Weather Report - The Lost Quintet's Anticyclone

One of the most serious problems jazz historians have to face is the fact that, while recordings offer us the only tangible proof of the music's development, some of the most important stages of that development were insufficiently documented. The protofusion transitional period Miles Davis went through is a significant case in point. In 1969 Miles spent a lot of time in the studio, giving birth to 'In A Silent Way' and 'Bitches Brew', the two albums unanimously credited - or blamed - for inaugurating the era of the fusion between jazz and rock. However, that same year, Miles also spent a great deal of time on stage, and the music he produced with his regular band was even more extraordinary than what was committed to tape on those two remarkable albums
(Peter Keepnews, "The Lost Quintet")

Miles Runs The Voodoo Down - The Origins of the Lost Quintet

If the shift from jazz standards to experimental form was sparked by the "biblical" revelation of John Coltrane, and by the avant-garde instances of Ornette Coleman's free-form, what Miles Davis did afterwards was the successful attempt to build a bridge, one might even say a transatlantic one, between this new jazz creature and rock, both the American kind and that of the British Invasion. Thus was born the so-called fusion, a term which - to be fair, as often happens in the music world - wasn't coined by any of those directly involved, but was pinned on, as a shorthand, by those listening to a music capable of crossing, in one Atlantic stride, everything that had come before.
If "Bitches Brew" is regarded as the genre's official seal, it's also true that "In A Silent Way" already carried its first sketches, albeit in a more introverted, austere form. "Bitches Brew", by contrast, is its explosion - volcanic and psychedelic... "Miles Runs The Voodoo Down". Yet what both Keepnews and Bob Gluck - who closely examines the core of that first "fusion" cell in his book "The Lost Quintet and Other Revolutions" - try in some way to make clear is that, although "Bitches Brew" is indeed the cornerstone on which the quintet's lineup was built, out of which both Wayne Shorter first and foremost, and Joe Zawinul for similar reasons, would emerge, in jazz the live and jam component is absolutely essential.
The schematic urge to pin the genre entirely on the masterpiece of Miles Davis's "rock" phase, however emblematic, makes us overlook the live music of extraordinary musicians, who made the experimental approach, the element of first impact, the keystone of a new sonic conception.
"At Fillmore: Live At The Fillmore East", an album released right at the end of 1970, immediately after the mixing of "Bitches Brew", is certainly proof of that.

Sometimes I think that perhaps what we need is to tell people that this happens because in some way, in this plasticized world, there's an automatic reflex whereby if something is labeled one way then that's all it contains, and we keep discovering, to our surprise, that there's more Blake or Ginsberg, or 'Trane or Stravinsky, in it than we ever thought at first glance. The same goes for the music we've called jazz, which I've never really known how to define, because it was so many different things, to so many different individuals, each apparently contradicting the other, until one day it hit me: first and foremost, it was music. And when it was great music, it was great art, and it had nothing to do with labels, or with who says Mozart is by definition better than Sonny Rollins... this music is new music... it hits me like an electroshock, and the term 'electric' is interesting, both for what can be done with tape, and for the process by which it's preserved on tape, or for the use of electricity in the actual production of the sounds themselves.
(Ralph Gleason, 1970)

The roots of Weather Report's birth must be traced right back to the metropolitan jazz scene of New York in the Sixties.
Zawinul met Shorter in 1959, when both were serving in some of the most important lineups in American jazz. If we consider that Shorter came from a stint with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers - Blakey being the founding percussionist of bebop and also a forerunner of a faster way of playing drums that would later lead to its modern form - while Zawinul, in the early '60s, played with Cannonball Adderley, the leading saxophonist of the era, we can clearly deduce that the ground on which the latter would later graft the roots of Weather Report was already fertile and solid.

Wayne Shorter was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, and is the classic enfant prodige, though raised in a very modest family. He glued his ears to the radio from childhood, which is when he realized that, above all, he had to play music for a living. He moved to New York, where he studied music at university and began studying wind-instrument technique, riding the wave set by Coltrane; in '56 he was drafted for compulsory military service, returning in '59 to play in the neighborhoods of the Big Apple, increasingly understanding that his path lay in music. Having subsequently met Zawinul in Maynard Ferguson's band, he would be signed up by the Jazz Messengers, proving himself not only as a saxophonist but also as a composer. World tours would make him known, and his fame would eventually reach Miles Davis, with whom he would play until 1970.

