In this apocalyptic age, nothing speaks to me about the meeting of big systems with small gestures like the mournful American man throwing his guitar away into Hiroshima Bay and the Japanese woman retrieving and returning it.
“What is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational [world] and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart,” writes Albert Camus in his wartime essay, The Myth of Sisyphus.
This is why, far from dismissing Jaco Pastorius as deranged, I see him as acting in the only way a sensitive heart can respond to being an American in Hiroshima.
Jaco Pastorius, the legendary jazz bass guitarist who died in 1987 at 35 of wounds inflicted by a nightclub bouncer, suffered from mental illness and addiction. But accounts from those who knew him paint a picture of a man as sensitive and generous as he was impulsive.
Jaco cultivated a racially ambiguous persona growing up in Florida. His mother was a Laplander from Finland and his father descended from a German colonial era abolitionist. “I got tired of whipping those goddamn motherfucking crosses off my mother’s front lawn,” Jaco said. He gravitated toward multiethnic ensembles like Weather Report, which propelled his fame.
Toward the end of his life, Jaco reemerged from a low period of panhandling in New York to play pickup basketball with his street friends and hand out ten-dollar bills. “When everyone else was writing me off and trying to lock me away, these guys took care of me,” Jaco told SPIN. “They saved my life last year. They’re family. I couldn’t pay them back enough.”
This is the man who led his Word of Mouth Big Band to the 1982 Aurex Jazz Festival in Tokyo.
Forrest Buchtel, a trumpet player in Jaco’s band, recounted to me in a 2008 email this remarkable story of the trip.
Jaco Pastorious was such a genius, and I was very lucky that he liked my trumpet playing. Jaco had a big band and we went to Japan where we made a triple album. When we got to Hiroshima, Jaco was very upset. When Jaco got off the Bullet Train, he simply walked to “ground zero” and kept going to the Hiroshima Bay and walked out into the bay up to his waist and threw his bass into the bay.
The next day, a representative from Yamaha came by the hotel to collect Jaco’s electric bass so that they could make copies for a new product in their electric guitar line. A couple of us went to the Hiroshima beach to see if we could find the bass floating in the water. A little Japanese lady was sitting on the sandy beach rubbing down the wood on the bass body. She was very glad to see us and said essentially that she knew that it must be a musical instrument that belonged to someone who would be missing it. Only in Japan would that happen, I think.
At the Hiroshima concert that same night, Jaco stood out in front of the band and played “Amerika” [“America the Beautiful”], unaccompanied. Imagine playing “Amerika” in Hiroshima. It was a very stunning and positive once-in-a-lifetime experience for me to watch this unfold. Jaco mastered playing the strings on both sides of the bridge, and you can hear him accompany himself.
Sisyphus is the man of Greek mythology doomed by the gods to push a rock up a mountain for eternity only to have it roll back down. His crime? Twice cheating death.
As Camus imagined Sisyphus confronting the irrational world, I imagine Jaco waist-high in Hiroshima Bay.
He has zero power at Ground Zero to change the past, bring back the dead, or atone for his government. So I imagine Jaco comes up with the only way he can express anger and sorrow. Jaco’s wild longing for clarity is echoed in that guitar.
I imagine the Japanese woman. She sees the floating guitar as an accident. She will retrieve, restore, and return it to its owner.
I see Forrest and his band mate approach her in the early morning, mystified as the woman hands it to them, dried and smoothed down as if the balance of the universe depends on its restoration.
Man engineered the tiniest particle on earth to destroy in devastating proportions while a solitary woman in the very place the first atomic bomb was deployed undertakes an act of healing. The woman was balancing the scale of an upended life as if she were gluing a broken cup handle.
I listen to the recording of Jaco playing “Amerika” that night on this same bass and think of Hiroshima and this woman. Perhaps he did too.
Intended or not, I hear Jaco’s performance as an act of apology. Contrition becomes a way of being in every small moment, not a state of being.
Jaco “had an incredible capacity to love,” said Othello Molineaux, the jazz steel pan drummer in Jaco’s band.
As Camus leaves Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain getting ready to roll that rock again with a “silent joy” that “the rock is his thing,” that he will act simply because he can, we leave Jaco with his bass. We must imagine, if only in this moment, Jaco happy.
