Word of Mouth

When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time trawling through city library’s LP collection. At the time, I didn’t realize how unusual it was that the collection included so many of jazz records, including albums from such a wide range of artists. The CD collection was really good, too, but I didn’t have a CD player, and was dependent on my buddy Mike to dub CDs for me so I could listen to them (which he generously did, but I tried to avoid doing it too often to avoid abusing his generosity).

LPs, on the other hand, I could listen to without problem, because I had an old 70s stereo with a built in turntable in my room, so I constantly signed out new LPs and listened, and anything I liked, I dubbed to tape so I could listen to it over and over (and over). 

It was somewhere in this process that I stumbled onto Jaco Pastorius’ album Word of Mouth. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I’m not sure why I even picked it out of the collection, except that maybe I looked at the personnel on the album and saw some familiar names—Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Michael Brecker, Tom Scott, Peter Erskine, and Jack DeJohnette were all familiar names—but I do know that I was stunned when I first listened to it.

It sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. I ever remember being so excited that I rushed to show it to my friend Mike, who listened to it with me during a drive around the city and, like me, struggled for the vocabulary to describe it. (He pointed out that parts of it soundedx like TV orchestra arrangements for 70s TV shows, which isn’t totally wrong—there’s some of that in its musical DNA, or at least I hear that—but even as a teenager, that struck me as woefully insufficient to describe what we were hearing.)

I bought a copy on CD when, years later, I worked in a music shop, and if I remember right, another Michael—the guitarist who managed inventory in the back room—commented on it. He wasn’t really a jazz guy, so much: more of a maker of spectral guitar soundscapes, but Pastorius is that kind of a musician: his bass playing was so legendary that people who weren’t into jazz at all knew him by name.

I’ve revisited that CD many times over the years—of course, along with Pastorius’ other work, which I immediately checked out after discovering Word of Mouth, and some of which I also got on CD—but it sounded different to me a couple of years ago, especially after learning more about Pastorius’ life and death.

A couple of years ago=—which is when I wrote most of this post—I saw the biographical documentary Jaco (2015). Some of the stuff in it, I already knew about: a friend of mine in high school (another guitarist, this one a jazz guy) sketched out a version of the story of Pastorius’ death, with distortions I’m pretty sure featured in a lot of jazz-kid retellings of the tale: he told me something about a bouncer in Florida beating him to death in the street when Jaco showed up for a gig but was high and too messed-up an grungy for the bouncer to recognize him.

(In reality, the bouncer was at a wine bar, and the gig Jaco had showed up for hadn’t been his own gig—it’d been a Carlos Santana show hours earlier and on the other side of town, from which he’d been ejected after pushing his way onstage. And… well, his altered state wasn’t fundamentally an issue of drugs or alcohol but of rapid-cycling bipolar disorder.) 

Still, the shape of the story was heartbreaking enough, even without those details, and the album had already incredibly impressive to me on its own. It’s full of vitality, of an exuberant excitement at playing music. Jaco reportedly used to tell people before a gig, “Have fun!” seeing or hearing him play, you can tell that’s exactly what he did too. There’s a kind of sweetness to all of the music on it, and a flippant glee: when Jaco plays, you can almost hear him saying, “Check out what I can do!”  

However, I was unprepared for what it would be like to listen to the album once I knew how much of it was, in some sense, a kind of musical autobiography. For example, the gorgeous chiaroscuro of “John and Mary” hits really differently (and a lot harder) when you know that it’s named after Pastorius’ first two children.

It’s not just the voices of the children, or the fact that Pastorius had his son John—the same “John” from the title—sing on the album. The bass playing, like the orchestration, is very soulful and expressive. There’s just something about the ebb and flow of the piece, which always sounded as if it brimmed with love and playfulness, but also insisted on its connection to the world outside of the album: birds singing, children talking and laughing, reciting something in a classroom. It’s music that captures the sunlight of an afternoon in childhood, the cheerfulness of a Disney cartoon watched happily as a child in the 50s, the sweetness of a father holding his child and letting this new, unimagined (and unimaginable) happiness course through him.

I can relate to that. 

