Weather Report: Американдық джаз-фьюжн тобының тарихы

American jazz fusion band
the band

Weather Report was an American jazz fusion band active from 1970 to 1986. The band was founded in 1970 by Austrian keyboardist Joe Zawinul, American saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš, American drummer Alphonse Mouzon as well as American percussionists Don Alias and Barbara Burton. The band was initially co led by co frontmen Zawinul and Shorter but, subsequently as the 1970s progressed, Zawinul largely became the sole musical leader of the group. Other prominent members at various points in the band's lifespan included Jaco Pastorius, Alphonso Johnson, Victor Bailey, Chester Thompson, Peter Erskine, Airto Moreira, and Alex Acuña. Throughout most of its existence, the band was a quintet consisting of Zawinul, Shorter, a bass guitarist, a drummer, and a percussionist. The band started as a free improvising jazz group with avant garde and experimental electronic leanings (pioneered by Zawinul); when Vitouš left Weather Report (due mostly to creative disagreements), Zawinul increasingly steered the band towards a funky, edgy sound incorporating elements of R&B and native musics from around the world. Zawinul used the latest developments in synthesizer technology, and he took advantage of a large variety of sounds and tone colors to make the band stand out. During the first half of their career, Weather Report were seen as one of the defining acts in modern jazz, winning the DownBeat "best album award" five times in a row. Alongside bands such as Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Herbie Hancock's Headhunters (all with members inspired by and partially responsible for the fusion era work of Miles Davis), Weather Report is widely considered one of the defining bands of the jazz fusion genre.

