With a plethora of guest musicians (like Christian McBride, Victor Bailey, Marcus Miller, Gerald Veasley, Victor Wooten or Richard Bona) on this tribute album to Jaco Pastorius, you know you're getting the real thing here.
When musicans like Christian McBride call Jaco "the Charlie Parker of the electric bass. Nobody has ever innovated on that instrument like Jaco did" and Marcus Miller says that "every year, Jaco's memory gets stronger. It’s up to us to make sure folks don’t forget", you can be sure that they give their best to deliver an album full of great jazz tunes.
This album project is conducted by Peter Graves, whose Peter Graves Orchestra Jaco Pastorius joind in 1972. This orchestra was renamed The Jaco Pastorius Big Band later on and gave Jaco an opportunity to evolve as an electric bass player and composer. After five years with Peter Graves some solo recordings follwed, a six year collaboration with Weather Report, projects with musicians like Joni Mitchell and Pat Metheny and Jaco's own progressive jazz project, Word of Mouth (which featured Graves and various other members of Graves’ orchestra).
Naturally this tribute covers most parts of Jaco's career like Punk Jazz or the cover of Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly (two songs he has done with Peter Graves Orchestra), Havona and Teen Town that are well-known from his collaboration with Weather Report or Continuum from Jaco's own Word Of Mouth Project.
An interesting result of modern technology is the Herbie Hancock written Wiggle Waggle that actually features Jaco on bass. For this song Peter Graves extracted the bass part Jaco played at a live gig on Sanibel Island in the Gulf of Mexico in the late 1970s.
Even if you haven't been familiar with the music of Jaco Pastorius (like myself) this album is a good chance to start with, the music is just plain instrumental jazz played perfectly by talented musicans and with detailed liner notes in the CD booklet there's enough information to get into the magic music of Jaco Pastorius.