[rating=8.00]
The title of Jaco Pastorius’ live recording. Truth, Liberty & Soul might well serve as a most accurate encapsulation of the late bassist/composer’s approach to music. As a visionary in its own way as his groundbreaking contributions to Weather Report, Pastorius’ Word of Mouth album, and the Big Band named its named for, it stretches the boundaries of form with as much attitude as technical virtuosity.
In this strikingly colorful two-CD set, sumptuously packaged with a ninety-six-page booklet full of dynamic color and b&w photos and enlightening interviews with friends, family, collaborators and admirers, Pastorius performs with the ensemble in its largest configuration. The core ensemble is augmented with sixteen horns, that along with Bob Mintzer on sax and clarinet plus Randy Brecker on trumpet, and a panoply of textures that sound like a mirror image of the leader’s bass weaving in out and around the other instruments on tracks like “Reza”/”Giant Steps.”
Cynics and/or naysayers familiar with the man’s mental and physical maladies later in life may look askance at these extensive credits, including one for the dearly departed master of harmonica Toots Thielmann, on, among five other cuts, “Three Views of A Secret” (first performed by the aforementioned the iconic jazz-fusion band). But it only takes a cursory listen to understand the sensitivity all these musicians devoted to the material and each other, in particular, their bandleader. The glorious immediacy of this performance, on the extended likes of “Mr. Fonebone,” for instance, unfortunately, reminds what a tragedy was Jaco’s demise.
Still, under his tutelage on the stage of Avery Fisher Hall in New York, aided and abetted by drummer extraordinaire and second-in-command Peter Erskine, the entire lineup radiates the fearlessness of Pastorius himself. In addition to traversing material from his eponymous solo debut (“Donna Lee,” “Onkonkole y Trompa”), the WOM album (“Liberty City”) there are some eye (and ear)-opening covers that illustrate the unabashedly eclectic approach of the eccentric bassist: with the colorful assistance of Othello Molineaux on steel drums, he reconfigures Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” as gleefully as he does Buster Brown’s r&b nugget “Fannie Mae” (later to appear on 1983’s Invitation album). In fact, the latter constitutes an all the more rousing conclusion, immediately following the “Bass and Drum Improvisation,” complete with Jaco’s often cinematic homage(s) to Jimi Hendrix.
Recorded live with a pristine clarity, and produced by Resonance Records general manager Zev Feldman (who conducts most of the interviews ) with some measure of collaboration with this idiosyncratic musician’s estate, this package (originally issued in a vinyl box set for Record Store Day 2017) contains a full forty minutes (out of a total near one hundred and twenty) not part of the original broadcast by and captured for posterity by NPR in 1982 from from George Wein’s Kool Jazz Festival. The remarkable result of rigorous rehearsal and full-blown spontaneity, Truth Liberty & Soul displays a combination of virtues that was the hallmark of Jaco Pastorius’ work both on the stage and in the recording studio.
