Like father, like sons
Anchored by the twin sons of South Florida bass legend Jaco Pastorius, Way of the Groove takes flight. by Bob Weinberg
“I’d like to start bringing it to gigs,” Felix says, sheepishly indicating the acoustic bass, which he says he plays just for fun. “I just need to play it more. I’m totally lost without the register. I really would like to get more into it, start practicing, you know, just playing along with everything I love.” Although Way of the Groove, as its name implies, plays mostly fusion and funk, ranging from tunes by Jaco, his seminal band Weather Report, and his collaborators Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, to The Meters and even Michael Jackson (an irresistible instrumental workout of “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough”), the bandmates profess affection and reverence for straight-ahead jazz. “I always thought maybe we should do an acoustic set,” offers 19-year-old tenor saxophonist Colin James. “I mean, we could play the same stuff, but how different would it sound? Why the hell not, man?”
“I know the parents would be going like this,” adds Ingrid, making a prayerful gesture at the prospect of a gig during which she and the other band moms and dads wouldn’t have to risk tinnitus. In fact, a recent Tuesday at the Alley found the 6-foot, 7-inch Felix (who passes his brother by 6 inches) playing a good portion of a set on his knees so he could actually hear himself through his amplifier. Right now, Way of the Groove is expressing its love for Herbie, as keyboardist Jimmy Staten fiddles with the CD player atop the acoustic piano behind him, cuing up the song they’ve come to rehearse. James, so tall that even in his stockinged feet, his red hair nearly touches the Tiffany lamp suspended from the ceiling fan, closes his eyes and points to the CD player during saxophonist Bennie Maupin’s driving solo. The band plays along with the recording, stopping and re-cuing it from time to time. Wearing a pair of headphones, Julius lays down a snaky beat on snare and cymbals before Felix joins in, pulling notes from the electric bass cradled in his lap with long, well-defined fingers that resemble his dad’s. His long, blond hair piled atop his head, guitarist Adam Lucas, wearing a T-shirt with the logo “Undercover Police,” scratches out a funk groove, before James enters, blasting heated riffs into the small, intimate space. The bespectacled Staten, sporting a T-shirt from Bethune-Cookman College, adds his Fender Rhodes-sounding keyboards to the mix, evoking an era of music that had just about peaked by the time any of the bandmates was born. “You gotta get that line,” Julius says to the saxophonist, instructing him to come in after Lucas’ guitar part. “You gotta do the [chord] change.” “It goes to G, right?” James asks Felix, who nods and answers, “Right.” Staten plays the CD once more, and the band jumps in, pretty much nailing it, though there’s a bit of confusion as to how to end the tune. Felix and Julius look at each other. “I’m a little lost with that, too,” the bassist admits. From behind his kit, Julius re-cues the CD to the song’s outro using a remote. “We hear that, and we out,” Staten says. They try it, and it works. “Do it again,” the keyboardist advises.
Tea and mangoes
To call Ingrid Pastorius’ home a nurturing environment would be like saying summers in South Florida tend to be a bit on the warm and muggy side. A visitor with a vicious head cold is immediately offered a mug of hot lemon tea and later loaded down with a couple of vitamin-rich mangoes from the tree out front, a gift from drummer Peter Erskine when Ingrid and Jaco moved into the house in 1979. A tabby alertly peeks from a makeshift shelter by the kitchen window in the front yard. Gently, Ingrid reaches into the clapboard box, talking soothingly to the cat she calls Mommy, and removes a tiny, white ball of fur with just-opened blue eyes and six toes — like the Hemingway cats — on all four feet. After hearing it mewing, one of the twins climbed on the roof and rescued the mama cat and the sole surviving kitten of the litter. The Pastorius menagerie also includes Bubba, a hefty black cat, and the beloved Zoe, a tiny, 4-year-old, black-and-white dog with comically big eyes who flits from one band member to another as fast as her little legs will take her and with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of affection. From the tribal masks, stylized Haitian art and richly patterned tapestries to the steel pans, piano and mandocello to the shelves crammed with art books on impressionism, perspective and moods of light, the Pastorius home abounds with delights for the eye, ear and mind. “Julius and Felix were homeschooled here,” Ingrid says, “which is why we have a lot of stuff, stimulation, you know? Stuff I’d want to bring into a classroom I brought into the house: art, music …”
Born in Indonesia, Ingrid moved to Holland with her family when she was 7. After a few years in Puerto Rico in her late teens, she moved to South Florida at age 20, first working as a flight attendant for Eastern Airlines and then as an artist for a company that mass-produced paintings for hotels. An exotic beauty who looked as if she stepped from a Gauguin painting, Ingrid quickly captivated Jaco, who called her at work with an ultimatum: Prove to me how much you love me; meet me at the Weather Report concert in Baltimore. Without further ado, she painted a resignation note on her work table, went home and packed, and was at the concert venue that evening. For three years, Ingrid traveled the world at Jaco’s side, first with Weather Report, then with Joni Mitchell. When Mitchell recruited him to be her bandleader, Jaco had two conditions: $50,000 and a spot for Ingrid wherever they traveled. The couple married in the summer of 1979, right at the peak of his fame. They lived what seemed an idyllic existence, raising the twins in the South Florida environs Jaco loved best; family photos show a doting father with his babies on the beach, his long stringy hair still damp from the ocean. He also remained close with John and Mary, his children from a previous marriage.
