Please elaborate.
I'm bored and I would just love to hear how Jaco influenced bassists in every single musical genre on the planet (which is wrong, whatever you might think). For the umphteent time...
Heisann DOB!
I'm bored too, so I'll take a shot at elaborating..
I guess also much of this depends on how you define the term 'influence' or where do we draw the line on what it means to "be influenced by" someone, right? That has much to do with where you'll land on this issue. I belong in the camp who see Jaco's influence as far reaching and the net he threw was wide. I'll use one specific example as a picture to explain what I mean:
I see a very clear and direct link between Jaco and Tim Commerford of Rage Against The Machine; so Jaco influencing a "heavy metal/rock/funk/rap band". So much of what Tim was doing with technique, approach and tone after he switched from Stingrays (first album) to Jazz Basses (everything after that) came from watching the Modern Electric Bass; Jaco instructional video. Like before he played with the scooped Stingray sound, pushing the treble, and holding the bass low, like "most rockers".
When he saw the Jaco video he immediately raised the level of the bass like, in his own words, "a session guy" for "better technique" and "being able to play with more power and clarity and with less string/fret noise". "He (Jaco) broke it down" he said about the video. Also he said "that I'm no Jaco with my left hand, but my right is pretty strong (like his)", and as far as tone goes I found this quote from fender.com:
Tim:" You can watch the Jaco (Pastorius) instructional video and see Jaco roll up all the pickups and roll the front pickup back and kind of like dial the sound in. That’s one thing about every Jazz Bass that I love—if you turn up both pickups all the way and then roll that front back, you kind of get that low-end “doo-doo-doo” sound, and then it goes into a (makes an open-ended “wah” sound). That’s my sound, right there. That’s it. No other bass does that for me. My hand goes there and it knows how to roll the pickups real quick and make it happen"
And that's the sound he's using + making it his own by all the amps and distortion stuff he's got going on. So yeah, he's still playing the RATM-songs and those kind of bass lines, but there is a Jaco influence there, and (I think) it is significant. And I think Tim thinks so too, because he's been talking quite a bit about Jaco in interviews over the years. So that's one example.
Also, I see Jaco as a huge influence on my own playing, even though I do not play in a Weather Report cover band, play jazz or fusion. (I can play most of his stuff though, minus Havona
) I usually play simpler stuff because what I like the most are good, simple songs. So in that regard; I play more like Sting (also a influence) than Jaco most of the time. But I do love Jaco and his music (even if I don't listen to it every day); because of his compositions (Three Views, John & Mary etc) playing (just about everything) tone and approach to music ("keep my ears open" from Modern Electric Bass). And it's also possible to be influenced by someone without even knowing it, right? Only later on you go "Wow, so that's where that came from"!!
