What to Think About Being an Artist with the Internet

“We’re going to start with Jaco,” announced my bass guitar teacher some time in late 1999.  I had begun lessons only a few weeks earlier. I knew my scales and modes and could play a walking bass line over a twelve bar blues, so long as no variation or improvisation required.

If you know who Jaco Pastorius was, then you might be thinking this was too early to get started on Jaco.  Kind of like that scene from Shine where the five-year-old’s dad tries to start him on a Rachmaninoff piano concerto.

And yeah, it was too early.  I spent a lot of lessons just staring at my teacher’s hands, blankly pretending to understand his technique much less the running music theory monologue.  Too early, but also - that’s what jazz pedagogy looks like a lot of the time, or at least used to. You spent dozens of hours looking at paper and listening to other people play and talk and you were like “what the fuck, this makes no sense,” and then one day somebody counted you in and you were like “oh shit! I can do this!”  Magic.

Why start with Jaco? Because he was a fucking legend.

I don’t mean that Jaco Pastorius is the greatest musician and composer of all time and you should go listen to his music (although, sure). I mean that he was an actual legend in the music community, in the ancient sense of the word, meaning much of what we knew about Jaco came through an oral tradition, inaccuracies aggregating into an aura of superhumanity. As of 1999, for a 13-year-old aspiring bassist to learn about Jaco, there was literally no avenue other than word-of-mouth—my local library and record store didn’t carry, for instance, Word of Mouth, his big band album. Jaco had left behind a handful of solo and group recordings, and some of that you could obtain by special order, if you knew what to ask for and where. There might have been a single biography, if you knew where to find it. When you were thirteen years old and you had no money and no real internet access, though, you didn’t know what to ask for and where. All you had were older kids and, if you were lucky, the struggling musician/part-time plumber your parents paid to show up on Tuesday nights to force you to play Teen Town at one-quarter speed.

The thing about Jaco, and about this kind of legend in general, is that just knowing about Jaco made me feel like I was being indoctrinated into the brotherhood. In fact, I’m pretty sure my bass teacher stated as much: “now you are among the Brotherhood of Those Who Know of Jaco.” And though it could be that my parents’ taste in music was pretty abysmal—we did have a record collection, it was five or six Barbra Streisand albums and the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire—we certainly didn’t have any jazz albums, much less 70s fusion albums. And being fair to my parents, none of my friends knew who Jaco was either. So when I got to join the Brotherhood, it really seemed to mean something.

I actually gave up on Teen Town. It’s not a good performance piece for most situations, a bit inaccessible. And though I love the song, harmonically it was too advanced for me as a study piece at that time; it really made no sense to me and I couldn’t figure out how to work its licks and changes into my rudimentary understanding of jazz theory. But I did get really into Donna Lee.

Donna Lee is about the most bepoppy of bebop tunes. It’s from 1947, when Charlie Parker and Miles Davis (authorship debated) were re-melodicizing the Great American Songbook in the interest of jazz weirdness. Or greatness. (Side note: some might consider bebop, and this tune in particular, the jazziest of jazz music. I would point out that this is the moment when jazz went from the default form of American popular music for dancing and easy listening to the default signifier of both East Coast intellectual coolness and, for American non-classical musicians, technical and theoretical mastery.) To be honest, I find the Charlie Parker version kind of hooty and annoying.

When Jaco introduced his own recording of the song in 1974, he entered the realm of legend. See, the electric bass as an instrument was only 20 years old. In the previous ten years, it had become an arguably prominent instrument in a certain strain of jazz and rock recordings (see: A Tribute to Jack Johnson), but nobody thought of it as a lead instrument and there wasn’t a lot of variation in the tones and styles bassists employed on recordings.

To the right is Jaco’s album version. If you haven’t already, it is worth listening to the Charlie Parker version before you play this one.

I’m not going to gush too much over this. Either it hits you or it doesn’t. My reaction on hearing it the first time—which is pretty telling in that for slightly different reasons it is my reaction now, having abandoned my music career about eight years ago—was “What the fuck, no, I can never do that, I guess I’ll just never be a great bass player.” This performance is just so technically skilled and yet so beautifully arranged and articulated, so musical, it just told me what I should have known but hadn’t learned yet, which was that there were people out there who were thinking their thoughts and moving their bodies in ways completely beyond my comprehension, let alone my ability.