On 1973's Sweetnighter, Weather Report began to abandon the primarily acoustic group improvisation format, and the band started to take a new direction. Primarily at Zawinul's instigation, Weather Report became more jazz funk and groove oriented, drawing more heavily on R&B influences and dense electric keyboard work while adding more structure to both the prewritten and the improvisational sections. Gravatt took his replacement in the studio sessions badly and quit the band at the end of recording, moving to Minneapolis to join the band Natural Life. Many years later, Zawinul paid tribute to Gravatt's skills and stated that he had been the finest of the band's "pure jazz" drummers as well as being "from the jazz side my favorite of them all". With Gravatt gone and former drummer Herschel Dwellingham unavailable for touring, former Sly & the Family Stone drummer Greg Errico played on the Sweetnighter tour, but did not stay with the band afterwards. At this point, Vitouš and Zawinul found themselves at creative loggerheads, since the former preferred Weather Report's original approach and the latter wished to continue further along the road to funk. Retrospectively, Zawinul accused Vitouš of being unable to play funk convincingly (something which Greg Errico corroborated) and claimed that he had not provided enough music for the band. Vitouš countered that he had in fact brought in compositions, but that Zawinul had been unable to play them. Vitouš has also accused Zawinul of having been "a first class manipulator" primarily interested in commercial success. For his part, Zawinul would later recall Vitouš planning to concentrate on more bowed solos and getting the group to hire a second bassist to play the standard basslines, to which Zawinul's response was "why don't we get one bassist who can do all of that?" Zawinul claimed that "there was nothing disrespectful about it we had to make this move. And history has proved us to have been right." When Shorter sided with Zawinul, the original three man partnership broke down acrimoniously and Vitouš left Weather Report, moving on to a solo career as composer and band leader. His final contribution to Weather Report was to play bass on a single track, which appeared on the band's 1974 album Mysterious Traveller ("American Tango", which he had co written with Zawinul). Vitouš' departure marked the end of the first phase of Weather Report and the shift of overall creative dominance of the band to Josef Zawinul, although Shorter remained an integral, influential, and vital part of the project. Vitouš has subsequently accused both Zawinul and Shorter of having used foul play to edge him out of the band, to deny the scale of his contribution to Weather Report's history and creative approach, and to cheat him out of remuneration. Alphonso Johnson was also worn out from the strain put on the rhythm by the band's frequent changes of drummer. During a break in activity halfway through the recording of Black Market, Johnson opted to leave Weather Report to play with the Billy Cobham/George Duke Band (which featured a young John Scofield on guitar). Prior to his departure, Johnson played on all but two of the new album's tracks. His replacement was Jaco Pastorius, a virtuoso fretless bass guitarist from Florida, who had been in touch with Zawinul for several years and who came in to play on "Cannonball" and his own composition "Barbary Coast". Zawinul and Shorter had assumed that new drummer Chester Thompson would be departing alongside his friend Johnson and, for the second set of sessions, they replaced him (on Pastorius' recommendation) with the former Mahavishnu Orchestra drummer Narada Michael Walden. Although Walden played on several album tracks, he ultimately proved unsuitable. Thompson returned for the final Black Market sessions, but left again after failing to gel as a rhythm section with Pastorius (whose style was much busier than that of Johnson). Thompson subsequently joined Genesis as their touring drummer. Black Market continued Weather Report's ongoing run of success, At the time they were once again without either a full time drummer and percussionist, with Alex Acuña having returned to Las Vegas for a career as a studio musician and Manolo Badrena having been fired for "non musical reasons". Shorter had been focusing most of his attention and compositional ideas into his solo work, while Zawinul was sketching out ideas for a solo album of his own, which involved moving away from a raw group sound in favor of constructing a far more orchestrated and experimental studio based recording with multiple overdubs. However, Weather Report's contract and work schedule required another album, so Zawinul's solo work was absorbed into what became Weather Report's eighth album, Mr. Gone (1978). The studio sessions made use of a variety of drummers – Pastorius played the kit on two tracks and further contributions came from Tony Williams, Steve Gadd, and Peter Erskine (the latter an ex Stan Kenton/Maynard Ferguson drummer recruited to the project by Pastorius). Erskine became a full member of the band for the next tour and remained with Weather Report until 1982. The album also featured guest appearances from Deniece Williams and Earth Wind and Fire leader Maurice White. The album rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart. Notoriously, Mr. Gone (1978) received only a one star review rating from DownBeat after a string of group releases which had all pulled a five star rating. The group arranged for a rebuttal interview with the magazine to defend their efforts. Zawinul and Pastorius were uncompromising in their contributions to the interview, Shorter more philosophical, and Erskine the most reticent of the four. By the late '70s, Weather Report was a quartet of Zawinul, Shorter, Pastorius, and Erskine, and (for the first time) had dispensed with the auxiliary percussionist role, which had been integral since the band's inception. Instead, all four members doubled on percussion at various points in live performances. Zawinul commented that this sleeker, less crowded sound provided more listening range and made the music less chaotic now that the band were focusing more on melody and harmony. The larger scale and multimedia staging of the band's tours (complete with stagehands, laser and film projections) began to take on the kind of rock star proportions mostly unknown in jazz circles. The 1979 double live album 8:30 (which won that year's Best Jazz Fusion Performance) was recorded on the Mr. Gone tour and captured the direct power and energy of this lineup of Weather Report. Zawinul later described this lineup as "one of the greatest bands of all time! That band was a hummer!" Between March 2 and 4, 1979, Weather Report traveled to Havana, Cuba, to participate in the historic Havana Jam festival, a break in mutual Cuban/American political hostilities, which had American artists such as Stephen Stills, the CBS Jazz All Stars, Bonnie Bramlett, Kris Kristofferson, Rita Coolidge, and Billy Joel play alongside Cuban artists such as Irakere, Pacho Alonso, Tata Güines, and Orquesta Aragón. Another featured performance was by the Trio of Doom (a short lived teaming of Pastorius with John McLaughlin and Tony Williams). Weather Report's performance featured in Havana Jam '79, Ernesto Juan Castellanos' documentary celebrating the event.

