Jaco Pastorius Walking Bass: The Other Jaco Most Players Miss

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You already know Jaco.

You know the harmonics. You know “Donna Lee.” You know the solos people are still arguing about on YouTube at two in the morning.

Christian McBride once called him “without question, the Charlie Parker of the electric bass.” He’s the player every electric bassist has to come through at some point.

That’s the Jaco everyone hands you.

There’s another one, and almost nobody has heard him.

He walked.

Where Jaco Pastorius’s walking bass lines are hiding

Mostly not on the famous records. The Giant Steps line I transcribed comes from a bootleg I found on YouTube. To find his walking, you have to go pretty deep into the YouTube rabbit hole, which I’m always happy to do. That might be why his walking isn’t talked about enough.

I wish there were more of it on record. I wish the great jazz musicians of the ’70s and ’80s had hired him to walk on some of their records.

And when Jaco walked, he did things on electric bass that most players have never once been shown. The solos get all the oxygen, so the walking sits there, buried and ignored.

So I went and dug some of it out: five of his walking lines, written out in notation and tab.

The first thing you notice is how simple they are. This is a guy who could play more harmony than arguably any bass player in history, and his walking lines are almost plain.

Jaco wasn’t chasing the right notes. He was chasing movement.

Most bass players stand there worrying about whether a note is correct. The correct note is the low bar. Movement is what makes a line sing, and hardly anybody teaches it, because the players who did it best never wrote it down.

Five Jaco walking lines and what each one teaches

• Giant Steps. A shockingly simple line over the tune that terrifies everyone, with repeated notes that work because you’re on electric. Electric is way more percussive than upright, and repeated notes sound way better on it. He leans on tritones, too, and on electric, tritones work great.
• So What. A line as melodic as an Israel Crosby bass line, over a chord most people find boring to walk. What stands out is the jumping around. You can’t really do that on upright, because upright is such a physical instrument. On electric, you can.
• Dolphin Dance. Herbie Hancock’s tune, from a 1985 film clip where Jaco leads the band. His walking line rhymes with itself the way a melody rhymes: bar four echoes bar one, so he bookends the phrase. He’s the leader, everybody’s listening to him, and the bass line can become the melody.
• All the Things You Are. Four bars of tritones and chromatic motion that look impossible on the page and fall right under your fingers once you slow them down. At one point the line has you playing D7 over E-flat 7. That’s not the obvious choice, and it plays beautifully. I dig into it in the electric section of the All the Things You Are bass line.
• Donna Lee. Not the melody you already learned. The thing happening underneath it: simple chromatic forward motion, moving upward like a Paul Chambers line, and each phrase ends on a tritone. I take apart his famous break in the Donna Lee bass post.

How to learn Jaco’s walking lines

None of this needs a theory degree.

If you can walk a slow blues, four steady quarter notes to a bar, you already have the hands for these lines.

They sound difficult, and that might put you off trying. So start by just playing the notes. Put the tab in front of you and play the line slowly, one bar at a time, over and over, until it starts to sound like music. Then play the whole line without stopping. Then bring up the tempo.

Pick one of these five tunes tonight. Walk it on electric and work in one of his moves: a repeated note, a tritone, or a two-bar phrase that echoes the one before it.