Weather Report (1982) - Weather Report

Jul

26

Weather Report (1982) - Weather Report

≡ Category: 1980s, Essential, Fusion, Music Reviews |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING

Rating:

Weather Report (1982) opens with a bang, with the driving Volcano for Hire. The band, consisting of Joe Zawinul on keys, Wayne Shorter on sax, Jaco Pastorius on bass, Peter Erskine on drums, and Robert Thomas, Jr. on percussion, is possibly the greatest ever under the Weather Report moniker. They are simply monstrous on this tune. Peter Erskine opens Volcano For Hire with an swinging salvo on the traps, joined by an incredibly lucid Joe Zawinul on synth. Then the rest of the band piles on, creating an irrestible groove.

Compositionally, it’s not clear where the track is going — it seems to grow and mutate spontaneously, but that’s just good writing on Joe Zawinul’s part. Wayne Shorter contributes some piquant improvisation, but Joe Zawinul is the star here. The richness and variety of sounds he gets out of his bank of synthesizers is astonishing and, unlike many of his contemporaries, the sounds are still beautiful and fresh almost 30 years after they were recorded. And his lines! They are just gorgeous, Art Tatem-esque.

Volcano For Hire is one of the best tracks Weather Report has ever recorded. What a way to start out an album!

Next up is the ballad Current Affairs, a through composed affair with lovely themes, beautifully interpreted by the band. As usual, Zawinul passes the melody from band member to band member. Current Affairs ranks with A Remark You Made, as one of the great Joe Zawinul ballads.

Then we get the three-part suite N.Y.C., Joe Zawinul’s love letter to New York City, which is evocative of the excitement and danger of that metropolis at the time this was recorded. Zawinul creates the mood expertly with his patented synthesizer magic. The band swings like mad, especially Jaco Pastorius on bass.

So far, every song on this release seems to exist an independent entity, as if it had always existed, instead of being composed. Like somebody has simply lifted a diamond out of the ground. It’s a quality that only a select few tunesmiths have, and Joe Zawinul has a fierce compositional mojo going on this release.

The second half of Weather Report (1982) isn’t quite up to the level of the first side, but it’s still great.

Dara Factor One is a big nothing, really. It’s a threadbare groove. But listen to what this monstrous band does with it! It’s fascinating to listen to the group improvisation spinning a lovely web out of nothing. The band vamps for over five minutes, and it never gets boring.

Wayne Shorter contributes the one tune not composed by Zawinul, When It Was Now, an utterly original and elliptical midtempto composition that seems to have just dropped out of the sky, fully formed. When you think about it, it’s crazy that the Weather Report of this period had three world class composers in it (Jaco of course was the third). It’s an enchanting tune, enchantingly played.

Then we get another fantastic Joe Zawinul ballad, Speechless. It just aches with melancholy and heartbreak, and hope. I can’t think of another jazz composer who is capable of pulling off those sorts of emotions in a composition. Jaco weeps as he talks the melody with his ever so expressive fretless bass. Zawinul’s solo at the end of the tune is heartbreaking and magical.

The album’s closer is Dara Factor Two, which is a bit of honesty in advertising. It’s built on exactly the same premise as Dara Factor One, which is to introduce a groove and a mode and maybe a scrap of melody and then just improvise. And darned if this fabulous group doesn’t pull it off and make it sound like an actual song!

Normally, I would dock an album 1/2 a star for relying on such obvious filler to fill out the running time, but how can I when the group interplay is so extraordinary, the individual creativity of the musicians is so high, and the grooves are so intense?

Weather Report (1982) may not be the best release by this group (that would be Night Passage, their previous album), but it sets an impossibly high standard of musicianship, creating a near perfect balance of hip-shaking grooves, compositional creativity, group interplay, and improvisational brilliance.