Jaco Pastorius And The Urantia Book

This is a brief and informative article on Jaco Pastorius (a revolutionary, highly technical, tremendously creative, original, and charismatic jazz and jazz fusion bassist, best known for being part of the jazz fusion band Weather Report during the late 1970s and early 1980s) and his interest in the Urantia Book, a fascinating and complex literary work of the past century, first published in Chicago, United States back in the 1950s (namely in 1955).

As other important, influential, innovative, and revolutionary musicians of the 20th century, Jaco Pastorius was influenced by the esoteric and mysterious Urantia Book, being one of its most famous readers alongside Jimi Hendrix (one of the musicians which Jaco held in high regard and respected to the point where he even covered one of his songs, namely Third Stone from the Sun, live back in 1978), Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Vai, Carlos Santana, Elvis Presley, or Leonard Cohen, just to name a few.

The Urantia Book claims to be a revelation attributed to celestial beings (without a clear/known Earthly author, so to put it; even though it is associated with an esteemed physician, namely surgeon, from Chicago, namely William S. Saddler who was also a skeptic of the paranormal, as paradoxical as it might seem), compiling together papers on mankind’s history, religion (without dogma), philosophy, cosmology, and science. It inspired Jaco Pastorius to write the song Havona, the last (but not least) track on the Weather Report’s iconic and most commercially-successful studio album, more specifically Heavy Weather, released in 1977. According to the Urantia Book, Havona is actually the name of the eternal central universe. It is located at the centre of all existence and is a perfect universe without a beginning or end. That being said, you can listen to the musical genius of Jaco and the rest of the ‘Weather Reports’ who created a great, timeless musical masterpiece honouring this concept taken from the Urantia Book below:

P.S. On a personal note, at first, I have to admit I thought Havona was the name of a beautiful girl/woman, but, after doing some more research on the matter, I noticed the fact thtat it was actually a reference to the Urantia Book. Needless to mention the fact that it was thanks to Jaco Pastorius that I decided to order and start reading a hardcover copy of the Urantia Book via Amazon while I was still an undergraduate student in Aalborg, Denmark back in late 2019 (when I was still 22). It was a decision that I made in part also thanks to the fact that I became more and more interested in spirituality at that time and that I needed a certain ‘expansion of consciousness’ as I was more or less doing university-related stuff on a daily basis (and if you focus too much on only one certain thing, regardless how important it can be in your life, you risk becoming a bit dull, so to put it). Needless to say, it was also thanks to Jaco that I decided to start playing on an electric bass myself, namely a Fender bass (I usually play the first notes of Birdland on it as a nice warm-up whenever I start playing on it, mostly via Yousician, naturally as a hobby).

Documentation sources and external links:

• Urantia-boken on www.wikipedia.org (in Norwegian Bokmål; an article which I created there and contributed to it in the past)
• Havona on www.urantiapedia.org (in English)
• My personal knowledge and life experience