Connections

The first story is about Marc Johnson, whose playing career took off when in 1978 he joined what would be jazz pianist Bill Evans’s last trio. Like every bassist who’d played with Evans since 1961, Johnson was ever mindful of the groundbreaking impact bassist Scott LaFaro had with Evans’s early ’60s trio. Perhaps because he studied clarinet and saxophone before switching to double bass, LaFaro brought a counter-melodic style that reached beyond timekeeping to interactive, spontaneous, and simultaneous composing with Evans and drummer Paul Motian. LaFaro performed and recorded with Stan Getz and Ornette Coleman, but his most famous work was captured on the last night of a weeklong Evans Trio engagement at New York’s Village Vanguard. The recorded performance became two of the era’s most important albums, Live at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby. Less than two weeks later, LaFaro died in an automobile accident. He was 25 years old.

Last year, Johnson collaborated with his wife, pianist Eliane Elias, on Something For You: Eliane Elias Sings & Plays Bill Evans, contributing compositions Evans had been working on when he died in 1980. He also got to play LaFaro’s 1825 Abraham Prescott bass on the session. And that was when Johnson found his deepest connection to one of his greatest influences, an experience which he describes as profound. 

The second story’s absent protagonist is Jaco Pastorius, the revolutionary musician whose technical innovations on bass are overshadowed only by his powerful individual voice as a soloist and composer. The fretless ’62 Fender Jazz Bass that Jaco used on his solo debut and key recordings with Weather Report, Joni Mitchell, Pat Metheny, and others, has been missing since 1986, when it was last seen in New York. Now it has reappeared, and Will Lee and his wife, the talented photographer Sandrine Lee (who, incidentally, shot many of the stylized black-and-white photos for advertisements that have appeared recently on BP’s back cover), graciously hosted a small gathering of big names in the Big Apple (including BP Senior Contributing Editor Chris Jisi) at their home to examine the bass and give it a try. This is the instrument on which some of the most important and enduring modern music was recorded and performed. Will described it as “the holy grail” of basses, and tried to picture how many notes Jaco played on it. Victor Wooten, in town for a club date, noted that it made him feel more closely connected to a musician who was such a tremendous influence.

This is all about connection. We may not have access to famed instruments, but our connection with other players, whether onstage or across miles and generations, is extraordinary. Any connection is an opportunity to merge our intellectual individuality and spiritual uniqueness; to get inside each other’s heads and hearts. Jaco and LaFaro may not be around to feel the impact of their music, but the connection they helped initiate lives on.