenario, and would inject himself constantly, he did it three times in a row. I could see it because I was very closed to him, I didn’t see the syringe itself, by unfortunately sow an elastic band in his arm, and the typical position of somebody injecting himself, and then the reactions and words…
I was one of the first to arrive in place to the concert, and so could get one of the closest places. I wanted to get as close as possible to the best bass player in the world, obviously, I wanted to see it, to enjoy, to learn, to be in front of my “master” for years. But I didn’t expect such a frantic behaviour.
Every time he went into this small room, he would say things like: “hoooo maaaan, hoooo”, and would get out of there in a quite transformed mood… It was difficult to hear what he said, cos people would speak loud and some jazz music was all the time playing during the brakes, nevertheless, I would pay absolute attention the my master. I have to say I hate drugs in general, and I am absolutely against any hard drugs, so it was a very strong impression to witness he was injecting himself to a dramatic extent, being one of the best musicians an composers of my life, Jaco Pastorius!!! Too sad.
He started playing alone and would not pick up what the other musicians would be doing. He would suddenly shut loud for everybody to stop playing, giving the commandment for one of the musicians to make a solo, just like that… Musicians were very annoyed and would clearly show it to the public with their body language.
Jaco would suddenly start doing some solos playing in such a tough and rude way, that he was more like a bad trash style bass player… It was absurd. Some times his geniality would show and some extraordinary musical phrases would come and go, but nothing else… he was so vulgar, so dense… I couldn’t believe it!
Then, he left his bass and went to the piano pushing the pianist out of his place, asked screaming loudly and badly to the musicians to go away… and they would all the time do exactly what Jaco would say… Nobody was there to see them in fact, but Jaco… I guess those musicians, even if they were absolutely excellent ones, were nobody without Jaco to the eyes of people… but well… Jaco was no longer… he had disappeared from earth… drugs and too much alcohol have already killed him mentally, before he was killed physically
Well, Jaco started to play the piano by himself, some broken chords, he started very jazzy and then went to play some mayor chords, without any sense… he would play a chord and would stare at people with different moods… every chord was played for about 30 seconds, so very long… it was all too strange and extremely depressing. Everybody would feel it… many there were great jazz musicians, known in the jazz world, and everybody would feel exactly the same… you could feel an awfully sad ambience going on. It was the end of a great.
I hate drugs, I hate alcoholism, sensitive people like Jaco, like possible you people, should be very careful with those substances. They can make you feel well for a while, they can pull you out of the pain you are in, cos you have problems, but your dignity is gong down, down, down…
Before taking drugs or drinking too much, I think we should think in other alternatives to go away from pain, or getting into fantastic worlds, because the end of it is, and it will be forever, your absolute failure…