However, as Jaco’s fame increased, his problems grew proportionally. Fairly abstemious when he was younger, he picked up drug and alcohol addictions that spiraled out of control, aggravated by bipolar disorder. “I can recall noting changes in my dad in the early ’80s,” Mary Pastorius notes in a 1994 essay that accompanies the release of a brand-new, two-CD retrospective, Portrait of Jaco … The Early Years. “I think a lot of people wrote my dad off, throwing him into the ‘self-destructive genius/jazz musician who can’t handle fame or his own creativity, so he turns to alcohol, drugs and eventually drives himself insane’ category. … That was not Daddy. … The truth is that my father was mentally ill. He was suffering from a severe chemical imbalance, manic-depressive illness. … His warped perceptions of reality and all of the bizarre behaviors that went along with them can be attributed to manic episodes that sometimes reached psychotic heights.”
Jaco and Ingrid were divorced in 1985, and by 1987, he was sleeping in Fort Lauderdale’s Holiday Park, picking fights with strangers and bumming coins from passersby. That same year, on Sept. 12, Jaco tried to climb on-stage with Santana when the band played at the Sunrise Musical Theatre and later showed up at the Midnight Bottle Club, an after-hours joint in Wilton Manors. He was found that morning in a pool of his own blood, savagely beaten by the club’s manager, a martial arts expert who served only four months for manslaughter. Jaco slipped into a coma and died nine days later. He was 35 years old. Felix and Julius were 5.
Although their dad’s music continues to be revered around the world, with reissues, compilations such as the recently released Portrait of Jaco and Punk Jazz anthologies, books and product endorsements generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, the twins see a minute portion of that income. According to Ingrid, a corporation set up by John and Mary Pastorius and Jaco’s brother Rory Pastorius pays Felix and Julius each $295 per month, plus $2,500 in distribution fees a year. They also receive insurance coverage and the usage of a couple of cell phones. Legal wrangling within the family ate up a good portion of the twins’ inheritance, as did unscrupulous lawyers, one of whom is now serving time for embezzlement to the tune of $200,000. Ingrid says she’s done her best to ensure that Felix and Julius don’t become bitter about the finances. “They were not raised to be concerned with that,” she says. “It messes with your heart. Felix told me, ‘I don’t care if they buy mansions. I just want to focus on my own life.’ ” Remembering Jaco’s toughness, she adds, “I wish he was around to teach my kids.”
The White Dynasty
Felix Pastorius mentions two milestones that occurred in his 16th year, neither of which is related to getting a driver’s license: He first dunked a basketball, and he was invited to play bass in percussionist Bobby Thomas Jr.’s Bermuda Triangle band. A member of Weather Report, Miami native Thomas is one of several of Jaco’s close friends appointed as godfather to the twins, though Felix, Julius and Ingrid all acknowledge that Thomas remained most involved in their lives growing up. “Oh yeah, that’s the whole reason I’m playing right now,” Felix concurs, his lanky, open-shirted frame folded into a chair in the living room of his mom’s house, where he and his brother reside. “I mean, we always had instruments in the house, but the only reason I’m playing music is Bobby.” Felix was 11 when he first approached the instrument that his father had all but reinvented. At age 13, he was invited to play a benefit for ailing drum great Steve Bagby. “I was still just jamming on it; I hadn’t done anything,” he says. “And then, a few years later, Bobby was like, ‘Hey, man, I want you to help me build my band,’ because the way he explained it to me, he was tired of all the musicians around here who are afraid of trying something new.”
