As we settle into the month of July, a look at the All About Jazz birthday calendar tells us that July 7 is the birthday of Joe Zawinul, founder (with Wayne Shorter) of one of my all-time favorite groups: Weather Report.
For those into labels, Weather Report is categorized within the “jazz fusion” genre. However, that label tends to obfuscate the range of music the band played over its 16-year lifetime. The albums Weather Report produced continue to garner new fans of not only their music, but of jazz writ large.
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with nearly 220 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
It’s important to dive into both Zawinul’s and Shorter’s musical roots to understand the foundations of Weather Report’s music.
In Zawinul’s September 2007 obituary in The Guardian, music critic and composer John L Walters notes that he was born to “lower-middle class parents” in Vienna, Austria. Tragedy struck the family early when Erich, Zawinul’s twin brother, died at age four.
Walters also notes that Zawinul had perfect pitch!
There was no piano at home (in a municipal flat), but the young Joe studied piano, violin and clarinet at the Vienna Conservatory, where he was given a free place at the age of seven. Later, he went to the Gymnasium Hagenmüllergasse, and discovered jazz through movies and radio. In the 1950s, he began to play piano with leading Austrian musicians such as Hans Koller and the Fatty George group. His contemporaries included classical composer-pianist Friedrich Gulda, later to collaborate with Zawinul on Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, and he played for dances with Thomas Klestil, later president of Austria.
Having friends in high places came in handy when he branched out into other interests. He opened a club, Joe Zawinul's Birdland, in Vienna, and also went into action to combat pollution in Senegal. This led to his appointment by the Austrian government as "goodwill ambassador" for 17 African nations. After making a name for himself on the home scene, Zawinul won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston. Jazz composer Mike Gibbs, who arrived on the same day as Zawinul in 1959, told me: "He stayed three minutes and I stayed four years." Within a week he was offered a job with Maynard Ferguson's band and went on the road with the flamboyant trumpeter for eight months.
After Ferguson came gigs with Dinah Washington and a long stint with the highly successful band of Cannonball Adderley, who shrewdly gave Zawinul a chance to write. In 1966 he delivered the great soul-jazz classic Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, a commercial but subtle piece that demonstrated how successfully this white Austrian had absorbed the gospel-like idioms of black jazz.
I’m going to stop right here for a minute. Read that again: Zawinul, a white guy from Austria, wrote “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” for Cannonball Adderley. Zawinul clearly had soulful jazz writing and playing chops.
Listen to the invited audience response to this live performance, released in 1967.
Steve Huey let us in on a secret when he reviewed “‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!: Live at ‘The Club’" for AllMusic: There was no “Club.”
The hoax was meant to publicize a friend's nightclub venture in Chicago, but Adderley actually recorded the album in Los Angeles, where producer David Axelrod set up a club in the Capitol studios and furnished free drinks to an invitation-only audience. Naturally, the crowd is in an extremely good mood, and Adderley's quintet, feeding off the energy in the room, gives them something to shout about.
Let’s meet the second half of Weather Report’s founding duo, Newark, New Jersey, native Wayne Shorter, courtesy of his AllAboutJazz profile—and largely in his own words.
Wayne Shorter had his first great jazz epiphany as a teenager: “I remember seeing Lester Young when I was 15 years old. It was a Norman Granz Jazz at the Philharmonic show in Newark and he was late coming to the theater. Me and a couple of other guys were waiting out front of the Adams Theater and when he finally did show up, he had the pork pie hat and everything. So then we were trying to figure out how to get into the theater from the fire escape around the back. We eventually got into the mezzanine and saw that whole show — Stan Kenton and Dizzy Gillespie bands together on stage doing ‘Peanut Vendor,’ Charlie Parker with strings doing ‘Laura’ and stuff like that. And Russell Jacquet…Ilinois Jacquet. He was there doing his thing. That whole scene impressed me so much that I just decided, ‘Hey, man, let me get a clarinet.’ So I got one when I was 16, and that’s when I started music.
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Just as he was beginning making his mark, Shorter was drafted into the Army. “A week before I went into the Army I went to the Cafe Bohemia to hear music, I said, for the last time in my life. I was standing at the bar having a cognac and I had my draft notice in my back pocket. That’s when I met Max Roach. He said, ‘You’re the kid from Newark, huh? You’re The Flash.’ And he asked me to sit in. They were changing drummers throughout the night, so Max played drums, then Art Taylor, then Art Blakey. Oscar Pettiford was on cello. Jimmy Smith came in the door with his organ. He drove to the club with his organ in a hearse. And outside we heard that Miles was looking for somebody named Cannonball. And I’m saying to myself, ‘All this stuff is going on and I gotta go to the Army in about five days!’”
[...]