Zawinul's story, on the other hand, besides being an academic one, is more visceral and tormented, in the most colorful and rollicking sense. We could almost call him a Celine of music. Born in Vienna in '32, he studied at the Austrian capital's conservatory, playing first the clarinet, then the accordion, and later the cello. During the Second World War, in 1944, to escape the frequent bombing raids, his family emigrated to Czechoslovakia; it was there that he discovered his true calling for the black and white keys, which he would favor for the rest of his career. Having fallen in love with jazz, he began performing in a trio at American military barracks across Europe. Having won a scholarship to Boston through the conservatory, he traveled to America and explored New York's African American neighborhoods, where, not without difficulty, he made his way into the Blue Note scene. Ferguson, and the better-known Cannonball Adderley, would be his first supporters, before he set out on an initial solo path, in which he moved from piano to the Hammond. It's here that a first evolution takes place: his European sensibility, injected into the classic jazz circuit, made him stand out through an exotic, cross-cutting way of approaching the piano, and the keyboard more generally. In 1968, Adderley would introduce him to Miles Davis, who would keep him under his "protective custody" for his future projects. The following two years mark precisely the inflection point of Davis's ascent, with "In A Silent Way" and later the cauda pavonis of "Bitches Brew".

Zawinul and the keyboard become artistically inseparable. The Hammond was his first foray into electrophony, but Joe would above all become the patron saint of another electric piano, the Fender Rhodes, of which he would become an absolute icon; indeed, it would accompany him throughout his entire career with Weather Report, even though he would later also experiment with other American companies, such as ARP and Oberheim. Working with these, he would prove to be a forerunner of other, far more kaleidoscopic and futuristic experiments ("I use all the sound the world generates").

It's March 1970. The audience is struck by something concerning pure sonic experience. And it's wild and otherworldly... At first the Fender Rhodes sounds like a bus horn, played forcefully and insistently repeated. It's a sound more electronic than electric, and it brings to mind avant-garde music rather than rock, pop, or funk. Its type of distortion differs from that of the electric guitar's fuzz. Fuzz emphasizes a sustained sound, even if dirty, while these articulations are short and sharp
(Bob Gluck)

I Sing The Body Electric - From Electric Miles to Weather Report

Bob Gluck gives us a proper map of the fusion flow, because it's reductive to think that Miles Davis simply drew on the sacred schools of John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, combining them with the Black music idols of the era, James Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, to arrive at a sound as experimental as that of "Bitches Brew", which boasts names such as Chick Corea, Dave Holland and John McLaughlin.
In the rearguard, in the nooks of academia, where traditional forms had nearly exhausted themselves, we should remember the figure of Anthony Braxton, who, together with Holland and Corea, formed Circle in Chicago - short-lived, but the source of a sound that was a dense, incendiary meteor. A student of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Braxton cannot be defined simply as a jazz musician. The same paths would later be trodden by Leroy Jenkins and his Revolutionary Ensemble; it was a genuine school of jazz avant-garde, which would flow, by the end of the '60s, into the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Cecil Taylor, considered the inventor of free jazz on a par with his contemporary Ornette Coleman, would carry these studies from Illinois to New York, giving creative impetus to the Yankee mainstream.
Other important pioneers who, instead, anticipated Zawinul's early interest in the Hammond, and more generally in the first forms of sound synthesis (moog) in the United States, were the Musica Electronic Viva collective, which was actually founded in Rome, in Trastevere, where Fredric Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum and Alvin Curran, the group's founders, relocated in the mid-'60s. Their experimentation, carried out in collaboration with John Cage, appears to have been an early attempt to extend the sound of the instrument beyond sui generis dialectics. Compared to avant-jazz, Zawinul remained more restrained within traditional canons. He was a true musician, one who didn't need overly abstruse forms to assert his talent in a still-unexplored field, and so felt able to incorporate the experimental vein into the pulsing life-arteries of the Capital.