Originally, the trio comprised Thomas, Felix and vibraphonist-composer Tom Toyama. They worked out on loose, funky jams, anchored by Felix’s toneful bass and Thomas’ explosive mix of percussion and drum kit, with Toyama’s crystalline vibes dancing exuberantly atop the solid foundation. The band was a regular fixture at Jazid in Miami Beach and Harrison Street Sushi Jazz in Hollywood. “I was completely scared,” Felix admits. “I mean, I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew one scale; I knew the pentatonic, and everything came from that. And playing with Bobby, the way it goes is he would just call a tune. We’d make up a name of a tune, just make it up and just start playing. He’d look at me, or he’d start a groove. It was interesting, because I didn’t know too many things. We didn’t even practice, no rehearsal. It was free. And after the gig, Tom was like, ‘We should get together.’
” It was left to Toyama to make sure the tunes didn’t dissolve into absolute chaos. For the jams to be coherent, he and Felix would have to figure out a way to communicate. “I understood where he was coming from,” Felix says. “I was just a kid. I didn’t know too much. It was a lot of fun, just come up with stuff every night.” Given his considerable height and the fact that he possesses some of his father’s athletic gifts (it was a football injury, in fact, that caused Jaco to switch from drums to bass in high school), Felix could just as easily have taken his passion to the hoop. “I love playing basketball,” he says. “I haven’t been doing too much of it lately, because I’ve been trying to focus on music more and not hurt myself. I’m probably 100 percent sure if I had gone to school, I’d be playing [basketball] right now. There’s no doubt about it.”
With great enthusiasm, Julius relates a basketball story about his brother. The twins and their bandmates had been invited to attend last November’s annual all-star Drummers Collective/Bass Day 2002 at the Manhattan Center in New York City. Jaco was being honored, and Felix was going to play on the same stage as fusion and jazz heavies Victor Wooten, John Patitucci and Steve Gadd, among others. With time to kill, Felix, Julius and guitarist Lucas made their way to some basketball courts in Brooklyn, where they were staying with a family friend. “When we got there, they were laughing, because we were the only white kids,” Julius relates. “Everybody else was black. And they saw these three white dudes comin’ up … and Adam had his Air Jesuses [sandals] on.” Lounging on the chairs and deep-cushioned sofa in Ingrid’s living room, the bandmates roar with laughter, not for the first or last time today. “There were like three half courts and one full, and every court was full up with kids playing,”
Julius excitedly continues, “and then Felix started dunkin’, and everybody’s watchin’ him. He did the between-the-legs and dunked it. Man, these people were climbing on the fences. They were going crazy! It was right outside this school, and the place is full with all these kids, and they went, ‘Nooo!’ jumpin’ off the gates.” “This one dude walks up to Felix with a clipboard,” Lucas adds. “ ‘I want you on my team. You on my team! The White Dynasty!’ ”
If his playground antics had provided an adrenaline rush, Felix and his bandmates were equally pumped for the all-star musical extravaganza that evening. Originally, Felix was scheduled to play with bassist Wooten, of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, and drummer Kenwood Dennard. As it turned out, the presentations ran long, and Felix was nearly cut from the concert, which is now slated for release on DVD. But Wooten, who had met and played with Felix while teaching at a bass camp, cut his solo short and introduced his young protégé: “A good friend of mine, Felix Pastorius.” Asked if he were intimidated, Felix says, “Holy shit! I mean, this guy, it’s not like he stopped and the lights came back on. He just pulled the plug out of his bass and plugged in mine.” Before Felix began, Wooten instructed him not to hit a particular switch on his equipment — actually a trigger to an electronic loop of a bass riff that Wooten had just laid down. “He was like, ‘Don’t hit that,’ ” Felix gleefully remembers. “In the middle of my solo, I hit it. I looked over at Victor, and I started soloing over a groove he had just used on his solo. I didn’t know how to turn it off.” “Victor was standing off-stage, and he was right in front of me,” saxophonist James says, “and he was cracking up. … The crowd was fuckin’ loving it, ’cause they had just heard Victor play the same thing.”
Clearly, Felix finds himself equally at home center stage or center court, creating magic with the roundball or with his electric ax. Thoughtfully, he considers the connection between the two activities that competed for his attention, with music finally winning the tip. “When I play basketball,” he says, “the best times I play are when I’m not thinking, when you’re just going for it. You know what you have to do. You have to get to this certain point, and it’s all in how you get there. … I just love playing basketball and freeing my mind and keeping my mind away from music sometimes. And that also helps me to just sit down and be original again and think of something different. I can’t just be engulfed in music all the time. I really enjoy the space of not even hearing anything for a while, not playing … and then just getting back into it, just picking it up and hearing it from a different place.”