In 1964 Miles Davis invited Wayne to go on the road. He joined Herbie Hancock (piano), Tony Williams (drums) and Ron Carter (bass). This tour turned into a 6-year run with Davis in which he recorded a number of albums with him. Along with Davis, he helped craft a sound that changed the face of music. In his autobiography, the late Miles Davis said about Wayne…“Wayne is a real composer…he knew that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your satisfaction and taste…” In his time with Miles he crafted what have become jazz standards like “Nefertiti,” “E.S.P.,” “Pinocchio,” “Sanctuary,” “Fall” and “Footprints.”
RELATED STORY: Legendary jazz saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter dies at age 89
From Weather Report’s official website:
Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter had first met and become friends in 1959 while they were playing in Maynard Ferguson’s Big Band. Zawinul went on to play with Cannonball Adderley’s group in the 1960s, while Shorter joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and then, in 1964, Miles Davis’ second great quintet. During this decade, both men made names for themselves as being among the best composers in jazz.
Zawinul later joined Shorter in contributing to the initial fusion music recordings of Miles Davis, and both men were part of the studio groups that recorded the key Davis albums In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970). Weather Report was initially formed to explore a more impressionistic and individualistic music (or, as Zawinul put it, “away from all that eight bars shit and then you go to the bridge…”).
There’s some dispute over how Weather Report initially formed. According to Zawinul, it began when he and Shorter recruited another Miles Davis associate, the classically trained Czech-born bass player Miroslav Vitouš, who had previously played with each of them separately (as well as with Herbie Mann, Bob Brookmeyer, Stan Getz, and Chick Corea). According to Vitouš himself, it was he and Shorter who actually founded Weather Report, with Shorter bringing in Zawinul afterwards. Whichever story is true, it was those three musicians – all composers – who formed the initial core of the project.
Curt Bianchi’s Weather Report Annotated Discography website is a treasure trove of Weather Report information—including this interview with Shorter about how the group got its name:
Shorter: Well, actually, the name Weather Report is the key, because the weather is unpredictable. And it’s hard to control the weather. When we were sitting around in Clive Davis’s office—he was the head of Columbia at the time—we were thinking and thinking and thinking. And somebody said, “Let’s call it a group. The Audience.” No, no, no. (laughs) There were a lot of people in that room, sitting on the floor, you know. Actually, that’s the only creative process that happened between us and the executives.
And I was thinking, “They have the news about the weather every evening, and the weather is something that nobody can predict. And this music we are doing has something about not being predictable or something like that,” And I said, “How about The Weather Report?” And we took the “The” off it: Weather Report. And everybody said, “Yeah!” And it all clicked.
The weather report can be an analogy to almost anything if you stretch it out. Like, when somebody says they are going to tell you a story, you don’t know what they are going to tell you until they start talking. You listen to them. You sit around the fireplace, “Let’s tell stories.” And the anticipation of not knowing what’s going to happen adds to the excitement. So that’s what we tried to do with every album, including Tale Spinnin’.
Bianchi is also the author of “Elegant People: A History of the Band Weather Report,” a must-read for fans of the band.
This documentary about Weather Report was produced for the British South Bank Show and aired in March 1984. Zawinul and Shorter talk about how they got started, and how they met and formed the band.
At last, let’s dig into Weather Report’s music, starting with their self-titled debut album, released in 1971. Bianchi writes:
It is an understatement to say that Weather Report’s first album created a stir. The May 27, 1971 issue of Down Beat devoted an amazing two-plus pages to the album’s review, including a track-by-track description by the band members themselves. The reviewer, Dan Morgenstern, accorded the album Down Beat‘s highest rating of five stars, and opened his review by saying, “An extraordinary new group merits an extraordinary review of its debut album.” Pat Metheny recalled to Glasser the anticipation he had as a 16-year old: “When the first Weather Report record came out, it was just… wow! I was probably at the store the day it arrived, because we’d all been reading about it in Down Beat and things like that.”
Here’s the full album:
Music critic and author Todd S. Jenkins wrote about the band’s 1974 album, “Mysterious Traveller,” for AllAboutJazz.
This was the year that founding member Miroslav Vitous was replaced by Alphonso Johnson, who became a critical asset as both a fluid, creative bassist and a composer. Drummer Ishmael Wilburn and Brazilian percussionist Dom Um Romao, with a shifting cast of supporting players, laid the foundation for the band's most exciting incarnation yet. The overdue reissue of Mysterious Traveller is a welcome acknowledgement of this mid-period lineup's importance in the evolution of fusion.
This album contains some of the Report's most popular works, chiefly the long opener "Nubian Sundance."
Here’s the full album:
I could fill this story with Weather Report albums—and my favorite cuts—but I think it’s important to showcase them live in concert.
Here they are, live at Montreux in 1976:
As a major vocalese fan, I’ll close with a rousing performance of Weather Report with The Manhattan Transfer, performing “Birdland” during the 1982 Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl.
Please join me in the comments for even more great Weather Report tunes—I’m looking forward to hearing your favorites!
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