The Word of Mouth album features several musicians who also appear on this album: Peter Erskine, Toots Thielemans, Don Alias, Othello Molineaux, Howard Johnson and John Clark, as well as showcasing two Pastorius compositions, “Three Views of a Secret” and “Liberty City.”īy 1982 Jaco and Peter Erskine had left Weather Report, and the concert captured on this release represents Jaco with the New York version of his new Word of Mouth big band. Toward the end of 1980, Jaco began recording his second album as a leader, Word of Mouth, which was more oriented toward his own compositions than his debut album had been. This is the complete concert, start-to-finish. And in addition to the exceptional sound quality, were elated to say the set includes more than 40 minutes of music that was not broadcast on Jazz Alive! at the time, therefore has never been available to the public, even in bootleg form. We were blessed to have the original recording engineer, multi Grammy award winner Paul Blakemore, on board to revisit and remix from the original 24-track tape reels more than three decades after capturing it live at Avery Fisher Hall.
And we at Resonance could not be more thrilled. Now, more than six years later, after negotiations with all the many parties who held rights to the music and the recording including NPR, Warner Music Group and the Jaco Pastorius estate Feldmans dream is finally coming to fruition. From the moment he noticed there was a recording of the Jaco Pastorius Kool Jazz Festival concert out there, he was determined that Resonance would release it. When they met, Feldman saw a piece of paper with a list of tapes on it and at just quick a glance the words “Jaco Pastorius” leapt right off the page.įeldman loves Pastorius’s music he regards Jaco as a hero. In 2011, noted jazz producer and label executive Michael Cuscuna introduced Resonance’s Zev Feldman to Owens. Jazz Alive!‘s mission was to record the best live jazz being performed around the country and present those recorded performances to the public over the air. Resonance is able to release this album thanks to the work of Tim Owens, producer of Jazz Alive!, a weekly syndicated NPR program that aired on public radio stations across the U.S. In addition to his extraordinary virtuosity, Jaco was also developing into an accomplished and sophisticated composer and arranger and those talents that are gloriously on display on this album. His legacy as a bass innovator continues to this day, nearly thirty years after his death in 1987. But behind it all was an ever-present R&B and Latin-influenced groove and a screaming rock-‘n’-roll attitude that he refined and incorporated into sophisticated jazz harmonic structures. In Jaco’s work with Weather Report and beyond, the self-described “greatest bass player in the world” (an assessment shared with virtually the entire music world) established a new identity and role for his instrument and became the torchbearer for a new way of playing both technically and conceptually. Jaco was a revelation no one in jazz had ever played electric bass that way before. With his extraordinary fretless electric bass playing as the centerpiece, Jaco Pastorius created an immediate sensation with the public and the media.
The brightest star in the electric bass firmament, Jaco Pastorius burst onto the national scene in 1976 with his audacious self-titled album on Columbia Records, featuring a lineup of top jazz musicians. This is the second historical release from NPR’s Jazz Alive! radio program, following 2016’s acclaimed Sarah Vaughan Live at Rosy’s, which captured “the Divine One” in New Orleans on May 31, 1978. Jaco Pastorius: Truth, Liberty & Soul Live in NYC: The Complete 1982 NPR Jazz Alive! a first-time release comprising more than 130 minutes of extraordinary, high-fidelity, ground-breaking music presented from beginning to end exactly as it happened at Avery Fisher Hall on June 27, 1982.