The birth of a groove
Right now, the bandmates are enjoying the extravagance of time with few commitments; their days, for the most part, are their own. James, who’s teaching saxophone this summer at Silver Trail Middle School, graduated from Stranahan High last year and has decided to take some time off before going to college. “I’ve just been hangin’ out with these guys all year,” he says. “I’ve learned so much, and I’ve had so many experiences I couldn’t [have had] in college. Because I was actually planning on going to college; things just happened to work out this way.” The son of a pastor, keyboardist Staten is introduced as “the scholar of the group,” because he’s taking a class this summer and will be returning to Bethune-Cookman as a junior in the fall.
Lucas, the youngest Way of the Groover, just graduated from Taravella High School and will be studying at FAU on scholarship. The twins have known Lucas for a few years. An aspiring bass player, he became enamored of Jaco in his early teens, even starting a Web site dedicated to the late bass legend. At about that time, he also began e-mailing Ingrid. “At first, I kept cutting him off,” she says, “but he was very persistent.” “There’s some kind of connection,” Lucas jokes. “I’m not just a stalker, I swear!” Finally, Ingrid went to see him play at Rosey Baby in Lauderhill, where he was subbing in a blues/R&B band. The twins and Lucas have been friends and bandmates ever since, with Lucas ceding the bass spot to Felix and picking up guitar instead. “It’s all bass-influenced,” he says of his angular guitar style, which sometimes recalls the work of John Scofield or Bill Frisell, though he says Jimi Hendrix and Steve Howe of Yes are his major influences. Asked if he prefers guitar or bass, Lucas demurs: “I play everything. I have a drum set in my house; I’ll play drums for like an hour a day. I’ll mess around with keyboards, guitar, bass. I want to play everything.” “You’re definitely a bass player,” Felix notes. “Yeah, at heart,” Lucas admits. “I love the groove. I love the low end. I love the thud.”
Julius also picked up his instrument by default; his interests gravitated more toward drawing and painting than drumming. A glance at his Web page, www.jpastorius.net/wotg.html, reveals a keen eye for detail in his pen-and-ink and pencil drawings, which include buxom comic book babes and portraits of heroes such as Kobe Bryant, Stevie Ray Vaughan and, of course, Jaco. “I’d have to complain to him,” Felix says of his brother, “because I’d want to jam out with somebody and I’d have nobody at the house. And I was like, ‘Could you please just play some drums right now?’ ” So Julius taught himself to play drums — though he did take a few lessons from South Florida jazz drummer extraordinaire Jonathan Joseph, who taught him such fundamentals as how to hold the sticks correctly — but started really getting serious about it only as Way of the Groove became a reality.
And if musical brothers, from Cannonball and Nat Adderley to Miami’s Jesse Jones Jr. and Melton Mustafa, share a special bond, imagine the connection between twins. “And the fact that we’re Geminis,” adds Felix, noting that he and Julius turned 21 June 9, “that might be something.”
The fire-blowing James, who was classically trained on piano from the age of 6, switched to saxophone in high school, even playing in the all-county band at age 15, but didn’t become obsessed with jazz until later. Meeting Miami sax star Ed Calle, who showed some interest in the obviously talented youngster, certainly awakened something in him, but at that point, he was still more interested in soccer. All that changed in his junior year. During a trip to Scotland, with little else to do but listen to tunes and woodshed, he had an epiphany, thanks to a Ray Charles CD that his dad had bought him. “He’s just playing straight-ahead bebop piano and just killing,” James gushes. “I mean, it’s very basic, 12-bar blues stuff. … I was like, ‘Shit, I can actually copy what these [horn players] are doing.’ And gradually, that whole year, I just started paying attention to music.”
However, musical opportunities at Fort Lauderdale High were limited, so James transferred to Stranahan, which had a strong music program as well as a band director who had actively been trying to recruit him; in fact, the director had already recruited Staten, an alumnus of Parkwood Middle School for the Performing Arts. In the middle of his junior year, James walked through the doors of the band room of the unfamiliar school for the first time.
“So then, Colin gets out his tenor,” Staten says, picking up the story, “and we see this big, lanky white dude coming into the room, and we were like, ‘Who is this cat? This cat better be rockin’.’ Me and the drummer were really tight, and we looked at each other like, ‘Whatever.’ And we played [Average White Band’s] ‘Pick Up the Pieces,’ and this dude got up and soloed, and everybody just got quiet. Everybody stopped playing; it was just him and the drummer. We looked at each other like, ‘Oh my God, this dude is just killin’!’ So, after practice, we was like, ‘You know what? We were gonna call you the Great White Hope.’ But we just come to call him The Great White.”