And so my takeaway from this, with some guidance from bass teacher Mike, was that I was never, ever going to be the guy who composes or arranges or records Donna Lee. But maybe, as an exercise, just to get myself to the next level, I could learn to play it. Like, I could play those same notes one after another and maybe, like a jillion artists before me, by copying it out I’d absorb some of the magic. (This was not an epiphany. It’s how you learn to do anything. In this case, the task just seemed, uh, hard.)

I worked with my teacher on this on and off for four years. By the time I left for college, I could play Donna Lee at about 3/4 the speed of Jaco’s recording. Fifteen years later, after some very long gaps in my practice habits, and the more thoughtful listening approach I now take in the rare moments I “practice” with the kind of intention this music requires, I can play it at about half speed, with pretty good phrasing and articulation. (I can improvise a solo over the chord changes, but not as well as I could in college, and unlike when I was in college, I have a strong sense of how shitty my soloing skills are, which makes it even harder to try these days.)

Ok, now here’s the point of the story: in 2004, I knew about five bassists who had ever attempted to learn Donna Lee. My teacher, who could play it at close to tempo and improvise on it, although professed humility at comparing his efforts to Jaco. Me. Three other teenagers who could play it at varying speeds, all with shitty articulation. And so my concept of Jaco Pastorius, from the very little information I could find on him and his music from available sources, was that he was this God of the bass, and he had invented a style and a technique that literally nobody in the world could match.

Then I went to college, and after college I spent a few years more in the classical music world and I never seriously pursued a career as a performing bassist, and then a few years later I picked it up again as a hobby and realized something had happened on Youtube. Ladies and gentlemen, a brief selection from the Youtube of Donna Lee bass playthroughs and lessons and covers.

I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, in that for a generation of bass players, Donna Lee was like, the song to learn. In other words, for decades it has been a standard repertoire study piece, like Beethoven’s Fur Elise but a lot harder. And my viewpoint was not wide enough to grasp that.

On the other hand, I think the world of musical talent development probably is very different than it used to be, precisely because anybody learning the instrument today has access to all these lessons and also all these dudes setting a musicianship standard.

The thing is, by the time I graduated high school, and I could play Donna Lee not nearly as well as every single one of these Youtube people, I was already looking for paying gigs. Like, I had satisfied my own mental standard for “you are now good enough to do this for money.” Which was a good thing! Because even though I was probably not good enough to do that for money, and it would be another year before someone paid me a single dollar to play music, if I hadn’t passed that mental test in my own head, I wouldn’t have put myself on the market. I would’ve kept on playing at home and seeing dudes on the internet play better than me, and I would’ve known with certainty that there were 300 or 400 better musicians than me within a 50-mile radius.

I like to think that I would’ve seen the value in the exercise regardless, and that I would’ve understood that you can be a uniquely expressive and talented musician even if you don’t have dazzling chops. (Would you rather listen to Neil Young or Steve Vai play guitar? Do you even know who Steve Vai is? Question answered.) And to some extent I did understand that and discuss such questions. But I also think that if I had truly understood the absolute garbage level of musicianship I possessed at age 18, at which time I in fact believed I was Big Dick Bassist Boy (TM), I would’ve quit. (I mean, I might’ve quit the bass and started writing really earnest poetry, but go with me here.)

On the other hand, if Youtube had been there when I’d started in 1999, would any of my life have unfolded the way it has? I sure doubt it. My experience of the internet in 1999 was dialing in on the phone line, looking at the news 12 hours before the paper would be delivered, hoping some girls were on AOL instant messenger and then failing to talk to them about nothing, and then logging off having wasted three or four hours and wondering what the hell the fuss was about. I know people my age who really “found themselves” on early message boards and whatever—and I’m sure there was a message board somewhere solely dedicated to Jaco—but I really never was able to navigate that. The platforms that made internet community-building really easy and understandable to navigate—what we called “web 2.0” at one point, and what we now call “the birth of the social media and marketing conglomerates that are ruining the world,” really happened the moment I left for college. (Like, the exact moment - Facebook launched to the college community about a month before my freshman year. My original Facebook profile was #6,000 or so.)

Youtube really changes the pedagogical approach to a lot of subjects. Stuff you could really only read about before (or at most, rent a VHS or something) suddenly becomes live. Oh, you want to learn how to bake bread? Here’s eight million different ways of doing it, from different camera angles, with a slow motion option. You want to beat some random video game level and none of your friends are playing that game? Here’s some dude beating that level while telling racist jokes to a 100 million people.

