WEATHER REPORT - Weather Report

This splendid work opens the journey of the most famous jazz-rock group (though today we might simply call Weather Report a modern jazz outfit), a journey that would last around 15 years and 15 albums, compilations excluded.

Clearly heirs, though not always debtors, at least as far as the prevailing mood is concerned, to the electric Miles Davis of 1969/70 - the Davis of In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, that is - the "Weather Bulletin" (what a great name, underlining the programmatic shifts in atmosphere!), a flexible lineup but one built throughout its history around the complementary duo of Zawinul and Shorter (unsurprisingly, both were leading figures on those two Davis masterpieces), would gradually arrive at an instantly recognizable stylistic signature - debatable perhaps, but undeniably original and almost always of great creative and artistic depth.

Their debut contains the building blocks of a successful stylistic synthesis that, to put it simply, can be summed up as a search for equal standing between front line and accompaniment, between composition and improvisation, between melody/harmony and rhythm - one that immediately set out to move beyond the conventions of more traditional jazz, beyond the theme/solo/restatement-of-theme/solo juxtaposition, a habit that even the most radical free jazz had never fully shaken off by that point.

In other words, improvisation and narrative are entrusted simultaneously to the group as a whole rather than, diachronically, to individual musicians...

This cohesion, especially on the early records - and so already on this very first one - is pursued through recordings that are spare yet precise; the compositions feel as though they were completed, and partly improvised, in the studio; the search for a compact, uninterrupted sonic flow draws on recording techniques in which reverb and saturation become a meaningful cause rather than a mere aesthetic effect.

The opening track, Milky Way, is already a small (and magical) manifesto: it takes a keen ear (and some help from the CD booklet notes, absent from the original LP) to realize that the track's abstract, starry quality comes from reverbed acoustic piano chords, and from a single note of Shorter's soprano sax just past the halfway mark!

Umbrellas immediately reveals the band's other side, the lively, funk-inflected one: Vitous's distorted electric bass leads the way; the resulting atmosphere is nonetheless already the product of a collective contribution, including at the compositional level, in line with several tracks on later albums.

Following in the same vein is Seventh Arrow (composed by Miroslav Vitous): the pulse of the percussion gradually grows more frenzied until it becomes the true driving force of the piece.

Orange Lady is structured as a kind of mini-suite, the centerpiece of the CD (it was the closing track of side one on the LP), and is the longest track in a sequence of otherwise fairly brief vignettes: after a dreamy, reflective introduction led by Shorter accompanied by Zawinul's liquid keyboards, the entrance of bass and percussion marks a shift toward a more direct, though no less abstract, atmosphere. Once again Shorter is the first narrator among equals. The liner notes don't tell us whose voice can be briefly heard in the background... but we'd wager it's one of the percussionists. It's worth noting that the theme of Orange Lady, composed by Zawinul, had already appeared in Miles Davis's Big Fun (it ran for about 14 of the 27 minutes of the track "Great Expectations"), and later turned up again on the Complete Sessions of Bitches Brew.

Morning Lake carries us along for a few more minutes with a similar mood, and could almost pass for the next movement of the preceding pseudo-suite; while Waterfall (the second-longest track) might well be seen as its extension: the piece again plays on the tension-and-release interplay between Vitous's bass and Zawinul's ever-fascinating phrasing, with Shorter once more floating on the surface...

Tears and Eurydice, both compositions by the great Wayne, bring things full circle: the first with a relaxed, bluesy sax line "disturbed" by a nervous accompaniment from Vitous and the percussion (once again it's hard to say whose are the evocative vocalizations - almost saxophone-toned wails - that surface a couple of times); the second, the jazziest track on the record, opens with a reflective passage from Shorter, while Vitous works almost in walking-bass mode, the drums grow steadily more aggressive, and Zawinul's phrasing becomes increasingly prominent right up to the ending/non-ending...

A circle closed almost reluctantly and rather abruptly, as if to say, "the story continues..."

In terms of availability, this is a record that can cause some headaches: among other things, deliberately, in an attempt to recall its magical abstractness, but for a work of considerably lesser value, the band gave (or rather, didn't bother to give) the same title, simply Weather Report, to their 11th album, released in 1982 (the one, to be clear, with the title in huge block letters on the cover); so be careful when ordering this CD from a shop: it's best to refer to the catalog number given at the top.

A couple of words on the cover art too, which unfortunately, as often happens with CDs, suffers somewhat from the reduced size compared to the original LP: an unsettlingly beautiful cover, rarefied and striking at once, as indefinable, enigmatic and intriguing as the contents of this magnificent record

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

24/12/2019