At the beginning of 1980, Pastorius recruited hand drummer Robert Thomas Jr. (a fellow Floridan, with whom he had jammed previously) into the band. Thomas featured on the 1980 album Night Passage. A tighter and more traditional recording than previous releases, the record featured a more prominent role for Shorter, a strong element of bebop, and a nod to jazz's golden age via a high speed cover of Duke Ellington's "Rockin' in Rhythm" (showing off Zawinul's pioneering and ever increasing ability to create synthetic big band sounds on his synthesizers). By now, Pastorius was displaying signs of the mental instability and substance abuse problems that ultimately wrecked his career; the close relationship he'd previously shared with Zawinul was becoming strained as Zawinul lost patience with Pastorius' showmanship onstage (beginning to feel that it detracted from the music). Towards the end of the year, Pastorius began working on his long delayed second solo album (Word of Mouth) (1981) in New York, while Zawinul worked on new Weather Report material in California. Weather Report's next album Weather Report (1982) (their second eponymous release, following their 1971 debut) was recorded in 1981, although it was not released for another year. Zawinul's dominance as instrumentalist and composer (as well as group director) was even more pronounced on this album. Increasingly, the band's music was written out rather than improvised. At the same time, Pastorius was spending more of his creative attention on his Word of Mouth project: his only writing for the Weather Report album was his contribution to a single group composed piece. Shorter (who only contributed one composition to the 1982 album, beyond group written work) was already taking a less active approach. He later commented, philosophically, "For a long time in Weather Report, I abstained. I elected not to do things." Erskine's own commitment to Word of Mouth (and his summer commitment to Steps Ahead) meant that his part also needed to be replaced; at the same time, Robert Thomas Jr. left the band. Reduced to a duo, and with tour commitments looming, Zawinul and Shorter were obliged to quickly assemble a new band.

On the recommendation of Michał Urbaniak, Zawinul and Shorter recruited 23 year old drummer Omar Hakim, a talented session player and multi instrumentalist, who had played with a variety of musicians including Mike Mainieri, David Bowie, and Carly Simon. Hakim was immediately entrusted with recruiting the rest of the new lineup. Having failed to secure Marcus Miller as bass guitarist, he selected Victor Bailey (a recent graduate from the Berklee College of Music, with whom Hakim had played while backing Miriam Makeba). Hakim also recruited percussion/concertina player José Rossy, with whom he had worked in Labelle. The new Weather Report went straight onto tour. The music developed on tour was later recorded for the 1983 album Procession, which showed the band beginning to make something of a return to the "world music" approach which it had pioneered in the mid 1970s, and featured a cameo appearance from The Manhattan Transfer. Having reluctantly agreed with Shorter that he would no longer use the band name, Zawinul then ended Weather Report. The final album under the Weather Report name, This is This!, was released in June 1986 and fulfilled the band's contract with Columbia Records. Two of its tracks featured guitar work from Carlos Santana, and it also marked the return of Peter Erskine on drums, with Hakim only appearing on one track.

Having split the band, Zawinul promptly attempted to reform it – after a fashion – as Weather Update. Weather Update toured in 1986 and 1987 before Zawinul dissolved the band. From 1988 onwards, Zawinul went on to enjoy a successful nineteen year career leading the world music/jazz ensemble The Zawinul Syndicate (which has continued, following Zawinul's death, as The Syndicate). Rather than form another collective band, Wayne Shorter concentrated on his solo career and on work as a bandleader, which continued until his death on March 2, 2023. In spite of the band's enduring popularity, a Weather Report reunion never occurred. The nearest that the band ever came to reuniting was when Zawinul and Shorter both played live with Miles Davis on July 10, 1991, in Paris (the only time when Zawinul is known to have shared a live stage with Davis). Six of the band's members have since died. Zawinul himself died on September 11, 2007, in Vienna from skin cancer (Merkel cell carcinoma). He was predeceased by mid period bass player Jaco Pastorius, who died on September 21, 1987, following a fatal beating in his hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Pastorius' successor on bass guitar, Victor Bailey, died on November 11, 2016 (apparently from complications from Charcot Marie Tooth disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Alphonse Mouzon, the first drummer, died on December 25, 2016, from cardiac arrest after neuroendocrine cancer. Dom Um Romão, the group's drummer from 1971 to 1974, died in 2005 aged 79. Wayne Shorter died on March 2, 2023, at the age of 89.