But there’s one other recurrent pattern in the song: here’s also a recurrent pattern, though, that sticks in my mind a lot more now: a droning, crescendoing darkness that rises up and threatens to overshadow everything, before fading again. It rises and fades, until the last time it rises up, outlasting everything and humming into the silence at the album’s end.

Until recently, I’d just felt it was there for the purposes of dramatic musical tension, a kind of tonal chiaroscuro. But John and Mary were Jaco’s children from his first marriage, a marriage that had ended two years before this album was released, and as joyful he was to be their father, there was a kind of pained sorrow he felt about failing to be there for them as a father. At one point, there’s discussion of the sadness he felt being away from his kids so much as he toured and played music across the country, and around the world. It makes sense that there would be a darkness here—parenthood can involve sorrow and pain, too.  

But there’s also this other darkness, too. In the documentary, a fellow musician describes Pastorius asking him to go for a drink: when they arrived, Pastorius burst into tears, and had to be coaxed into explaining what was wrong. He confessed a fear that he would die in his 30s, and asked his musician friend to take care of his kids for him. This, too, isn’t so strange for a parent to hear: for some of us, having kids really does drive home your own awareness of your mortality, and it can be terrifying to think about how vulnerable your child would be in the world if they lost you. How could it not be terrifying, when the instinct to provide for one’s children is so strong in some of us, and when the love one feels for one’s own child is so life-changingly profound? You can hear that love, in a lot of this album… and in John and Mary, you can hear the fear, too. The song gives way to silence, overcoming that darkness, and after a little awkwardness, becomes joyful, filled with the sound of children’s voices. The singing of Pastorius’ son, and the “choral”-sounding singing later on, seem to embody a sense of family, or community, or togetherness. 

It’s not just divorce that kept Pastorius from being present for his kids. By all the accounts I’ve seen, like this one:

In 1978, he spent some 280 days on the road while Tracy minded the children back in Florida. His relentless schedule, coupled with his escalating temper and vanity, led to their 1979 divorce.

“Who knows what was going on in his head?” says Tracy, a bit of regret in her voice. “I just thought he was being an egomaniacal jerk.”

But Jaco wasn’t just being a jerk. He was sick. In a few years, he would be diagnosed as a manic depressive, and, already, it was taking control of his life. He and Tracy lost touch for years at the time. He married her again, only to divorce her in three years. He fathered two more children, twins Felix and Julius. They never knew him. By the early 1980s, Jaco’s mental health had reached the point of sheer havoc. He moved to New York City, living in the streets and playing sporadically. Onstage, he seemed to be in total control; offstage, however, his behavior was erratic and illogical, leading some to dismiss his illness and to believe that his behavior was either a facade–a twisted ruse for attention–or the work of drugs.

That casts the moments of shadow, those ultra-deep and dark, growling passages that feel almost like a kind of tunnel to be passed through, a whole different meaning. After a gorgeously lyrical section featuring Jaco’s bass and French horn (always a wonderful pairing) the sweet groove returns, joyful and light… only to eventually give way to that dark, deep droning tone, which sounds like like all the low brass struggling to play the lowest pitch they can on their instruments. 

By the time that comes around a second time, the listener gets the sense this is something that there is a kind of tug-of-war going on: Jaco’s experience of fatherhood when he was well, and his experience of shame and sorrow and confusion when he wasn’t well. The song ends with that deep, overpowering rumbling, and while it’s perhaps a bit much to hear that dark tone as prophetic, it is more than just a little foreboding, this low, growling bowed tone at the bottom end of the contrabass’s range—or, I suspect, below the bottom. I think it’s a low Bb, a full tritone beneath what is normally the lowest tone on a contrabass. (Which is an interesting thing, that tritone, if it is indeed a musical symbol of the depressive side of Pastorius’ cycling bipolar illness.)

For all that, “John and Mary” is a masterpiece musically, even if you don’t know any of the biographical stuff. It’s still nakedly confessional, still exploding with joy, still sonorous and gorgeous and at times unutterably sad. But seeing it line up with the man’s life this way, it’s hard not to see other dimensions open up in it, especially knowing how soon Pastorius’ untimely end would come. 

