In July, All About Jazz Birthday Calendar July 7th is Joe Zawinul,Founder( Wayne ShorterThis is one of my favourite groups. weather forecast.
Genre sticklers would classify Weather Report as “jazz fusion,” but that label tends to obscure the breadth of music the band played during its 16-year run. album Bands produced by Weather Report continue to attract new fans not only of their music, but of jazz more broadly.
“Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series featuring all things Black music. With nearly 220 stories spanning performers, genres, history, and more, each with a vibrant soundtrack, we hope you’ll find some familiar tunes or a primer on new ones.
To understand the musical foundations of Weather Report, it’s important to dig deep into the musical roots of both Zawinul and Shorter.
in Zawinul’s September 2007 obituary Music critic and composer John L. Walters wrote in The Guardian that Zawinul was born in Vienna, Austria, to “lower-middle-class parents.” Tragedy struck the family early on when Zawinul’s twin brother, Erich, died at the age of four.
Walters also points out that Zawinul had perfect pitch.
Although there was no piano at home (in a municipal apartment), young Jo studied piano, violin and clarinet at the Vienna Conservatory, where he enrolled for free at the age of seven. He then attended the gymnasium in Hagenmüllergasse and discovered jazz through movies and radio. In the 1950s, he began playing piano with some of Austria’s leading musicians, including Hans Koller and the Fatty George group. His contemporaries included classical composer and pianist Friedrich Gulda, who later performed with Sawinul on the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, and danced with Austrian President Thomas Krestil.
His friends in high places helped him to branch out in other areas. He opened a club in Vienna, Joe Zawinul’s Birdland, and participated in efforts to fight pollution in Senegal, which led to him being appointed a “goodwill ambassador” by the Austrian government to 17 African countries. After gaining fame at home, Zawinul won a scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston. jazz “He stayed three minutes, I stayed four,” composer Mike Gibbs, who arrived on the same day as Zawinul in 1959, told me. Within a week he was offered a job with Maynard Ferguson’s orchestra and toured with the flamboyant trumpeter for eight months.
Ferguson was followed by gigs with Dinah Washington and a long stint with Cannonball Adderley’s hugely successful band, who wisely gave Zawinul the opportunity to write, and in 1966 he released the soul-jazz classic “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” a commercial yet sensitive song that showed how well the white Austrian had absorbed the gospel-influenced idiom of black jazz.
Let’s stop and think about that for a second. Read it again. Zawinul, a white man from Austria, wrote “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” for Cannonball Adderley. Zawinul clearly had a talent for writing and performing soulful jazz.
Listen to an invited audience’s reaction to this live performance from 1967.
Steve Huey let us in on a secret. “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!: Live at the Club” review On AllMusic: There was no “club.”
The prank was meant to promote a friend’s nightclub business in Chicago, but Adderley actually recorded the album in Los Angeles, with producer David Axelrod They set up a club at Capitol Studios and offered free drinks to invite-only guests, and unsurprisingly the crowd was in very good spirits, with Adderley’s quintet feeding off the energy of the venue and getting the crowd cheering along.
Let’s meet the second of Weather Report’s founding members. Wayne Shorter Taken from his AllAboutJazz profile, mostly in his own words.
Wayne Shorter’s first great jazz revelation came when he was a teenager: “I remember seeing Lester Young when I was 15. It was a Norman Granz Jazz show at the Philharmonic in Newark, and he was late to the theater. Me and a few other guys were waiting in front of the Adams Theater, and when he finally showed up, he had a pork pie hat on and looked kind of funny. So I was trying to figure out how to get into the theater through the back fire escape. I finally got to the mezzanine and saw the whole show. Stan Kenton and Dizzy Gillespie were onstage with their band doing “Peanut Bender,” Charlie Parker was with strings doing “Lola,” and Russell Jackett… Illinois Jackett was there, too. He was playing his thing. I was so impressed by the sight that I thought, ‘Hey, I’ll get my clarinet.'” So at 16, I got a guitar and started playing music.
[…]
Just as Shorter was beginning to make his mark, he was drafted into the Army. “A week before I enlisted, I went to the Café Bohemia to hear some music for the last time. I was having a cognac at the bar and had my draft notice in my back pocket. That’s where I met Max Roach. He said, ‘Are you a Newark kid? Flash,’ and asked me to come sit with him. They’d changed drummers during the night, so Max played drums, then Art Taylor, then Art Blakey. Oscar Pettiford was on cello. Jimmy Smith came through the door with an organ. He loaded it into a hearse and headed to the club. Outside I heard Miles saying he was looking for someone called Cannonball. I said to myself, ‘This is what’s going on, I’ve got to go to the Army in about five days!'”
