Fifty Years Ago Today—Ishmael Wilburn Joins the Band

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Dayton Daily News ad for Weather Report's Nov. 2 performance.
Okay, I’m a day late with this, but we need to commemorate Ishmael Wilburn’s first gig with Weather Report! It took place on Nov. 2, 1973, at the Palace Theatre in Dayton, Ohio, a 1920s-era movie palace that saw its share of live music going back to the heydays of Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie.

The advertisements for the show listed Eric Gravatt as the drummer, even though Gravatt had left the band in June. Taking his place was Greg Errico, whose first gig I wrote about here. By October, Errico was preparing to leave the band, so Joe and Wayne began looking for a replacement.

Ishmael, who was born and raised in Philadelphia, was then in a local band that featured original material in a funky-jazz vibe with a female vocalist. Weather Report came to town on October 14. This was the night Joe and Wayne heard Alphonso Johnson play bass with Chuck Mangione, leading to Alphonso joining Weather Report. It was also the night that Wilburn got on Joe and Wayne’s radar.

“We had a guy who sort of managed our group, and I think he was somehow connected to Wayne Shorter,” Ishmael recalled. “He went down to the show to see them—I didn’t go to the show—and he let them hear a demo tape of some originals we were working on, and they liked the drumming. Joe liked my foot. That’s what I remember the guy saying when he came back. He said, ‘Hey man, those guys want to talk to you. They want you to do an album with them. Joe really likes your foot.’ I said, ‘Wow, my foot!'” [laughs]

I asked Ishmael what Joe meant by his “foot.” “My kick drum,” he explained. “How I play my kick drum. Where I drop and how I played my kick drum. He really liked the feel of how I played.” Going back to the recording of Sweetnighter, Joe was keen on finding a drummer with a powerful bass drum sound. Ishmael fit the bill.

Ishmael Wilburn in 1973-74. Photo courtesy Ishmael Wilburn.
I have to imagine that getting an offer to play with Weather Report, let alone record an album with them, was probably the last thing on Wilburn’s mind at the time. He was twenty years old and his experience was mainly limited to local groups. “I had done some things with local bands in Jersey, New York—small club stuff, maybe a big venue where we weren’t the main draw—you know, a doo-wop group or something like that. I had backed up a lot of doo-wop groups up to that point. That was the thing in Philly.”

Nor was Wilburn all that familiar with Weather Report’s music. “I had never really heard of Weather Report. [laughs] I was more into Cold Blood, Earth, Wind & Fire, Rare Earth, Chicago—that kind of stuff. I was coming from a gospel background.” Nevertheless, when the offer came, Ish was willing to give it a try.

Joe and Wayne wasted little time getting Wilburn to a gig. Ten days after they were in Philadelphia, Weather Report had a show in Washington, D.C., and they invited Wilburn to come down. “Somehow or another I was supposed to go meet them,” Wilburn told me. “They paid for me to go to D.C.; they were supposed to play at Constitution Hall. I took the Amtrak down and I think I was going to sit in or do something at soundcheck so they could get a feel for me. But something happened. They didn’t get into town and I was delayed, and it was getting late. I think the show was pushed back or something. Anyway, I didn’t meet them. So I came back to Philly and started doing my daily thing.

“And then I got a call from their manager, and he said, ‘Listen, they want you to play a gig with them.’ I said, ‘What? I have never even played with them. I have never met them. You’ve got to be kidding me.’ So I said okay.” Wilburn caught a plane to Dayton—he had never been on an airplane before—where he met the band for the first time. After checking into the hotel, he went to the Palace Theatre for soundcheck.

“I was actually playing on Greg Errico’s drums. He had these Ludwig clear acrylic drums—huge drums—and I’m not very good at playing other people’s drums. I hate that. I don’t like going and sitting in. But anyway, we did a soundcheck for about forty minutes, and I was nervous as hell.

“Then we did the concert. I had never played a room that size. Scared as hell. That was really something. It was a standing ovation. I really hadn’t understood how big they were in the jazz market. And afterwards Joe told me how great it was. Joe Zawinul was a character. Oh my God, man! He took a tape off the soundboard and gave me a cassette of it and said, ‘This is you. Listen to this. This is you!’ I didn’t even recognize me playing the drums with them. I said, ‘No, this is not me.’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s you!'”

As I wrote in my book, so began a whirlwind that found Ishmael playing with one of the leading jazz bands of the day. A month later he was at Devonshire Sound Studio recording Weather Report’s fourth album, Mysterious Traveller. There’s no question that Wilburn’s playing was instrumental in creating the unique sound of that album, one of Weather Report’s best.