Once again, the bandmates explode with laughter. James may indeed be gangly and pale, but anyone who would underestimate his skills in a head-cutting contest just might come away bleeding. It was his intensity that drew Ingrid to the young saxophonist, who had come to hear Felix and Bobby Thomas Jr. at Jazid a few years ago. She hadn’t heard James play a note, but she “heard him listening,” she says. “I was so blown away by watching him that I knew he had to be a musician.”
And so Way of the Groove began to jell. Ingrid asked the bandmates if they might be able to put something together for her annual, all-star Jaco birthday party Dec. 1, 2002, which was being held at Musicians Exchange at One Night Stan’s in Hollywood. Way of the Groove went in with a handful of Weather Report tunes and more than a little chutzpah. Not long after, they had their first paying gig — well, almost-paying, considering they, like all local bands at Alligator Alley, play for tips. “We played all the tunes we knew in one set without stopping,” James recalls, “because we didn’t really know how to end our songs. So whatever key we were in, we’d just think of a song in that key, and we’d just play it.” “We still kinda do that,” Julius notes. “But it’s a little more organized,” James counters. “I remember looking at you and going, ‘Well, what else we got?’ ”
On their Way Way of the Groove has indeed come a long way in a short time, from not knowing enough tunes to actually having to choose which ones to leave out. A recent Tuesday night at Alligator Alley finds them burning through a batch of funk and fusion classics such as Weather Report’s “Cucumber Slumber,” Jaco’s “Teen Town” (with a nod to Hendrix’s “Third Stone From the Sun”), The Meters’ “Cissy Strut,” Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” and, yes, “Spank-a-Lee,” which just might be one of the highlights of the night. The crowd, which has steadily grown since the band started playing Tuesday nights a few months ago, is a mix of old and young, black and white, some of whom know firsthand the music of the era, some of whom simply appreciate the neck-snapping rhythms. The band is joined by a guest rapper for a spoken-word number and a saxophonist from the local funk band Side Project. Even as the group heads into its third set, sometime after 1 a.m., the Alley remains fairly busy.
“I’ve seen them grow, as far as their cohesiveness as players,” says Alligator Alley proprietor Carl “Kilmo” Pacillo, who was also a student and close friend of Jaco’s. “I hear them getting better every week — not necessarily faster or technically better, I just hear them getting more mature.” As a bass player himself, Pacillo calls Jaco a “huge influence on my life” and views his weekly booking of Way of the Groove as “payback to my bro.” Sometimes, late at night, Pacillo will put Jaco’s ballad “Continuum” on the jukebox, and the tears will flow as he thinks about his friend and mentor, who grew up in a house not far from Alligator Alley. Already internationally renowned, Jaco took the time to show him harmonic concepts on the piano at the Deerfield Beach house, and Pacillo remembers Felix and Julius responding to the music they overheard in their cribs. “He’d hit a note, and Felix would go ‘wahhh.’ And Jaco would go, ‘He’s gonna be the bass player. The other guy’s gonna be the drummer. I made my own rhythm section.’ Well, lo and behold, 21 years later, here these cats are, the most cutting-edge young guys in town.”
Well, “cutting-edge” might be overstating it at this point; though the bandmates are working on original tunes, currently they’re mining the rich material of the past, albeit with fresh enthusiasm and ever-growing expertise. After all, Way of the Groove has been playing regularly only for the past few months, with its weekly engagement at the Alley. A mini-tour of the Northeast is in the works, with tentative dates at New York’s Zinc Bar and clubs in Boston being planned around Staten’s class schedule.
Way of the Groove is ready to hit the road. “Definitely, take it out,” Julius says. “I think everyone should hear us,” Lucas deadpans. “We need to take over the world. I’m sorry.” “As long as we have people come out to listen to us play,” Felix says, “it doesn’t matter where we go. We can go anywhere. I’d love to go anywhere. Anywhere. Everywhere.” Way of the Groove performs 9:30 p.m. Tuesdays at Alligator Alley in Oakland Park. Call 954/771-2220. Their website is www.wayofthegroove.com. Contact Bob Weinberg at bweinberg@citylinkmagazine.com.
Bob Weinberg covers the blues and jazz scene every other week.
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