THE BIRTHDAY CONCERT

This recording is live Jaco Pastorius show, recorded during his 30-th birthday concert at Mr.Pips in Ft.Lauderdale. And it is not fusion, but mostly big band jazz.

Jaco Plays with Peter Graves Orchestra (14 horns,2 drums and 2 percussions). And the sound is as you can expect from this line-up. Big band orchestra playing in small club. Happily, there are some great jazz guest musicians (drummer Peter Erskine, Don Alias on conga, and both Michael Brecker and Bob Mintzer on tenors), filling all the space with great solos. But the worst thing ,Jaco's bass line is somewhere on the back, and he sounds just as one from back-up musicians. Common concert atmosphere is lovely, but the music is only very average.

Not a bad album for big band/classic jazz lovers. Not too much progressivity, however.

This was my second Jaco album. As a bassist, I felt compelled to check out his self-titled album, and of course I fell in love with it (and still love it dearly to this day). This one is another fun slice of music, though not everything on this live disc is up to the same standards. Things get off to an excellently groovy start, with Soul Intro/The Chicken. Jaco was such a groovy bassist, and this song shows off just how well he could sit in the pocket and have fun with it. So right out of the gates it really drew me in (again). The version of Continuum here isn't all that great though. Invitation has some good parts and some bad, but overall I think it's a bit stretched out. The album has more ups and downs, and like Slava said some of it seems to come across as nothing much more than typical big band jazzy stuff. Not a bad thing, though. Liberty City, Reza and Domingo are some other favorites of mine from this album.

For fans of Jaco, this one's a pretty safe bet. For anyone else, I'd say it's good if you like this style of music, so I'll give it a healthy 3 stars. The good songs are great, but the not so good songs kind of leave me dry some of the time.