Miles Davis, of course, is the one who notices this - he who doesn't always look favorably on free jazz, especially because of its quarrelsome nature, and who is also, rightly, convinced of his own worth as a musician. His rivalry with Coleman is well known in the jazz world of the time, and it is certainly the obstacle standing between Miles and the Chicago avant-garde musicians. Having reached a delicate point in his career, he rethinks his sound and his ensemble starting from something new, and if "In A Silent Way" comes across as more meditative, it's certainly because we have Zawinul, and above all Herbie Hancock, as well as Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams. It would be hard to ask for more, were it not for the fact that John McLaughlin is also drawn in. In "Bitches Brew", Jack DeJohnette replaces Tony Williams on drums, and he would in turn be joined by Airto Moreira on "Feio". Among the ranks of Hancock's and Davis's musicians is also Miroslav Vitous, a Czech double bassist with roughly the same background as Zawinul, and it is here that we move toward a break from Davis's ensemble, and toward the well-earned independence of Zawinul and Shorter.

On February 9, 1971, we were sleeping peacefully in a hotel room in Hermosa Beach, California. We had played at the Lighthouse, a jazz club nearby... suddenly my dog Schnuckel barked, and a few seconds later the room started shaking. It was so violent and unexpected that I couldn't understand what was happening: could masonry walls really sway like that? They seemed to have turned to butter
(Herbie Hancock, from "Possibilities")

The first Weather Report lineup is stable around Joe Zawinul on keyboards, Wayne Shorter on horns, Miroslav Vitous on electric bass and Airto Moreira on percussion, with other players added to the rhythm section (Don Alias and Alphonse Mouzon).
The self-titled debut was recorded for the New York-based Columbia, right in that fateful February of 1971, memorable for the earthquake that shook the San Fernando Valley on the other side of America. The album introduces a fluid jazz, without pauses, flowing like a stream all the way to the cascade of sound that Zawinul is able to create with his electric piano arpeggios (hence “Waterfall”), but it's a totally free form, music that never seeks repetition as a recurring theme but rather moves through ideas without a break, so that this river-like descent meets no obstacles. “Umbrellas”, “Orange Lady”, “Eurydice” play with jazz standards and blend them into something uniform that surely has a warmer, more magmatic ancestor in “Bitches Brew”.
It's a quality record, one that doesn't face the same resistance to being listened to as “In a Silent Way”, since by then the genre had already been embraced in its new guises.

I sing the body electric
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
(Walt Whitman)

If the first album presented itself as a successful exercise in style, in which Zawinul's meticulous technique joined the perfectionism of the band's other talents, I Sing The Body Electric, released in 1972 on Columbia Records, fills out that content in essential ways. The lineup remains unchanged, except on percussion: this time on skins we have Eric Gravatt and Dom um Romao. The sound is decidedly heavier and more explosive than on the first album. Inspired by a Bradbury story published in 1969, which in turn takes its title from Whitman's poem of the same name contained in the collection “Leaves of Grass”, the record is less continuous, but turns out to be far more conceptual and shows some truly significant compositional peaks. As on the first album, Zawinul deconstructs standard forms, but this time even more markedly. “Unknown Soldier” breaks the silence with its rhythm, almost an entrance of Floydian memory, and its crescendo pulls the listener dimensionally into “The Moors”, with Ralph Towner's 12-string guitar and Shorter's writing, as refined as it is powerful. Underlying the track's vibrant magnetism is always Vitous's pulsing bass, which continues its trajectories in “Crystal”, introduced by the long, orgiastic wails of Shorter and Zawinul. Easier on the ear is “Second Sunday In August”, which sounds like a meditative La Monte Young piano piece sped up by rapid-fire percussion.
Side B of the record opens with a dazzling medley, with Zawinul's electric virtuosity accompanying the sustained groove, and it's a recording from a live show held in Tokyo, again in 1972, where instead both of Weather Report's fixed elements are celebrated, namely Shorter, and above all Zawinul on “Directions”, the track that closes the album in style.

Although Davis had paved the way for fusion, this sound has few precedents in America at the time, which already makes it quite distinctive, combined with Zawinul's explosive, and at times even cynical, charisma. Certainly in the freakier psychedelia of the era there are traceable elements that anticipate the fusion sound, if we think of Zappa's “Hot Rats” or the free forms of Red Crayola, although these are more noise-oriented and decidedly unacademic.
Across the ocean, on British soil, Robert Wyatt is following a very similar trajectory with Soft Machine, and in general the Canterbury Scene has a great deal in common with free jazz, if we think of an absolute masterpiece like “Third“, released a year before Weather Report's debut.

