19 December 1984. Jaco Pastorius and Rashied Ali, at the end of a short workshop engagement in Martinique, play a set for French radio. Electric bass and drums, nobody else. Timeless put it out, and it was never released in the United States until Music On Vinyl pressed it in 2023.
The pairing is stranger than it looks. Ali was the drummer of Coltrane's last two years, of Interstellar Space, the free-time drummer par excellence. Pastorius, thirty-three, was between Weather Report and the collapse of his life: the Hollywood Bowl breakdown had been that summer, the bipolar diagnosis came after, and he died in 1987. What the two of them do together is play standards and Pastorius tunes as a conversation, with Ali's pulse floating and Jaco's harmonics filling the space a piano would take.
Spin, reviewing the vinyl reissue, calls the tape far better than an audience bootleg but disappointing for a radio production, with Pastorius's tone flattened and the bass drum muffled. That is fair, and it is still the only document of the two together.
Japanese CD edition from Solid's Timeless series.
