Live Gem Involving Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorius, Bennie Maupin and James Levi

Herbie borrows a bass player, deep music ensues....

Someday when we all have more time, it’d be nice to do a Thank You campaign to acknowledge the many radio-station audio engineers who worked long hours under less-than-ideal conditions to record live concerts back in the day when these were in the radio-programming mix. The audio history of music is richer because of these mostly unknown people.

One of them gets a shoutout in the opening of this set, recorded live at Chicago’s Ivanhoe Theater on February 16, 1977. His name is Ken Rasic (spelling is a guess), who worked for WXRT-FM on a regular feature called the “UnConcert.” As the unidentified host explains, Rasic brought a bunch of microphones and TDK tape to the Ivanhoe for a Herbie Hancock concert.

Except it wasn’t a typical night. Hancock explains the situation after a throttling, long-distance romp through “Chameleon:” “We borrowed a bass player from another band,” he tells the crowd. “That band is Weather Report and that bassist is Jaco Pastorius.”

This is 1977, so a few years after Headhunters was a megahit. It was a busy performance year for Hancock; a few months after this, he recorded a terrific live trio date in Japan with Ron Carter and Tony Williams. As for Pastorius, when he teamed up with Hancock that night, Weather Report had finished and was about to put out Heavy Weather. That’s the one with the megahit “Birdland” and some of Pastorius’ most gorgeous work as a performer and composer.

The circumstances make for fascinating listening. Pastorius was in the middle of a torrid ascent — his self-titled debut came out the year before, and critics were already talking about his galvanic impact on Weather Report.

Here, though, he’s primarily a bass player, expected to hold things down as Hancock, reed virtuoso Bennie Maupin and drummer James Levi engage in a profoundly conversational strain of jazz/funk/rock fusion. All of Pastorius’ tricks are on display, from the thundering root-note drones to the wicked double-time ascending/descending basslines to brief double-stop chords that function like horn backgrounds. Here’s another track from the performance that’s not on the above link:

Also here: Plenty of instances where Pastorius appears to know the book. He plays melodies, and joins in the whole-band phrases that punctuate the forms; he sounds happy to be in the support role as solos get underway, following the flow of the discourse rather than behaving as a soloist. (As he sometimes did later.)

This performance has been available for awhile — it’s been sold as a bootleg and grey-market item. The recording is crisp give or take a few jarring blips. Thanks Mr. Rasic for being on the scene and having the recorder running on a night in the winter of 1977 that winds up adding, in ways large and small, to the legacies of two titans.