Oh, you think you’re a talented bassist? Here’s an entire channel that’s just one snarky Italian guy making fun of you for thinking you might be a talented bassist. HE HAS OVER FOUR MILLION SUBSCRIBERS.

(And also, if you indulge in the line of thinking that “I’m still special because I can play bass pretty well, AND I can do other cool hipstery stuff like cooking and whatnot, well…here he’s making a pizza. And that is indeed the line of thinking I used to indulge in and…honestly sometimes I still think that way, when I feel intimidated by someone professionally (“well they may be 3% better at writing, but can they play Donna Lee?”). And by the way, this guy Davie504—he has chops, but his compositions are monotonous and awful, just very repetitive and bland slap-funk garbage. He is an incredible Youtube personality, video and audio editor, and not a great musician by pre-Youtube standards of musicianship, which include compositional skill and live performance, etc., and you can kind of see this distinction in the video at top right where the other player in the “bass battle” has significantly better technique and melodicism but no control over the video presentation. Would I have understood the difference if I’d had Youtube as a teenager? I’m honestly not sure.)

I’m at a point in my life where I make more money than I ever expected to make, and I’m professionally respected and somewhat fulfilled. I have a family and a nice place to live and enough to eat. Setting aside the increasingly likely collapse of western society, climate change-related or otherwise, I’m about as secure as I could hope to be. And so of course the moment I become slightly stressed by work, or bored because I don’t have enough work, or just irritated by the people around me—between those three things, most of my waking hours—I fantasize about what my life would be like if I’d kept going with music.

The thought I keep coming back to is that even to pursue music as far as I did required an amount of self-deception that isn’t possible for me anymore, and was probably only possible in the pre-internet era. In that time and place, I could be indoctrinated into the Brotherhood by learning bits of Jaco Pastorius’s life and music, and he would be this mysterious and legendary figure for me, and I could make myself believe I was a good musician with a real future because I could play parts of Donna Lee at half speed. There was nobody to tell me that there were literally 20,000 people who could do it better. And there wasn’t much of a way to discover that for myself, at least until I left home. Because legends were real, it seemed realistic to want to be, if not a legend, then someone who could make rent imitating one.

Nowadays I understand not just that I wasn’t a very good bassist, but that I never even understood the enormity of the work involved in becoming a good bassist and I made choices not to do that work. I chose to go to a liberal arts college, not a conservatory. I did all my homework instead of running scale and chord patterns all day (which I didn’t know how to do properly, anyway). I didn’t seek out enough other musicians and challenge myself; I just assumed that as a brilliant and creative person I was special enough to make it. And there was nobody in my life telling me that I was doing it wrong, or that I wasn’t good enough. (At least, I don’t think so…maybe I just wasn’t listening!) Having achieved just a little bit of career success now in another field, I understand better the work involved in becoming genuinely accomplished and valuable to people, and I know how it feels to be so talented and accomplished and valuable, and I know I rarely if ever felt that feeling as a bassist.

One of the things that happened when I grew older was that I learned more about the legend of Jaco. When Mike first told me about Jaco, he told me Jaco was “crazy.” Jaco would wear wild clothes, paint his face, threw his favorite bass into the ocean. Got himself beaten to death by a bouncer outside a jazz club for no reason. A tragic, legendary jazz life and death, like so many others. In the internet era, we put these stories together and we understand that Jaco was mentally ill and self-medicating, like so many others.

I keep wondering what compels me to watch these Jaco videos and write about this. There have been many, many thinkpieces about the internet, and there are the obvious takeaways: “real” talent vs. video charisma, geographically isolated niche community members finding and comforting each other, the radicalization of the youth; all of these things are real and true observations I’m sure. But I’m not here to complain about the internet ruining the music industry or the world, although again, I think the case could be made. But I keep coming back to Jaco because reflecting on my own life, the internet and Youtube in particular forced me to see how large the world is, to see the different camera angles, to see how much talent is out there and what people are doing with it in a way that wasn’t possible when I was a kid. Like so many endeavors in life, it was my inability to understand the magnitude of the world and the difficulty of accomplishing anything in it that made becoming a musician seem like a remotely sane thing to aspire to. Was that good or bad? Well, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t try it again, and sure, there’s less magic to the world and fewer legends in the world, knowing what I know now. Then again, I know what I know now because of who I was then.