If you dig around you'll find a lot of great quotes from Pat Metheny like this:
Playing with Jaco Pastorius
When I left Kansas City, I had the opportunity to move to Florida. A guy who was a Dean of a college in Florida heard me play, and offered me a full scholarship to go to the University of Miami. This is certainly the happiest day of my parent’s life, because until then I had been flunking out of both high school and junior high. I was really only concerned about trying to become a good musician. The thought of me actually possibly turning out to be something other than that was exciting for them.
I went to the University of Miami for about four days, and realized I was functionally illiterate. There was no way I’d be able to fake my way through this, the way I did through high school. The fourth or fifth day I was there, I met Jaco Pastorius who was a bass player living in town. My first reaction upon hearing him was thinking, “Are there people like this everywhere? Is this normal? [Maybe] I should get on the bus and go back to Kansas City.”
Jaco had a willful – almost sabotage – mechanism that he would invoke. Whenever the music seemed to be moving one way, he would push it a different way for sometimes inscrutable reasons.
Jaco and I became very good friends. It turns out that we had similar missions in life, in terms of trying to expand the role of our instruments within this general realm of music. We ended up making a number of records together over the years, and were very close friends all the way through. There are some musicians you play with, and it’s really easy to play with them. It’s almost like a magic carpet ride. Jaco was not that at all. He was actually somebody, I would say, that was very difficult to play with. He had a huge presence in every way, and this is before he was this iconic figure that he has become. He had a willful – almost sabotage – mechanism that he would invoke. Whenever the music seemed to be moving one way, he would push it a different way for sometimes inscrutable reasons.
At the same time, he was an incredible musician and had amazing responses to things that I would play and tunes that I would write. The way that he and I played together I can’t say that I’ve really heard anything quite like that since. I’ve never experienced that with anybody. We had a volatile relationship actually. I think maybe I was one of the few people along the way who would really yell at him. I would say, “Man, do this, do that.” Everybody was mostly so in awe of his facility on the instrument – which was pretty staggering – but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking more like, “This tune needs this.” I was more thinking about what the music was asking for, and that we were both participants in that. That was always the primary thing.
