My Story

My life started on October 12, 1989 in the small and historical town of Plymouth Massachusetts. Like any parent that tries to help their children succeed my parents encouraged everything that I attempted. When I was about 5 years old I started draw everything that I could find so my parents got me paint brushes and colored pencils. I had a relatively average life with no real determined direction until I reached 7th grade. This is when I first learned to play a musical instrument. Every morning in 7th grade I would talk to the people that monitored the breakfast area. More often than not the monitor position was fulfilled by the middle school music teacher. He was a rather large middle class citizen trying to make a living. I enjoyed talking to him because he had an opinion on every subject, and it was usually one that I had not considered. During one of these in depth conversations one of my friends joined in and mentioned that he needed a bass player for his newest rock band. I volunteered even though I had no experience, no bass, and no teacher. I looked to my friend the music teacher for some advice on the subject, but I think that the only thing he heard was that I was going to learn to be a bass player. It turned out that the school band and the school jazz band needed a bass player. I decided to take on the responsibility of learning all the songs for the school bands and my friend’s band. The music teacher allowed me to borrow the schools bass for the weekend so I could get to know the instrument. I fell in love with the way that it felt in my hands and the low rumble that was produced every time I plucked a string. I was more than just in love with it, I was completely obsessed. I practiced compulsively the entire weekend. I had to reluctantly return the bass to the school on the following Monday. I needed to get my hands on my very own bass so I called every music store within an hour of driving from my house and became educated on the process of buying an instrument. I learned that I would have to be very careful when selecting an instrument because I would have to make a bond with it. I looked in music stores for 3 months unsuccessful in finding the perfect instrument. I was sure that I had tried every model of bass that had ever been made, I was wrong of course. A few days before my birthday in October my mother decided that it was necessary that I stop using the school’s bass and get my own. She took me to a music store that I had been to a few times before, but this time they had a few new instruments on the walls. One of them was a Fender Precision Bass. I had heard many positive things about Fender basses so I thought that it would be worth my while to at least give it a try. It was absolutely the perfect bass for me. It sounded both bright and warm at the same time. The physical balance of the bass guitar was very even witch is very important for a player that will be using it to practice for many hours every day. I told my mother that how perfect this instrument was and she bought it for me to honor my 12th birthday. I don’t think that I have ever gotten a better present on any occasion. I was immediately enrolled in private lessons so I could properly learn the instrument at a reasonable pace. Much like the instrument themselves, the bass teacher needs to be chosen with extreme care. I first tried learning from a college student, but I noticed very quickly that I was not progressing as fast as I felt I could have been. I left him for another teacher. This new teacher’s previous students are known for being some of the best players in the area. After 10 minutes of the first lesson I knew that he was not right for me. I met him for the first time in the lesson room because he is blind and could not come out of the room to meet all his students at the front of the music school. I sat down and introduced myself to him and he answered with “play 5 choruses of a jazz blues in F using flat five substitutions on 1 and 4.” I had no idea what he was talking about at the time, but I still remembered it because it made me feel like I was very far from where I needed to be knowledge wise. There was one more very credible bass teacher to try to contact. I found that he taught at a music school within walking distance from my house. I enrolled with very high hopes that he would be able to teach me a lot of things very quickly, but not so quickly that I don’t understand any of it. I can remember my first lesson with him as well. It was a much different experience than any other teacher I had ever had in school or out. The first thing that he did after he casually introduced himself was take his bass out of the case and instructed me to do the same then he quickly tuned both of them so the lesson could really start as soon as possible. He began to play a song that I had never heard before then he instructed me to take a solo. It was an awful start to something beautiful. His “plays first, learn later” technique worked well for me because was very eager to play all the time. I continued to study the electric bass guitar with him until the end of my junior year of high school. I had been learning more than I realized there was to know under this teacher. I also acquired a taste for jazz music. He helped me for my first real band, which happened to be a jazz trio. I had so much fun learning and playing with this band that I decided that I would dedicate my life to music somehow. I had always looked up to teachers especially eccentric music teachers. It did not cross my mind that I had the potential to be one someday, but with a little help from my father I decided that being a music teacher is my true calling.
Music teachers have been some of the most important people to me, I decided to become one myself.

Jaco Pastorious

Jaco Pastorious is the greatest bass player ever!! He may have been drunk all the time but he was still unbelievable. When he played “the dry cleaner from Des Moines” with Joni Mitchell I actually got chills. I personally think that he is just one of the best, tied with Ron Carter and Victor Wooten, but he would have told you otherwise. From what I understand he was very very pretentious. This negative aspect in his personality ultimately ended his life.
Jaco grew up in Florida were it is extremely humid. This location completely changed the course of bass history. He first fell in love with and tried to play the upright bass, but he said that the weather turned his bass into splinters. Pastorious did not give up! He went out and bought the bass that would be known as the bass of doom. It was a fender jazz bass. Jaco later removed the frets and filled the with wood putty (this really works well if you have a lot of patience and any wood working background at all)so that it would sound more like an upright bass. He would not practice on the bass of doom because the strings would actually tear away at the finger board creating little divots that would throw each note slightly out of tune, and it would also create a lot of “fret” buzzing.
He has played on countless records with huge named players. As I said before my favorite stuff of his is with Joni Mitchell. The balance of his perfect low notes and her thick relatively upper register voice was perfect. A Zen master could not mix a concoction so balanced.
The way that he ultimately died was from making a couple of karate chopping security guards angry. They would not let Jaco into a bar so Jaco screamed “don’t you know who I am” and began to fight the security guards. They killed him out of self defense. This is the story that I heard, it may not be true, but it is interesting.