Mysterious Travelers 

Leaving nothing untouched in their wake, the cultural revolutionaries of the sixties spawned many movements in art and music.  Shortly after the marriage of Pop and Blues gave birth to Rock, Miles Davis, the high priest of post-bop Jazz, took the key elements of the infant music form and created what was respectfully referred to as Fusion or sometimes more pithily as Jazz-Rock. 

Other traditional music forms, too, switched on the electricity and began to rock out – Folk and Blues being obvious examples.  However, Miles and his followers did more than just plug in a bass, mike up the drum-kit and hire a pianist for whom the Fender Rhodes meant a road-friendly portable instrument.  They created a new form of music that was born in 1969 with the release of the seminal In a Silent Way (1969) and attained its early majority with the release the following year of Bitches Brew (1970).    

The hallmarks of the new music’s fast developing vocabulary stemmed from the harmonically complex pieces that Miles had developed on albums such as Filles de Kilimanjaro.  In addition to Joe Zawinul’s compositional genius - he wrote the title track - In a Silent Way added amplification, layers of keyboards and, most significantly, a departure from the theme-improvisation-theme format that had dominated jazz for the previous forty years.   

Just as their biblical predecessors scattered to spread the message to all those who would listen, it was not long before Miles’ original electronic disciples rapidly created their own diaspora.  Alongside John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea’s Return to Forever and the Mwandishi and Crossings line-ups of Herbie Hancock, Weather Report was one of the first of those who did not just take the new language literally but who developed its own dialect and subsequently begat its own musical progeny. 

Weather Report was established in the latter half of 1970 by Austrian-born keyboardist, Zawinul, and tenor and soprano sax player, Wayne Shorter, a long-time Miles collaborator.  In the band’s first incarnation they were joined by Miroslav Vitous (basses), Alphonse Mouzon (drums) and Airto Moreira (percussion).  Together they recorded the band’s eponymous first album in March 1971.  Eschewing the populist, indeed almost obligatory, contemporary requirement for an electric guitar – irrespective of the musical genre, Weather Report’s continually evolving personnel nevertheless remained rooted in the same instrumental line-up though, in later years, often reduced by the absence of a percussionist to a quartet. 

The direction that Weather Report’s musical journey would take had been clearly signposted during Zawinul and Shorter’s orientation with Miles.  Nevertheless, the new course charted by their debut Weather Report album featured acoustic bass and no synthesizers.  Not long after the release of the album, Mouzon and Moreira departed and were replaced by Eric Gravatt on drums and Dom Um Romao on percussion.  It is this line up, responsible for an altogether earthier sounding offering, that went on to record the band’s sophomore release, I Sing the Body Electric.  Before Mouzon’s departure the band performed a set for groundbreaking German TV show Beat Club that was made commercially available on DVD about two years ago.  A client of mine had discovered the buried treasure in the vaults of ARD in Bremen, a German television station.  Knowing of my admiration for Weather Report, he asked if I would like to write the sleeve notes.  When I readily accepted, I didn’t realise quite how complex a task he had set me.  This Blog is based around those sleeve notes so, apologies to those who already have the DVD and find most of this familiar.

Picking up any one of the sixteen front-line albums released by Weather Report is like getting together with an old friend who hasn’t been around for a while.  There is much that is familiar but always something new to discover.  As exciting and as different to each other as those albums remain, none compare to the experience of seeing the band live and the memories of those gigs.  I was fortunate enough to have caught the band in concert on two occasions – once in the 70s and once in the early 80s.

In a 1972 article, Zawinul talked about the band's live performances: "Right from the start, [playing together] was just a very natural thing. But I can't really talk about the music.  None of us can.  We don't know what's happening.  We have our tunes and lines, which we always play differently. What's happening up there is just composing, and when it's right, it's magic. There's a certain chemistry in the band which amazes me-and which makes it very consistent, also."   

What was consistent about Weather Report’s live performance was the sound dynamic, the virtuosity and the symbiotic interplay between the musicians.  This was always true notwithstanding the constantly evolving constitution of the rhythm section.  Additionally, whenever the band played live, it always looked at each of its compositions through different angles of its musical prism.  The Beat Club set was performed only a few months before the band’s landmark concert at the Shibuya Philharmonic Hall in Tokyo.  In terms of Weather Report’s evolutionary time-scale, a few months was a long time as listening to the two sets back to back will demonstrate. 

Extracts from each of three concert-length pieces played on the Tokyo set were originally released as side 2 of the vinyl release of I Sing the Body Electric.  Although the entire concert was released as a double album in Japan, by the time it was made available globally in 1977 as Live in Tokyo the band’s rhythm section had regenerated several more times, iconic bassist Jaco Pastorius had been recruited and Weather Report’s biggest selling album, Heavy Weather, had provided their first hit on the singles chart with the enduringly popular and oft-covered Birdland.

