Jaco Pastorius, untutored and untrained, was the greatest bass-guitar player of all time. Guitarist Pat Metheny called him “a legend.” Herbie Hancock called him “a phenomenon.” Hiram Bullock called him “a true genius on the level of Mozart.” When she first heard the news, recalls Ingrid Pastorius, Jaco’s second wife and the woman he’d loved until he died, “I said to myself, ‘My God! Jaco finally got some sucker to do the job for him.’”Īt his funeral, jazz musicians took turns playing the music he had composed. It came as almost a blessing after years of suffering, both his and theirs. Although his loved ones cried at his death, they were not surprised by it.
Only his girlfriend of the last three years of his life was not permitted to be at his side. On his deathbed, he was surrounded by his parents, his two younger brothers, his two ex-wives, his four children and his friends. Jaco Pastorius died on September 21, without ever regaining consciousness. And, finally, one photograph, the photograph published on the day he died, showed a sad, sweet-faced boy-man with a look of innocence in his haunted eyes. Still another pictured a tense man, an animal ready to spring, with a fierce, manic look in his eyes, his hair pulled back almost painfully tight into a ponytail. Another showed a man with lank shoulder-length hair and exhausted heavy-lidded eyes. One was of a man with narrowed, distrustful eyes, smirking lips and a wispy goatee like Ho Chi Minh’s. Once he had been identified, local newspapers ran photographs to accompany stories headlined “DARK DAYS FOR A JAZZ GENIUS” and “JAZZ PERFORMER’S LIFE STRIKES A TRAGIC CHORD” and “THE LONG, SAD SLIDE OF A GIFTED MUSIClAN.” The various photographs seemed to be of different men. John Francis Anthony “Jaco” Pastorius III lay comatose in the intensive-care unit of a Fort Lauderdale hospital for nine days, unrecognized until he was spotted by the doctor who had delivered his children. “So, you see,” said the investigating officer, “the victim was not unknown to us. Over the past four years, “the victim” had been arrested in and around Fort Lauderdale many times for being drunk and disorderly for resisting arrest during an argument with his second wife for stealing patrons’ drinks and change at jazz clubs for driving a stolen car around and around a running track for breaking into an unoccupied apartment to sleep and, finally, for riding naked on the hood of a pickup truck. Prior to the incident, he had been an “at-large person,” a vagrant with no known address or visible means of support. The police report listed the cause of injury as a “blunt trauma to the head.” His skull was fractured. That’s all there was to it, the bouncer said. The bouncer shoved him and he fell backward, hitting his head on the concrete. When the bouncer chased the man down the alley, the man threw a glancing blow at him. Luc Havan, 25, a Vietnamese refugee, said that the man had tried to kick in the bar’s door after he had been denied entrance because he was drunk and abusive. She looked up and said, “Jaco’s hurt.” One officer bent down and massaged the man’s shoulders while the other looked for witnesses. When the police arrived, a woman from the bar was kneeling beside him, wiping the blood out of his mouth so he would not drown in it. He was less than an eighth of a mile from a police station and only a few feet from the Midnight Bottle Club, the Bread of Life health food store and a religious supply store with a sign in its window: “God Loves You.” He lay there peacefully for a while, in the darkened alley in a strip shopping mall in Wilton Manors, Florida, on the morning of September 12, 1987.
He lay motionless on the concrete, as if sleeping, his tangled shoulder-length hair ringed by a halo of blood. He was just another bum bleeding to death in an alleyway at four o’clock in the morning.
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