I’ll let Wikipedia pick up the story: 

Pastorius developed a self-destructive habit of provoking bar fights and allowing himself to be beaten up. After sneaking onstage at a Santana concert at the Sunrise Musical Theater in Sunrise, Florida, on September 11, 1987, and being ejected from the premises, he made his way to the Midnight Bottle Club in Wilton Manors, Florida. After reportedly kicking in a glass door, having been refused entrance to the club, he was in a violent confrontation with Luc Havan, the club’s manager who was a martial arts expert. Pastorius was hospitalized for multiple facial fractures and injuries to his right eye and left arm, and fell into a coma. There were encouraging signs that he would come out of the coma and recover, but they soon faded. A brain hemorrhage a few days later led to brain death. He was taken off life support and died on September 21, 1987, at the age of 35 at Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale.

Luc Havan faced a charge of second-degree murder. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to twenty-two months in prison and five years’ probation. After serving four months in prison, he was paroled for good behavior.

If you search for more information, you’ll see a fair bit of rage out there: bassists angrily vowing revenge against Havan, but an interview from a few years ago suggests that nobody followed through with it: Havan kept up his rather questionable claim that he’d only punched Pastorius once—though that’s almost certainly a lie: Pastorius couldn’t have sustained so many injuries of such severity from a single punch from a mere human beings—and suggested that Pastorius would have recovered if he’d been “eating a good diet” and not living on the streets. 

The rage some people have expressed online toward Havan is understandable: it’s hard not to feel outrage at the fact that the man only spent four months in prison. Doubtless the judge, like so many others, didn’t care about some long-haired, drug-abusing, alcoholic homeless person—regardless of his fellow musicians had regarded him as brilliant. As Pastorius’ second wife commented at the time, “he served one month for each child he left fatherless.” It’s a truly heartbreaking, but quite apt, observation. (She’s gone now, too, though their sons apparently are active musicians in Florida.)

It’s common to speak of all the music Jaco could have made, and of course I do wish the world could have heard it. But it’s also possible that Pastorius might not have ever made another album, that after a few more gigs he might have quit suddenly, or taken time away and never gone back to it. It feels strange to mourn Pastorius as a person, though: I never knew him, and could never have known him, since I was only barely a teenager when he died. But his death is a tragedy for more reasons than just that he was a creative musician. 

His death, in fact, was part of a much bigger tragedy that affected millions of people at the time. Havan’s crime was awful… but it wasn’t isolated. The context here is that Jaco Pastorius was a mentally ill man in America in the 1980s. He was (apparently) living on the street, but then so were many other mentally ill people in that place and time. This is because they were abandoned by their society, by their government. In 1981, Ronald Reagan repealed the Mental Health Systems Act that had only been signed into law in 1980. Reagan and the Republican Party—true to character, the same people who’ve opposed every positive advance in modern American society—trashed what had been a landmark law funding community mental health centers. Over the following years, funding was support was stripped away, resulting in a familiar story: the mentally ill wound up in the streets, and then, eventually, dead (or in prison). When I hear people today praise Ronald Reagan (even if just in comparison to Trump), I think of that—of a large portion of America’s mentally ill population tossed right into the streets like garbage.

And I feel like if you want to blame someone for what happened to Jaco, you could do worse than the blame Reagan and the Republicans who looted the mental health care funding so they could cut taxes for the ultra-rich. 

But that’s now why I’m writing this. I’m writing this because Word of Mouth is an album that’s been important to me for many years, something I’ve had to come back to over and over, and to reckon with. In some ways, it’s helped me to see something about my own relationship with music: that while I spent many years trying to learn the intricacies of very cerebral, serious, complex forms of jazz, on some level that sweetness and that vulnerability in Pastorius’s music is what speaks to me most these days. 

If you’d like another view of the piece, guitarist Alan Oehler wrote a post that dug into some of this too, back in 2016. He does well one thing that this post of mine doesn’t: he manages to refrain from making it all about Jaco’s life story, and keeps in focus the fact that even on its own the music is profoundly beautiful and moving. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *