Jaco Pastorius

September 1978, WDR's Rockpalast. The complete Weather Report concert during Jaco PastoriusJaco PastoriusJaco Pastorius · 1976's tenure, including his solo feature — one of the most important fusion concert films.

Jaco PastoriusJaco PastoriusJaco Pastorius · 1976 transformed the electric bass when he joined Weather Report in 1976. His singing fretless tone and his approach to bass as a lead melodic voice redefined what the instrument could be.

Pilgrimage (2007) was the last album Brecker recorded, in the year he died, with Herbie Hancock on piano. Of a record made at the edge of death, Hancock said: 'That record is alive—one hundred percent, more than alive, Michael Brecker.' The final document was the most alive.

In 1976, a still largely unknown Jaco Pastorius played bass on Joni Mitchell's folk album Hejira — the same year he released his own debut and joined Weather Report. His avant-garde fretless playing found its way onto one of the era's defining singer-songwriter records.

Don Alias was brought into the 1969 sessions as a percussionist. On "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" he turned out to be the only player in the room who could lay down the New Orleans beat he had brought in, so he ended up behind the drum kit himself. The most recognizable groove on Bitches Brew (1970) is played by the man filed under percussion.

Randy Brecker played trumpet on Jaco Pastorius's landmark 1976 debut album, a cornerstone of jazz fusion. Fifteen years later, the same trumpeter turns up on a folk-tinged pop record — New Moon Shine (1991) — a world away from fusion's cutting edge.

When Lenny White played drums on Miles Davis's Bitches Brew in 1969, he was still a teenager and virtually unknown. The album that dissolved the line between jazz and rock turned out to be the session that launched his career.

Howard Johnson, jazz's foremost tuba specialist, is credited on Jaco Pastorius's self-titled 1976 debut — the album that redefined what the electric bass could do. He plays a marching-band instrument that has almost no other place in fusion.