We never solo, we always solo
(Joe Zawinul)

This boldly stated, brash attitude still leads them to throw themselves headlong into the recording studio, riding the wave of inspiration from the tour that had taken them as far as Tokyo. Still with the same lineup, Sweetnighter is released in 1973, and compared to its predecessor it eases off the throttle, settling into contemplation of an ever-shifting sky like the one on the cover, with the five members' faces suspended among the clouds. This time the quintet seems to have absorbed the meditations of Herbie Hancock (“Will”) and perhaps even more so those of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and the sound repeats and expands more than in the improvisation of the early albums. Zawinul's keyboard takes on even greater depth and supports the rest of the group the way foundations hold up the pillars of a house. This is what fundamentally sets Weather Report apart; whereas keyboards were often a melodic element that tended to enrich the sound with more or less virtuosic digressions, especially the Hammond organ in rock (though other examples could be cited), on Sweetnighter it holds up the whole structure and is the foundational element. With “Non-Stop Home” we're right in Hancock territory, and here the percussion runs harmoniously and freely over the expanses conjured by the Fender Rhodes.
More demanding are “Boogie Boogie Waltz” and “125th Street Congress”, two suites both over ten minutes long. The congas, and above all Shorter's contortionist sax work, anticipate the tropical exoticism that will characterize them so much later on, incorporating decidedly Afro tonalities that will even draw comparisons to The Temptations and Earth, Wind & Fire; Vitous's bass, too, turns out to be decidedly funkier and further removed from double bass technique. The following “Will” continues its rhythmic soaring with absolute mastery, wrapping the listener in a warm, smoky r’n’b. The sweet, melancholic “Manolete”, with Zawinul's exquisite keyboard work, shows us the overflowing compositional talent of the whole ensemble, always able to open out into new images and all-encompassing sonic sensations.
At this point the band finds itself at a crossroads: retrace its steps toward the jazz imprint of its early days, or settle into a funkier, more accessible format for a popular audience.
The disagreement spills over into a difference of views between Zawinul and Vitous, who approaches funk skillfully even though it's not really his genre. His rhythms have the hollow depth of the double bass rather than the Motown groove. This doesn't always sit well with Zawinul, who considers him, not always fairly, responsible for too acoustic an inclination.

Mysterious Traveller, then, released in 1974, is decidedly more troubled, but paradoxically turns out to be the most complete album of the first phase, that is, the one with Vitous on bass, who will decide, precisely following the disagreement with Zawinul, to leave the group to pursue a solo career. Taking his place in the lineup is Alphonso Johnson, who manages to match his predecessor's considerable technical level. A more accomplished record, more mature if you will.
Opening the show is “Nubian Sundance”, a drum'n'bass avant la lettre that projects the mind into a remote, ancestral Egypt, with its fleeting keyboard rises and falls and rhythmic hieroglyphics sustaining its profile. That off-beat rhythm would later be picked up throughout hip-hop culture and beyond; recently, “Babel”, from Heligoland by Massive Attack, mirrored its structure almost identically, but if you listen with an open ear you realize it was all already there in the closing coda of Miles Davis's “Pharaoh’s Dance” (coincidence, perhaps?!). On “American Tango” Zawinul's comet burns incandescent: absolutely a great track, precisely because of the unmistakable touch of the Viennese keyboardist, who paints a lagoon-like panorama dense with will-o'-the-wisps.
The new bassist's talent instead stands out on the lopsided “Cucumber Slumber”, and that's exactly what Zawinul is after, the best funk, piled up by the tribal circles of building congas. The dreamlike “Mysterious Traveller” immerses us in restless sleep, with the tritone keys of a Zawinul in trance. It's music that sweeps away the already known, and tries precisely to make us travel into mystery. At times it brushes against peaks of pure aural orgasm, and the sound, so richly detailed, brings out the latent part of our listening. The romantic “Blackthorn Rose”, and even more so the sensual “Scarlet Woman”, continue this exploration; the latter can almost be considered the emblem of the album's entire philosophy.
Mysterious Traveller represents the compositional finish line, the goal achieved by Joe Zawinul, and it establishes fusion as a genre in its own right, making it historic and significant.