“Great memories for me out there,” Ishmael said of his time in Los Angeles. “We were out there recording, and I was staying in this little hotel bungalow. I had my own room. Dom Um [Romão] was like a mentor to me. I remember him cooking me lentil soup, stuff like that. I drove around L.A. a little bit, but I was twenty years years old. I got home sick. They flew me home for Christmas. It was weird being in L.A. with Christmas trees and Santa in shorts. I just couldn’t handle that.” [laughs]

There’s lots more about Ishmael’s experience with Weather Report and the recording of Mysterious Traveller in my book Elegant People: A History of the Band Weather Report. When I interviewed Ish for the book, I told him that Mysterious Traveller was one of my favorite albums, and that it must be gratifying to know that people are still listening to it decades later.

“It is,” he replied. “That’s my claim to fame. Every musician wants to be associated with an album like that.”

Fifty Years Ago Today—Greg Errico Joins the Band

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Melody Maker review of Weather Report's Jul. 6, 1973, performance.
On July 6, 1973, former Sly and the Family Stone drummer Greg Errico made his debut with Weather Report. The band’s performance was part of the Newport Jazz Festival, which had been transplated to New York City the previous year after a near-riot forced the cancelation of the festival in 1971. Festival events were spread across the city in multiple venues over multiple days, group in themes. In Weather Report’s case, it appeared at Philharmonic Hall on a double-bill with Chick Corea’s Return to Forever.

Errico replaced Eric Gravatt, who had been the band’s drummer since October 1971. Gravatt was a truly great jazz drummer, but with Weather Report’s third album, Sweetnighter, the band began moving in a funkier direction that demanded a different approach from the rhythm section. This was made clear by the fact that Joe Zawinul brought in an R&B drummer for the recording session, replacing Gravatt on several of the album’s tracks. That, coupled with some interpersonal issues with Zawinul, made it increasingly clear that Gravatt’s days with the band were numbered. He soldiered on for several months, but behind the scenes Zawinul began looking for a replacement.

Meanwhile, bassist Miroslav Vitous had been introduced to Errico by mutual friend Doug Rauch, who was the bassplayer in the rock group Santana. Miroslav and Errico got along well, jamming together when they had the opportunity, and even talked of doing an album together. So When Zawinul mentioned that he wanted to make a change, Miroslav asked Errico if he would be interested in going out with the band. He was.

“When Mirsolav asked me to join them, I think it was like a week or two before the tour was going to start,” Errico told me when I interviewed him for my book Elegant People: A History of the Band Weather Report. “They wanted me come back to New York and rehearse a little, meet everybody, meet Joe, and I said fine. I went back a couple of days early, and I remember Joe lived in a loft. So I went there and for the first time I met Airto and Flora [Purim]—they were hanging out with them. And Jan Hammer, met him. It was a whole different circle of people in relation to where I had come from. It was very refreshing and I enjoyed it. And we did a couple of rehearsals and we hit.”

Adding Greg Errico must have raised eyebrows within the jazz community—and the rock community, too. It would have been an unmistakeable signal that Weather Report was making a more overt effort to combine elements of rock and funk into its music. “Well, you know, there was a lot of that happening,” Errico told me.

Up to then, the jazz world had always been segregated. I remember growing up in San Francisco and there was a lot of jazz around here, and they had their own club, and that was it. But this time period [the late-sixties/early-seventies] was when Miles [Davis] got turned on to us [Sly and the Family Stone]. He came up to the Newport Jazz Festival and hung out with us the whole weekend. And so the jazz world wanted some of that new audience, that bigger audience. They wanted to reach out to bigger audiences and younger people to sustain, to continue to be. Because I think in the fifties and the early-sixties, they were the thing. They had the world watching there for a while, and they saw this new thing happening, these huge audiences, which was new for everybody, even in the rock world. It was like a phenomenon that was happening. The music changed the world, from the Beatles to Woodstock, and all these things that were happening socially all around the planet.

So they wanted some of that, and they started listening and looking, and finding things that they could connect with, to latch onto—like something they could grab onto to get catapulted and pulled into this thing. I mean, they didn’t just go get whatever pop tune that was number one for a week; they were looking for something valuable. And there were things. There was a lot of great writers and creative people, like Sly himself, the Beatles, the arrangements, and some of the things that were happening musically. It was real music. It wasn’t just Tinker Toys. So that was happening a lot during that time period.

Look at what Miles was getting into. And Herbie [Hancock]. I mean, there was a lot of passing the ball around, everybody trying out each other’s things and doing something with it. Those were very interesting times. The stuff that came out of the late-sixties and early-seventies still lives today, recreating itself through young audiences five generations removed. So there’s something there. Obviously, there are elements that connect with people that weren’t around then. And it keeps on connecting.

Errico’s tenure with Weather Report was relatively short-lived. He toured with the band for about four months, going to Japan and Europe, in addition to performing numerous gigs in the United States. Joe always said that Greg played “Boogie Woogie Waltz” better than anyone before or since.

