When Berklee Bass Chair Steve Bailey hears the passing train at the beginning of Barbary Coast, the first original tune Jaco Pastorius recorded with Weather Report, he remembers a valuable lesson he learned from the bass legend.
Late one South Florida night in the early '80s, Bailey was in Jaco's Volkswagen Beetle, along with steel-pan savant Othello Molineaux, returning to Molineaux's house. Upon arrival, Jaco was reaching in to pull the seat forward, when he said, “Listen! Do you hear that?” Bailey strained his ears into the distance and said, “Yeah, it's a train whistle.” To which Jaco replied, “No, man, that's music.”
