Portraits of Tracy is on the rise

I recently told a friend, having just listened to Jaco Pastorius’ 1976 bass musing “Portrait of Tracy,” named for his wife, that it had the sound of a knife’s edge—slicing into time or a surface or an object with the sharp bend of his bass strings, fashioning a tribute of his devotion out of the sound of something being severed. In its minimalist soundscape, you can project all of the multifaceted angles and edges that make up a person onto the simple way a note bends. These are the pieces of music that make music obsessives, the passages of sound that you grip onto for dear life when you don’t know who you are yet, when all the information you can wring out of a song becomes your reason for creating anew. Speaking to Tracy Geneviève Amare, who named her project Portraits of Tracy (first conceived in her childhood bedroom in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) after the Pastorius song, it is clear that she has banked and stored hundreds of these musical lifelines and fed it back not only into her work, but the way she moves about the world. You can’t imagine that someone freshly of drinking age in our shared home nation could contain such an encyclopedic knowledge of so many things presaging h...