[…]
In 1964, Miles Davis invited Wayne to tour with him. Wayne toured with Herbie Hancock (piano), Tony Williams (drums), and Ron Carter (bass). This tour turned into a six-year tour with Davis, during which Wayne recorded several albums with Davis. With Davis, Wayne helped create a sound that changed the face of music. The late Miles Davis said of Wayne in his autobiography, “Wayne was a true composer. He knew that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules and bend them to your own satisfaction and taste.” During his time with Miles, Wayne composed jazz standards such as “Nefertiti,” “ESP,” “Pinocchio,” “Sanctuary,” “The Fall,” and “Footprints.”
Related article: Legendary jazz saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter dies at age 89
from Weather Report official website:
Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter first met and became friends while playing in Maynard Ferguson’s big band in 1959. Zawinul went on to play in Cannonball Adderley’s group into the 1960s, while Shorter joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and then Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet in 1964. During that decade, the two made their mark as jazz’s greatest composers.
Zawinul later worked with Shorter on Miles Davis’ early fusion recordings, and the two were part of the studio group that recorded Davis’ seminal albums In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970). Weather Report initially formed to explore a more impressionistic, individualistic style of music (“getting away from the eight-bar crap and going to the bridge”, in Zawinul’s words).
There is some debate as to how Weather Report first came together. According to Zawinul, it was when he and Shorter recruited another Miles Davis associate, Czech-born, classically trained bassist Miroslav Witous, who had previously played separately with Zawinul (he also worked with Herbie Mann, Bob Brookmeyer, Stan Getz and Chick Corea). Witous himself says that it was he and Shorter who actually formed Weather Report, who later recruited Zawinul. Whatever the truth of the story, it was these three musicians (all composers) who formed the initial core of the project.
Kurt Bianchi’s Weather Report Annotated Discography The website is a treasure trove of information about Weather Report, including an interview with Shorter about the origins of the group’s name.
short: Well, actually, the name Weather Report is key because you can’t predict the weather. It’s hard to control the weather. So we sat in the office of Clive Davis, who was the head of Columbia at the time, and we thought…
So I was thinking, “They do the weather report every night, but nobody can predict the weather. And there’s something about this music that we’re doing that’s about unpredictability and all that.” So I said, “How about The Weather Report?” So we took out the “The” and we made it Weather Report. And everybody said, “Yeah!” and it all just worked.
Weather forecasts can be expanded to represent almost anything. For example, when someone says they’re going to tell a story, you don’t know what they’re going to tell until they start talking. You listen to them. You sit around the fireplace and they say, “Let’s tell a story.” And the anticipation of not knowing what’s going to happen adds to the excitement. That’s what we’ve tried to do with all our albums, including Tale Spinnin’.
Bianchi said:Elegant People: The History of the Band Weather ReportIf you’re a fan of the band, this is a must-read.
This documentary about the weather report South Bank Show It aired in March 1984. Zawinul and Shorter talk about how they started the band and how they met and formed it.
Finally, let’s take a closer look at the music of Weather Report, starting with their debut album, released in 1971. Bianchi writes::
It’s no exaggeration to say that Weather Report’s first album was a big hit. Down Beat gave the album a two-page review, complete with track-by-track commentary from the band members themselves. Reviewer Dan Morgenstern gave the album a five-star rating, Down Beat’s highest rating, and began his review by writing, “A great new band deserves a great review for their debut album.” Pat Metheny recalled to Glasser his anticipation at 16 years old: “When the first Weather Report record came out, I was just like… wow! I was probably in the store the day it came out, because everyone had read about it in Down Beat and stuff.”
Here’s the full album:
Music critic and author Todd S. Jenkins wrote of the band’s 1974 album Mysterious Traveler: For AllAboutJazz.
That year, founding member Miroslav Vitous was replaced by Alfonso Johnson, who became a key presence as a fluid, creative bassist and composer. Drummer Ishmael Wilburn and Brazilian percussionist Dom Um Romao, along with a rotating cast of supporting players, laid the foundation for the band’s most exciting incarnation to date. The belated reissue of Mysterious Traveler is a welcome recognition of the important role this mid-period lineup played in the evolution of fusion.
The album features some of Report’s most popular work, led by the lengthy opener “Nubian Sundance.”
Here’s the full album:
I could fill this story with Weather Report albums and my favorite songs, but I think it’s important to perform them live in concert.
Here’s a live performance from Montreux in 1976:
As Big vocalist fanI’ll close with a moving performance of “Birdland” by The Manhattan Transfer alongside Weather Report at the 1982 Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl.
Let us know what other great Weather Report songs you have in the comments – we can’t wait to hear your favorites!
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