The Beat Club DVD arrived at my office on white label.  As I played it I rapidly realised that my first task was to identify each of the pieces that the band had played.  There was no label copy, no track-listing.  An uncharacteristic lack of German efficiency had even omitted on-screen text naming each piece performed.  Even with my knowledge of the band’s early repertoire and given that Weather Report had been released but a short time prior to the Beat Club gig, the music had already begun to be repurposed, recast and interpreted.  The fluidity of the band and their easy familiarity meant that they were not so much improvising or even interpreting as they were composing or, perhaps, re-composing as each piece unfolded.  After many hours of listening and cross-referring to the original studio versions I was satisfied that I had done the band justice, unpicked the threads of each piece and identified it accurately.

On the DVD, the sparsely lit, propless studio with plain, black backdrop focuses the attention on the musicians and what they play.  Unsurprisingly much of the repertoire that is recognisable is culled from, or at least based around, pieces from Weather Report.   Launching into an extended reading of ‘Umbrellas’, the band’s playing explains Zawinul’s elliptical comment that ‘everyone soloed and no-one soloed’.  The energetic climax takes the music by degrees into a segue with Orange Lady.  This is the first recorded example of the technique of blending one piece into another that became a Weather Report trade mark.  How many of their segues were rehearsed and how many were spontaneous responses by the musicians to the impulses of their collective performance is never easy to determine.

Zawinul’s haunting theme, Waterfall, defined on the Fender Rhodes and underpinned by Vitous’ hypnotic bass playing, shows the strength of the band’s melodic and harmonic capacity; it also provides a contrast to the almost modal improvisation of the opening cuts as Shorter’s soprano leads the band around the melody.   By the time the set reaches the disjunctive opening of Seventh Arrow, the feel with which the band is exploring the music has loosened to the point that, although what each of the musicians plays may be easily identified, it is the homogeneity of the musicians’ vision and their respective ability to express it that seduces and excites.  A percussion feature acts as a bridge into a truncated rendering of TH.  Morning Lake provides an impressionistic reading of the original studio recording that demonstrates how the skeleton of a composition may be fleshed out to create something altogether different from its original iteration.

A funked-up medley draws the set towards its finale.  It features an unlikely soul-strained vocal from Mouzon.  The anonymous piece betrays those elements of Weather Report’s sound that would become more prevalent in the overall mix of styles as the band evolved.  Seemingly largely improvised, elements of what would become Dr Honoris Causa conclude the proceedings.

Looking back on it from a distance of nearly 40 years, experiencing a Weather Report live set in the early seventies was like standing at the summit of a mountain.  In the far distance one could only imagine what the eye couldn’t see; looking back there was a steep path and a climb that had been both challenging and rewarding.  With Zawinul’s classical European roots and the dues he had paid playing with the likes of Maynard Ferguson and Cannonball Adderley and Shorter’s more conventional East Coast jazz upbringing, Weather Report’s musical expedition had been well prepared.  The vista of its future investigation of the contemporary musical landscape that ended in 1986 opened up a vast panorama of innovation and excellence.  Fortunately, there is much that survives on record and will ever remain worth the effort of exploration.

Miles Davis: ‘In a Silent Way’ is a vinyl album released in 1969 by CBS; I also have the CD releases in 2002; Miles’ ‘Bitches Brew’ is the double CD reissue of the album that was originally released by CBS in 1970.  ‘Filles de Kilimanjaro’ is a Contemporary Jazz Masters digitally remixed CD reissue of Miles’ 1968 album. ‘Weather Report’ the band’s first album was released on vinyl in 1971 followed by ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ in 1972; I have CD reissues of both.  ‘Heavy Weather’ is also a vinyl release from 1977; all are on the CBS label as are the other Weather Report albums in my collection being ‘Sweetnighter’ (1973: CD reissue) ‘Volcano For Hire’ (vinyl 1982), ‘Black Market’ (1976: CD reissue), ‘Live and Unreleased’ is a collection of various live recordings made between 1975 and 1983 and was first released as a double CD in 2002 by Sony.  ‘The Collection’ is a CD compilation released by Castle Communications in 1990.  Weather Report ‘Live in Germany 1971’ is a DVD released by Gonzo Media Group in 2010.  The performance was first aired on 9^th August 1971 from Bremen on Erstes Deutsches Fernsehen, the national public TV channel of the ARD.  This Blog substantially reproduces my sleeve notes for the DVD.