“Musically, it was like he threw me the keys to the car, and I just had a lot of fun,” Errico told me. “It was challenging, but it all worked. The Chemistry was good. And sometimes Dom Um [Romão] would jump on the drum set, too. He was a percussionist, but he had a small set of traps up there and once in a while he would jump on them.”

“I really enjoyed traveling the world with them,” he told me. “Whether it be the musical experience or the exposure to different audiences, it was a whole different vibe, a whole different paradigm. I really enjoyed it.”

“The Boogie Woogie Waltz Man”—Remembering Herschel Dwellingham

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Herschel Dwellingham, whose drumming provided the funky underpinnings for Weather Report’s third album, Sweetnighter, passed away on April 16. He was 77 years old.

I got to know Herschel while researching my book Elegant People: A History of the Band Weather Report. I interviewed him twice, and over the years we talked by telephone many times, usually initiated by Herschel calling me out of the blue. It was always fun hearing from him. One time he called to tell me about a new project he was working on. He called the band the Sweetnighters, an obvious nod to Weather Report’s album. When Herschel needed a write-up for it, I was happy to do it for him.

Write-up in Cashbox, Oct. 20, 1962.
Herschel had a long and varied career with an extensive list of credits not just for his drumming, but for songwriting, arranging, and producing as well. In fact, producing his own songs was his true passion. He got his first songwriting credit when he was sixteen years old and continued writing and producing to the end of his life. Many of his songs found an afterlife in television shows and motion pictures (e.g., “(Gonna Ride This) Whirlwind” as performed by the Escorts, which appeared in the 2020 film Don’t Look Up starring Leonardo DiCaprio).

Herschel got his start as a musician when he was just a toddler. As he told it, “My mother told me that to keep me from crying, she used to give me two wooden spoons and a pot for me to beat on just to keep me busy so she could cook.” A little later, his parents, who were school teachers, took him to a high school prom they were working at. In the band was Earl Palmer, a drummer who has been credited with helping to invent rock and roll, and who later gained fame as a member of the Wrecking Crew, a loose collection of studio musicians who played on hundreds of top 40 hits in the 1960s and 1970s.

As Herschel remembered, “Earl Palmer was playing with the Rhythm Aces [a popular band based in Herschel’s hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana] and I watched Earl all night, standing near the stage, just watching him. When the night was over he handed me a pair of drum sticks and that started me off. To this day, I keep four or five pairs of new sticks in my bag and I given them to kids who come up to me asking about the drums.”

In addition to the drums, Hershel learned the piano and played organ in his church. His high school bandleader taught Herschel how to write and arrange music, and he began arranging for the marching band. “I did that to keep from marching,” Herschel said. “I made a deal that I would orchestrate and arrange the half time shows to keep from marching because I hated it.” Herschel also took over the drum chair in the Rhythm Aces and starting writing his own songs. At the age of sixteen he took thirty songs he had written to Joe Ruffino, who ran two New Orleans–based labels, Ric Records and Ron Records (named after his sons). A month later, Herschel heard one of his songs on the radio, “Come On and Tell Her,” sung by Benny Freeman. All told, Ruffino released ten of Dwellingham’s songs as singles.

Upon graduating from high school, Herschel moved to Boston to attend the Berklee School of Music. At Berklee, he came under the tutelage of legendary drummer and teacher Alan Dawson. Years later, Herschel said his drumming style was a combination of his Louisiana roots and the rudiments that Dawson taught. He and Dawson would often trade licks in a Berklee practice room, and Herschel would pick up gigs substituting for Dawson at local jazz gigs. He was also part of a band that included guitarist John Abercrombie, Mark Levine on trombone, and Carl Schroeder on piano. They played a mixture of dance jazz, R&B, and funk.

Herschel leading the house band at the Sugar Shack.
While Herschel was studying with Dawson, the Sugar Shack opened in downtown Boston. It quickly became Boston’s one and only place to hear the top R&B, soul and funk acts of the day. After completing his studies at Berklee, Dwellingham took over the house band at the Sugar Shack, leading a 13-piece orchestra and backing many of the name acts that came through, including Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Smokey Robinson, just to name a few. Herschel also did sessions for local R&B acts. There’s no question he was an important part of Boston’s Black music scene in the late-sixties and early-seventies. According to Herschel, he became known as “Boston’s Number One Soul Man.”

Meanwhile, his real goal was to write and produce his own songs with the goal of achieving a national hit that could put him over the top. He did his own arranging, hired the musicians, and foot the bill for his own sessions, then either shopped the tapes to the record companies or put them out himself on My Record, a label he and his wife Alva started with Skippy White, a Boston disc jockey who also owned several record stores in the area. The first 45 he released on My Record was “Young Girl,” featuring vocalist Frank Lynch, who came under Dwellingham’s mentorship and sang in his band. Tragically, Lynch’s life was cut short when he was shot and killed by a police officer. That story was remembered in a recent Boston magazine piece which you can read here.

