Wuff

Dirty Loops’ Henrik Linder (best Justin Bieber cover evar!), Vulfpeck’s Joe Dart, and YouTuber Charles Berthoud are all bass monsters in a golden age of musicianship. But “Havona” by Weather Report is a different level. In my memory Jaco Pastorius attacks with 16th notes in every DAH-DAAHHHHH refrain, but it’s a magic trick: he can suggest max propulsion even playing legato long notes. And the rest of the band pushes and pulls and drops out to keep the song building and flowing into and around his two bass solos.

It’s not head and shoulders above any other band’s bass showpiece (e.g. Yes’s “On the Silent Wings of Freedom”); Jaco assembled a penthouse on Mount Olympus.

Don’t underestimate Wayne Shorter

Now play it again (Sam) and listen carefully to Wayne Shorter hold back on sax. He’s not merely providing sax flourishes as he does on some Joni Mitchell songs; his contributions are lag bolts drilled deep in the song construction holding it together. His legato lines at 0:43 are perfect, his dah-DAAAAH two-note refrains are perfectly low-volume instead of over-the-top honking, his solo at 2:00 ending in blue notes leaves space for Jaco, his yelps at 3:01 are perfect punctuation, his trills 4:27 and on are perfect, his unison playing with Jaco 4:37 is 😘, and those staccato sax notes 5:38 decelerating the end of the song (after Jaco and Joe Zawinul have 16th-noted their hands to a pulp) are only obvious in hindsight.

It’s a phenomenal contribution to the band’s performance. Without it “Havona” would be an amazing bass performance instead of the greatest jazz fusion instrumental of all time.

Jaco Pastorius, Joni Mitchell, …

Now listen to Jaco Pastorius’ eponymous solo album (full of the best bass solos but not the best song-with-bass), his bass playing on Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, and his off-the-charts/off-the-wall funky interplay on Joni Mitchell’s live “God Must Be a Boogie Man.”

Update: oh noooo, another great leaves us. RIP Wayne Shorter (August 25, 1933 – March 2, 2023).

Did Paul McCartney know he wrote the greatest jazz standard since the golden age of the American songbook? The supremely confident moving bass line, the single note “Blackbird singing in the”, the early “dead of” leap in the melody, the hypnotic up-and-down melody “take these broken wings and”, later the musical explosion “into the light of a dark black night” until the upward chords pull you back into the song… it’s a toolkit of parts that begs for a jazz interpretation. Several artists whom I like recorded it recently.

Hiromi’s is solid. She near-quotes “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” a few times, which is gold. I saw her live recently and it was thrilling to hear her slide into “Blackbird.” In this album recording she starts with a two-note birdsong, and the trills and slurs also suggest birds tweeting. People are awed by her Oscar Peterson-level technique, but it’s her long cadences of chord voicings that do it for me; there’s some all too-brief chord magic starting at 3:37.

Jon Batiste has a strangely expressive intro that moves all over until it hits the groove. He plays a chord for the pedal point and moves the chords around. Then he puts a blue note into “Black BERD fly.” He makes it his own.

Brad Mehldau made a fine “Art of the Trio” recording of “Blackbird” (his trio has several other monster interpretations of modern pop songs), but his solo version is sensational. He slows it down and makes the pedal point inevitable, then moves the trilling melody all over the piano’s upper octaves… like a bird singing. It’s a masterpiece of a masterpiece.

Special bonus: disco lite Blackbird

I would love to ask Paul McCartney what he makes of all the jazz takes on “Blackbird,” while surreptitiously playing Sarah Vaughan’s version in the background. It’s nuts! Sawing wood provides the rhythm to the acoustic guitar intro, then it takes a hard left into a “Blackbird-fly way-ahh” funky disco syncopation, then the strings lead into a sub-Boz Scaggs “fly-ah-ah-ah” bridge with two jazz-funk electric guitar solos. David Paich co-wrote “Lowdown” with Boz Scaggs, and he and his dad Marty Paich produced this Sarah Vaughan album of Beatles covers a year later in 1977.

All the tired old people complaining about “the music today” just aren’t trying. With nearly all recorded music a click away, today’s musicians are building on the best in every genre.

My journey through modern instrumental guitar from Vulfpeck to Cory Wong to Yvette Young to Dirty Loops (trick! no guitarist) to the almighty Allan Holdsworth (RIP 2017) to Ichika Nito back to still godly Guthrie Govan has ended at Polyphia, a bunch of snotty math-rock-meets-trap-pop kids from Plano Texas.

Maybe the crunchiest guitar sound I’ve ever heard, is it Violet Crumble or Crunchie? Either way, it rots teeth.

Every video has comments pointing to bedroom YouTube guitarists with equally mad skills. It’s mostly impressive stuff worth a listen but once the video is over I find it hard to remember the titles of instrumentals. I miss the days when many hit pop songs had outrageously good guitar, piano, or sax solos.