“The band was already using devices like the fuzz pedal and the echoplex, which created a tape echo for electric instruments, I played the Fender Rhodes both live and on records. I was always busy attaching various gadgets to the electric piano, sometimes right before shows. In Boston I'd gone to two MIT engineers, who told me: ‘Hook this box up to the piano, it'll change the shape of the sound wave’. I loved exploring new sounds. To attach the cables, the pedal and the Echoplex I had to remove the top part, turning it into a sort of Frankenstein-piano… I'd met Harold Rhodes back in the Miles days, when he came to see us at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. He got up on stage and noticed all those wires coming out of the head of his instrument: ‘Herbie! What have you done to my piano? You've cannibalized it!’
(Herbie Hancock, from “Possibilities”)

The discovery of the versatility of synthesized sound shook the whole music scene, and while at first analog machines took up entire walls of the studio, formats were soon compressed. Rhodes himself, as Hancock points out in his autobiography, saw to fitting the Fender with a more suitable wiring adaptation. We're in a phase of pure pioneering: Zawinul and Hancock still stand today as two pillars of musical research in this regard.
The transitional phase that saw the release of Tale Spinnin' (1975) documents, like travel writing preparing the ground for its successor, their experiences on tour. Recorded in Los Angeles with Alyrio Lima on percussion and Johnson on bass, it remains somewhat in the background of their discography, as it was made straddling the first phase of their career and the later one with Jaco Pastorius, but tracks like “Lusitanos”, with Johnson's wah croak underpinning the exquisite elegance of Shorter and Zawinul, formulaic as it may be, give us a hint of the shores their sound would head toward in the Pastorius era.

Painting with sound – The bass of doom and Jaco's destiny

Jaco Pastorius's story begins in Pennsylvania, where he was already being steered toward a sense of rhythm within the family, by his paternal grandfather and his father, both percussionists in local jazz quartets. Naturally, drums are in fact his first instrument of interest. After moving to Fort Lauderdale following his parents' divorce, he spends his teenage years with his siblings. It's there that he buys his first electric bass, the legendary Fender Jazz, destined to accompany him in every form and facet throughout his career. At the time it's the most fashionable bass around, but Pastorius will be the first to turn a traditional bass into a fretless, bringing the instrument closer to the fluidity of the double bass. It's a technique now well known among bass devotees precisely because Jaco was one of the first to experiment with it: he removes all the frets from the neck and fills the grooves with wood filler. To make the neck smooth and even, he uses layers of marine epoxy resin, sanding down the surface of the neck once the resin has been applied and has hardened.
Pastorius begins to stand out as a bassist with an outfit called Woodchuck, which makes him known on the East Coast as an extremely gifted musician. During his apprenticeship he learns the rudiments of jazz technique from more experienced bassists, acquiring above all that mastery of harmonics that will elevate his playing above all his contemporaries. He also absorbs into his style elements from other genres such as Motown funk, which he will inject into jazz, along with the dominant use of the mixolydian scale. Slap, muting, an extension of harmonics almost unheard of until then, with dizzying legato runs on fretless. These skills will make him quite formidable in the early '70s, a period that finds him forced to work on cruise ships to earn extra money, after marrying his partner Tracy Lee that same year, with whom he will have his first daughter. He later becomes a member of another band for a brief period, the C.C. Riders, with whom he tours America, deepening his musical experience further.

But it's his partnership with Pat Metheny that proves the real turning point for Pastorius. The two meet in New York when Pastorius is hired by Paul Bley to play on the Big Apple's jazz scene. In '74 Metheny releases “Bright Size Life” on Ecm, a seminal record of the genre, featuring Bob Moses on percussion and Jaco himself on bass. Pastorius releases his first record as principal artist with Bley and Metheny, which nonetheless remains largely overlooked. But it's in 1975, with the signing of his contract with Epic, that Pastorius attains the artistic command that allows him to launch a solo album capable of presenting his vision and his style to the world.
He performs mainly in Florida, and it's precisely in Miami, during a chance overlap of their respective tours, that Jaco meets Zawinul. He introduces himself as the best bassist in the world: Zawinul doesn't take long to bring him back down to earth. At the time his relationship with Alphonso Johnson hadn't yet run its course, and Vitous, too, hadn't appeared technically inferior to his successor. In 1976, however, Johnson will start to have doubts about staying with Weather Report. So everything becomes ripe for bringing Jaco's flamboyant vision into a new configuration of the group, completely restructured by Zawinul.

