Bass Player Jaco Pastorious and Guitar Player John Scofield Performing The Chicken

This video shows two of the most important jazz musicians playing together in a studio session: we are talking about the legendary funky bass player Jaco Pastorious and guitar monster John Scofield. As for bass players there are musicians like Percy Jones, Linley Marthe, Mark King, Jeff Berlin, Ralphe Armstrong or Hadrien Feraud, to mention just a few. However, Jaco Pastorious is in my opinion the funkiest bass player, specially because of his slappy style which is now being copied by many younger bass players.
In this studio session John Scofield and Jaco Pastorious count with the drums of Kenwood Dennard. It is astounding how well Jaco’s bass lines go together with the bass drum, everything is in the pocket!
Unfortunately Jaco Pastorious was killed violently short time after this recording.
We also recommend to check for videos with Jaco Pastorious together with the jazz rock band Weather Report where he played most of his best performances.
In this video, Jaco is playing a bass with frets while in many other recordings he uses a fretless bass and produces some excellent solos with it. Here Jaco is playing mainly as part of the rhythm section which is his usual concept for the bass player while other ones consider the bass as an instrument as any other conventional solo instrument.

John McLaughlin Performing with Indian Group Shakti

Watch this video with the great guitar player John McLaughlin performing live on stage with Shakti, a group of indian musicians. This music belongs to the fusion genre and is a wonderfull combination of western and eastern music.
As many musicians from the western world, John McLaughlin has been interested in eastern culture for some time and has released several albums that clearly show the influence of indian music in his playing. One of the most remarkable albums in this sense is the LP with Carlos Santana and Michael Walden.
Notice that the two female music instrument players are sitting in the background which has mostly to do with the indian way of thinking and living.

Larry Coryell and Stanley Clark Performing School Days Live on Stage

Watch this video with two music legends: guitar player Larry Coryell together with bass player Stanley Clark performing a song called School Days. The performance was recorded during the World Exposition 1992 in Sevilla, Spain.
The song School Days is a composition of Stanley Clark who has played it in almost all of his concerts but here it is still sounding very fresh. Larry Coryell has played with many famous musicians from the jazz and fusion scene and obtained mayor popularity when touring with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia, the great flamenco guitar player. This video clip also shows Dennis Chambers on drums and George Duke on Keyboards.
Many people, specially the younger ones, thing that Larry Coryell is playing without soul, I hpoe this video helps to correct this image. However, as Stanley Clark announces at the beginning of the video clip, this is the first time the two musicians play this song together. Another detail is the low volume of the bass guitar, it could have been mastered in a better way but as we always say: Don’t let the low recording quality keep you away from the musical essence. Would you say that people who listened to the first recordings of Louie Armstrong or other musicians of the era before digital sound processing couldn’t enjoy the music?

Gong – The Legandary Band Performing Live in 2000

Gong is a group from the 1970s era and had disappeared for some while but has come back and this video shows the band Gong playing their first gig after their comeback in the year 2000. In this clip, Gong is performing the song Master Builder from their original album You. They still count with some of their original members: David Allen, Mike Howlett, Didier Malherbe and Gilly Smith.
The band’s concept has always been to play music beyond the mainstream. The band lived together in a commune in France after David Allen, born in Australia and who had founded the band Soft Machine, couldn’t enter the UK any more for legal reasons, decided to stay in France and to continue to experiment with musical sounds.
The band developed an unique style and was experimenting with lots of strange elements, specially focussing on improvisation as the vital part of music. They also liked to appear in rare costumes and still do so as you can see in this relatively recent video clip. The music is a combination of jazz and rock elements and can be regarded as part of fusion, the style from the seventies that concentrated on the fusion of jazz and rock elements, sometimes calles jazzrock too. However, they sure are a band that plays very progressive music, specially if you consider that they were playing this kind of sounds in the 1970s.