They Knew Which Way the Wind Was Blowing

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Funnily enough, the thing that seemed most important (to me, at least) about Weather Report during the years the band was together, between 1971 and 1985, is the very thing that seems least interesting about the band today: that they used electronic instruments. Today I say “big deal,” but at the time, that was more than most of us old hard-liners could take (all right, so I was a very young old-hard-liner).

We were prepared to listen to Count Basie and his orchestra playing secondrate Tin Pan Alley, or to great horn soloists like Bobby Hackett trying to capture the commercial market by playing romantic jazz with big string sections, or to the pop-jazz of “crossover” musicians like George Shearing and Wes Montgomery. (And at the same time, we even steeled ourselves to listen to the mostly unlistenable screams and shrieks of the extreme 1960s avant-garde.) But the idea of fusing jazz with rock elements was the one place we dared not go.

It’s only now, in fact, that I realize how much I missed by avoiding Weather Report 20 years ago. As a new boxed set from Sony Legacy called “Forecast Tomorrow” makes clear, and as Weather Report co-founder Joe Zawinul will no doubt show in his concert this weekend at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, perhaps the least important thing about the band was its use of electricity. Actually, only half the band was electrified: Mr. Zawinul played a battery of electric keyboards and synthesizers, and the group’s bassist (most famously Jaco Pastorius) always used something out of the guitar-style Fender family; but co-leader Wayne Shorter always played standard acoustic saxophones (soprano and tenor) and the drummer (most famously Peter Erskine) used his own variation on the traditional trap kit.

The use of the electric instruments, which seemed so heinous way back when, was a perfectly natural development. Both founders, Messrs. Shorter and Zawinul, were working with Miles Davis’s early semi-electrified band in the late 1960s when they decided to form their own group.There had always been strong element of blues and pop in their music as individuals — Mr. Shorter with Art Blakey and then Davis (and in his own classic series of albums for Blue Note Records), and Mr. Zawinul with Ben Webster, Dinah Washington, and, most extensively, Cannonball Adderley — and these elements were no less present whether they were working in acoustic or electric contexts.

By the mid-70s, Davis and five of his most prominent sidemen — Chick Corea, Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, and Messrs. Shorter and Zawinul — were leading electro-jazz groups. The movement at the time was known as “fusion,” yet that seems, in retrospect, a fairly useless term. It was intended to describe a music comprised of both jazz and rock components. Yet though there can be jazz with rock elements and rock with jazz elements (most famously Steely Dan), it seems to me that something either is jazz or it isn’t — and the music of Weather Report surely was, and is, pure jazz.

Other than the electricity (and let’s face it, jazz guitarists had gone electric 15 years before rock ever rolled), there was little about Weather Report that could be considered a rock element: The compositions of Messrs. Zawinul and Shorter relied on the rich, harmonic palette of jazz, as opposed to the threechord head-banging style of blues and rock.They played driving, accessible rhythms, to be sure, but they weren’t any more driving than those Messrs. Zawinul and Shorter had played with Adderley (“Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”) and Blakey (“Lester Left Town”). Rock was essentially dance music, whereas Weather Report was strictly a concert band — it’s hard to imagine any of their tunes, other than the pop hit “Birdland” and the proto-hip-hop “125th Street Congress” (heard on the boxed set both in the original version and in a new mix by D. J. Logic), being played at a dance club.

One point that comes through in the accompanying live DVD, recorded at a show in Germany in 1978, is that the band even played jazz standards: There’s a lovely medley of Mr. Zawinul playing “I Got It Bad,” leading into a piano-sax duet on “Midnight Sun.”A real highlight is Mr. Shorter, an avid movie and pop culture buff, doing an unaccompanied reading of Bob Hope’s theme, “Thanks for the Memory,” Sonny Rollins-style, which leads into Pastorius playing Mr. Shorter’s “Dolores,” as if in a reference to Mrs. Dolores Hope.

As longtime Weather Report associate Hal Miller and producer Bob Belden both suggest in their notes to the boxed set, the band started more firmly in the spontaneous, improvised tradition of jazz, but the longer they worked together, the more ambitious Mr. Shorter and especially Mr. Zawinul became as composers. The most successful of their largely through-composed pieces was Mr. Zawinul’s 1971 “Unknown Soldier”; whatever it is, it’s not rock. It seems more like the soundtrack of a silent film depicting the composer’s memories of growing up in Austria during World War II. He juxtaposes the sounds of an expanded musical ensemble, including flute, piccolo, trumpet, and wordless vocals from three singers, along with martial drumming and other sound effects. It’s a highly vivid and extremely personal musical tableaux vivant that’s completely unclassifiable stylistically.

The accompanying DVD is especially valuable, as drummer Peter Erskine says in his own essay, because it’s the best visual record of what most people regard as the essential edition of the group, with himself and Pastorius. By 1978, the bass virtuoso was being given as much melodic responsibility as either leader, and he is something to see, particularly on dedications to two ladies, “Dolores” and his own “Portrait of Tracy.” Pastorius (who would be beaten to death nine years later by a club manager in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after suffering years of mental illness) is simultaneously in the rhythm section and the frontline, doing choreography, partially disrobing (it was apparently killer-hot in Offenbach in September; the two leaders are drenched in perspiration and the other two are shirtless), and engaging in all sorts of showboating stunts while continuing to play astonishing music on the electric bass. He builds to an unexpected quote from “The Sound of Music,” which refers, one assumes, to Mr. Zawinul’s Alpine origins.

It probably doesn’t matter to Mr. Zawinul that this weekend’s concert is being produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center, the organization whose artistic director, Wynton Marsalis, once positioned himself as the spiritual leader of all of us anti-fusion young-old-hard-liners. It was only a matter of time before both Mr. Marsalis and I came to realize that Weather Report put Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison’s discoveries to better use than any other band.

wfriedwald@nysun.com


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use