Black Market

Released in March 1976, Black Market is an absolute masterpiece for rhythm-section devotees and represents a one-of-a-kind record for bassists and drummers alike. On the record both Johnson and Pastorius appear on bass, while on skins we have two other madmen, Chester Thompson and Alex Acuna, with Don Alias on tribal percussion and Narada Walden of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
But it's not only an eldorado of rhythm, Zawinul too shows up with a remarkable arsenal. His brushstrokes on the Fender Rhodes are at times accompanied by the polyphony of the Oberheim and the Arp: the opening title track (which, incidentally, would go on to become the theme tune of Radio Popolare in Italy) and “Cannon Ball”, Jaco's first rhythmic foray into the quintet, are genuine gems in his repertoire.
Overall, the entire side A of the record is, in every respect, well above the average of anything released under the Weather Report name up to that point. Indeed, next comes “Gibraltar”, with an exotic entrance that transports us into the chaos of Nuestra Señora de Africa, and here Thompson and Acuna reach the record's rhythmic peak, making us lose ourselves among the labyrinthine alleys of this subtropical market in an ever more intense crescendo, which spills into the enveloping final riff, where Shorter gives his lungs full rein.
Shorter's compositional flair stands tall on “Elegant People” and “Three Clowns”, with Zawinul instead seeming to wink at his colleague Hancock. Pastorius's presence among the album's composers doesn't undermine Johnson's Afro versatility, however, quite the opposite, it manages to bring it out even more, while “Three Clowns” settles onto Zawinul's pianistic bed, leading into “Barbary Coast”.
The synesthesia between this record's cover art and its sounds is almost total. “Barbary Coast” is, for Pastorius, a small stylistic exercise, and yet his hand effortlessly masters every rhythmic groove, and in the bass's own extended runs, and in the silences beneath the surface, we can feel its full potential. The splendid “Herandnu” closes out an album that calling virtuosic would be an understatement, but it's not mere virtuosity, it's a summa of pure talent, showing all its members in perfect sync in expressing their mental explorations, in depicting other, distant lands, and in maximum possible entertainment. Bass and drums here literally fly, and at times closely recall certain progressive bands (the sound isn't all that far from Yes and Rush, for instance).
If Mysterious Traveller closed out the relationship with Vitous, establishing itself as the masterpiece of the first phase, Black Market immediately proves to be the finest work of the second phase, marked by Pastorius's arrival alongside musicians who were all already more than seasoned.

There was magic in him, the same kind of magic there was in Jimi Hendrix… We started selling out big concert halls, wherever we went.
(Joe Zawinul)

That same year Pastorius releases his true solo debut, and this time the expression of his artistic sensibility comes through in full. Opened by a nothing-short-of-masterful reworking of Charlie Parker's “Donna Lee”, the record skillfully blends both Motown and experimental jazz, with Pastorius's technique sharply refracting the world of the era's traditional bassists; while free jazz had already experimented a great deal, with unusual timbres and harmonics, what Pastorius brings about is a truly radical shift in how the bass itself is regarded. While “Come On, Come Over” presents itself as a bold embrace of the funk touch, it's in “Continuum”, and above all in “Portrait Of Tracy”, dedicated to his wife, that Pastorius expresses his organic vision of the bass: not mere rhythmic accompaniment, but an instrument with thought and voice, one that at times seems to paint with sound. This “verbal”, and if you will pictorial, way of communicating rhythm would become a new starting point for modern bassists of the most varied backgrounds, from the funkier ones, like Les Claypool and Flea, all the way to more or less progressive metal; Chancellor of Tool is one example, as are both Cliff Burton and Robert Trujillo of Metallica, the latter of whom also co-produced “Jaco”, the biographical documentary on the rise and fall of a bassist who, had he not burned out so prematurely, would most likely have been a full-blown asteroid rather than a mere shooting star.

The fusion acceleration of “Kuru/Speak Like A Child” brings us back onto Zawinul's territory. Here the tightrope walker throws himself into the tribal jungle with an exceptional Hancock on piano and clavinet. The track is stratospheric, ranking among Weather Report's finest compositions overall. It's worth remembering that also appearing behind the scenes on this record are Don Alias, Wayne Shorter, Narada Walden, as well as the two soul singers Sam and Dave on “Come On, Come Over”. The sprawling “Okonkolè y Trompa” is instead a meditation on timbres that Pastorius would later use in Weather Report. “Opus Pocus”, featuring Shorter, and the samba of “Used To Be (A Cha Cha)” continue along the path of Pastorius's untamable flair, who in the closing “Forgotten Love” even takes on the role of composer of all the arrangements, without playing his beloved instrument at all.

