Otituaries
Not Fade Away
Fondly remembered this month…
PAUL JACKSON
Headhunters bassist
(19472 021)
Jackson at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, July 11, 1998
PETER VAN BREUKELEN/REDFERNS
HERBIE Hancock’s immersion in jazzfunk fusion, first heard on 1973’s Head Hunters, was partly reliant on the spontaneity and deep grooves of electric bassist Paul Jackson. The first jazz album to sell more thana million copies, its lead-off track was “Chameleon”, co-written by Jackson and featuring an infectious Afro-Cuban vamp. The song has since become a jazz standard.
Jackson was a founder member of Hancock’s Headhunters band, alongside saxophonist/clarinet player Bennie Maupin, drummer Harvey Mason and percussionist Bill Summers. The ensemble, with Jackson’s good friend Mike Clark replacing Mason, proceeded to make three more albums with Hancock in the mid-’70s: Thrust (including “Spank-A-Lee”, another Jackson co-creation), Man-Child and the live Flood. Jackson’s restless style was a perfect fit for Hancock’s intuitive approach. “Paul Jackson was an unusual funk bass player, because he never liked to play the same bassline twice, so during improvised solos he responded to what the other guys played,” noted Hancock in his memoir, Possibilities. “I thought I’d hired a funk bassist, but as I found out later, he had actually started as an upright jazz bass player.”
Raised in Oakland, California, Jackson played piano and bassoon in his youth. After his father took him to see the Miles Davis Quintet in San Francisco, he was inspired by sideman Paul Chambers to switch to bass. “I went back to my junior high music teacher and picked one up,” he told ukvibe.org. “And that’s when I found out what was happening!” He went on to study at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music.