Heavy Weather

If the self-titled album is the statement of Jaco's undeniable talent, Heavy Weather is its natural sequel within Zawinul's ranks. Released in 1977, it's an album that pushes into new territory within the collective consciousness of the ensemble's members. This time the lineup is cohesive and stable: Zawinul, Shorter, Pastorius, Acuna and Manolo Bandrena. Technically it's the most complex Weather Report album; it was admittedly hard to top Black Market, though compared to its predecessor it gains in virtuosity at the expense of the organic warmth of the sound, which here comes across as more cerebral and less inviting.
This time it's Zawinul's synth that opens the curtain on "Birdland", destined to become a modern jazz classic even beyond Weather Report. The track is dedicated to the famous New York club where jazz musicians performed in the '50s, and it shows us what's left of that era and how the genre's story continues for those who came after. "A Remark You Made", slower and hazier, renews Pastorius's wonders, who has no qualms about unleashing his enormous technical ability: alongside Zawinul's shimmering keyboards and Shorter's romantic sax, the whole album is in fact overseen by the latter, who is credited as composer on every track. The record also carries notable extra layers of meaning, the fruit of that era's explorations into new-age spiritualism. As in "Havona", inspired by the "Urantia" manuscript, a book that was all the rage among Chicago's freaks at the time. It's another heavyweight moment in Weather Report's career, with a blast of sound that seems to come from some hyperuranian realm and a Pastorius in a state of grace, perhaps reaching his peak here. The onslaught of "Teen Town", backed by a lopsided sax, recalls precisely the experimental wing of Chicago jazz and could almost anticipate certain outliers within new wave, like the early sounds of Tuxedomoon, or the Rip Rig & Panic of Neneh Cherry.
"Rumba Mama", introduced by Bandrena's tribal vocalizations, is a live digression led by Acuna's skins, who throughout the album shows off his unimpeachable percussive skills.
Heavy Weather, true to its cover art, is a gloomy, stormy record; it almost feels like standing in the autumn rain in front of some ramshackle construction site. It's an album that seems to foreshadow the changing of the guard in '77, while at the same time it almost shelters us under the hat on its cover and tends to us in the warmth of the quintet's fusion. It's worth remembering that those same years saw huge upheaval thanks to the spread of punk in both London and New York, where the genre's first bands would perform at CBGB (Talking Heads and Television are just around the corner).

This shift is felt quite strongly, though still within the band's own vocabulary, on the less successful Mr. Gone, the ensemble's eighth album, which sees the departure of Alex Acuna and the arrival of session man Peter Erskine. Still, "The Pursuit Of The Woman With The Feathered Hat" and "Punk Jazz" still showcase the overflowing talent of Zawinul and Pastorius respectively. It's a historical moment in which genres more closely tied to jazz or even symphonic idioms begin to take a back seat to popular music and the first wave of punk and new wave, and indeed it's from this album onward that the band's popularity starts to wane. Both fusion and progressive music had been defining forces in the early Seventies, but the philosophy behind the new genres departs considerably from the compositional horizons and theoretical grounding of those two genres.
As far as Weather Report are concerned, this is perhaps due to the fact that they always remained, at heart, a jazz outfit, only occasionally incorporating vocals into their work. But had they had a permanent vocal element, perhaps they would have managed to update their sound, maybe even beyond the boundaries of jazz.

Even as the cracks begin to show in the studio, their live lineup is still formidable, and on 8:30, recorded live in 1979, they perhaps reach their peak on stage — fittingly, they revisit Davis's "In A Silent Way", the very piece that had sparked the partnership between Miles and Joe. Their live signature remains dizzying, and will clearly carry them through the early years of the decade to come.

Still with Peter Erskine and Jaco Pastorius in the lineup, Night Passage brings the band into the Eighties, and is perhaps the most noteworthy record of a decade that will, ironically, see them fall out of fashion, since in synth-pop, the dominant genre of the decade, the use of the very keyboards Joe had undeniably pioneered would become its defining trademark. But Zawinul, like many other great geniuses, can be both his own victim and his own executioner. The same goes for Pastorius: although he's at the height of his renown for his technical gifts, after the birth of twins with his second partner Ingrid, Jaco begins to suffer serious mental health problems, likely stemming from bipolar disorder, which manifest through heavy substance use and alcoholism. Still, he manages to carry his solo projects forward, releasing Word Of Mouth in 1981 and forming the Big Band that will back him until 1983, the year in which debts and personal troubles leave him alone to fight his own addictions. Even so, the album features Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock and Toots Thielemans. Also worth mentioning is his cover of the Beatles' "Blackbird", naturally rendered entirely on bass, with Thielemans on harmonica. In 1982, despite everything, Swing Journal names him jazz artist of the year.

1982 also brought another album under the name Weather Report, which brings them back together after their solo experiments, but it's a band in decline, and their music comes across as less compelling. It's also the last album with Pastorius on bass, who will later be replaced by Victor Bailey. Procession, from 1983, finds Bailey, not without effort, navigating the void left by Pastorius.
It's Weather Report's final lineup, one that will draw them close, through a kind of elective affinity, first to Carl Anderson, known for his portrayal of Judas Iscariot in "Jesus Christ Superstar", with whom they will craft two transitional albums, Domino Theory and Sportin' Life (from which "Corner Pocket" is worth a listen), and then to another great virtuoso, this time on guitar, Carlos Santana. Himself a glorious veteran of previous decades, he too manages to work his way, if only occasionally, into Weather Report's repertoire. If we think of albums like "Caravanserai" or "Abraxas", it's not hard to understand why Santana chose to collaborate with Zawinul.

This Is This, with an explosive and exuberant Santana, is Weather Report's epitaph, and it's an album worthy of closing out the quintet's career, even though it ends up as a parting divertissement that masks the inexorable void left by Pastorius.

As for Jaco, the last years of his life were a turmoil of inner crises, starting with his live performances: in 1984 the Word Of Mouth Big Band will leave him alone on stage, at the mercy of his own delusions. Buried in debt and unable to break free from his addictions, in 1985 he takes part in a demonstration of bass technique for "Modern Electric Bass", but his arc has already entered its final decline. He is found strung out on drugs and alcohol, begging in the streets of Fort Lauderdale, and admitted to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital. Once discharged, he manages for a brief period to carry on a tour in Europe. But the death of a close friend from his high school years in a car accident sends him spiraling back into the tunnel of crack and heroin.
In September '87, Pastorius will attend his last concert, this time as a spectator. At the Sunrise Musical Theatre in Fort Lauderdale, it's Carlos Santana performing. During the show, drunk and disruptive, Jaco climbs onstage unrecognizable and, in a fit of spite, lifts his friend Alphonso Johnson's hand off his bass. Escorted out by security, he heads to a club outside of town with the worst of intentions. He's denied entry by the bouncer, Luc Havan, a Vietnamese refugee skilled in martial arts, with whom he gets into a brawl. He suffers a head injury, and at dawn is taken, by now unconscious, to the nearest medical center, where he falls into a coma, until the fateful 21st of September, when brain death is declared.

From 1984, the year his wife Ingrid caught him snorting cocaine backstage at one of his concerts, in front of her and their two twins, his end was already written: the growing distance from both friends and family would seal his fate. Robert Trujillo of Metallica, through a legal battle, managed to get the historic Fender returned to the Pastorius family, and, through careful biographical research, to do justice to the career of the artist who, more than any other, elevated the electric bass to new heights. A fate forever bound to the four strings of his Bass of Doom, his third arm if you will, the instrument that made him immortal.
John Francis Anthony Pastorius's Fender Jazz, pickguard removed, cracked open, left unguarded, battered, thrown and smashed into a thousand pieces after one of his fits of rage, crushed by a taxi on the road, pieced back together like a puzzle by a trusted luthier, stolen in 1986 off a park bench, would be found twenty years later on the West Side, in a New York guitar shop, recognized precisely by the visible grooves left by its breaks and by the neck hand-carved by Pastorius himself.
 
The whirlwind of the lost quintet left ruins and outcasts in its wake, but it also built a future for jazz. Every legend worth the name has, unfortunately, its own cursed fate. That doesn't change the fact that Weather Report's music was a watershed. Just as there's a before and after Jimi Hendrix for every guitarist, there will always be a before and after Jaco Pastorius for every bassist, confirming how his story, for better or worse, left an indelible mark on the history of music.

Bibliographical sources

Bob Gluck – Miles Davis, il quintetto perduto e altre rivoluzioni (Quodlibet, 2020)
Herbie Hancock – Possibilities, l'autobiografia (Minimum Fax, 2017)

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