In 1971 Herschel took a song to Black Rock, CBS’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan. There he met Bob Devere, who was on Columbia Record’s Artists & Repertoire staff as manager of independent projects. In this role, Devere purchased the masters of regional hits that he thought could go national, which Columbia then put out on a subsidiary label, Date Records.

As Herschel remembered it, Devere didn’t really want to give him any time. “He said he didn’t have time to hear it. I said, ‘Well, take it in back, listen to it, and come back. We don’t have to go in.’” So Devere took Herschel’s tape back to his office while Dwellingham and his wife Alva waited in the lobby. When Devere returned, it was with a different attitude. He offered Herschel $15,000 for the master tapes, the only catch being that he wanted to re-record the vocal part using O.C. Smith, who a few years earlier had had a gold record with “Little Green Apples.” But Herschel wasn’t interested in giving the song to another vocalist and he wound up selling it to RCA instead.

A year and a half later, Devere was managing Weather Report and Joe Zawinul tasked him with finding a funky drummer for their upcoming recording session, and he thought of some R&B 45s that had come through his distributorship with the name “H. Dwellingham” on the center label. By then, Devere had forgotten all about Dwellingham’s visit, and even his name. After checking around for “H. Dwellingham,” he found Herschel in Boston and asked about the drummer on those tracks. Surprised to learn that Herschel played the drums in addition to writing the songs, Devere invited him to the Sweetnighter session. My book goes into great detail regarding the making of the album, so I won’t repeat it here. However, one thing I didn’t include in the book was Herschel’s reaction to Joe’s claim that he spent hours teaching the drummers the beat to “Boogie Woogie Waltz” and “125h Street Congress.”

“He’s full of shit,” Herschel said, laughing. “Everybody who knows me knows I was playing those beats even in my Boston days. It’s like a New Orleans drum style mixed with Alan Dawson’s jazz sensibility. If you hear the records I played on in Boston before Zawinul, you’d hear the same thing. Those beats are a combination of my Louisiana roots and George Stone’s Stick Control book as Alan Dawson taught it. I started incorporating his teaching in my playing way before Zawinul was ever in sight. That’s where that came from. Joe Zawinul didn’t teach none of us anything, especially me. I didn’t play the song more than two or three times, anyway. There wasn’t a live rehearsal—everything was done in the studio. So I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

With Eric Gravatt also in the studio for the Sweetnighter sessions, there’s been some confusion as to who played drums on what. According to Herschel, he was the sole drummer on “Boogie Woogie Waltz” and “125th Street Congress,” and he and Gravatt both played on “Manolete” (“Eric’s on the beginning of that with me”) and “Non-Stop Home.” “Non-Stop Home” was his favorite. “I liked that round jazz groove,” he told me. “That’s my ringtone for my phone. That’s what I use for my alarm.” (laughs)

“And then Zawinul wanted the tempo to speed up and that was a good finish—faster and faster and faster, intentionally.” As a session player, this wasn’t what you would normally do. “No, it wasn’t,” Hershel agreed. “I’ll tell you, bass players or keyboard players that push the tempo, I don’t play with them anymore. I don’t get high. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink. I don’t do none of that because I don’t want to mess with my built-in metronome. That’s what made me a great session player. I’ve never done anything with a click track unless it was a movie score I was playing. But all the records I played never had a click track.”

Shortly after the Sweetnighter sessions in February 1973, Herschel moved to New York City where he became an in-demand session drummer working with the likes of REO Speedwagon and Peter Nero. He also worked in the Broadway pit bands of many high-profile musicals. Aside from Sweetnighter, his best-known session work is probably Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In the Cradle,” a gig he got from Paul Leka, who co-owned Connecticut Recording Studio where Sweetnighter was recorded several months earlier. After spending a couple of decades in New York, Herschel returned to Bogalosa where he set up his own recording studio and production company.

Through it all, Sweetnighter seems to be the thing Herschel is best known for, and people mentioned it to him for years to come. “That one little album must have put me on the map,” he told me. “Even in Europe. I was in Frankfort and I did master classes and private teaching—it was just unbelievable. My wife and my friends say I really don’t realize what I did and how important to drumming my playing was. I’m just a country boy who doesn’t think nothing about that. To me, I was just trying to make money to feed a wife and three little kids. That’s what I was doing. I didn’t think I was making history or fame or anything. Just trying to keep money in the house.”

At one point, Herschel was in New York and noticed that Zawinul was there, too. “He was in town at the Blue Note and I was playing the same night he was playing, so I couldn’t get there. So I called the club and asked for Zawinul. They said he’s on stage; call back in ten minutes. I called back and said, ‘Tell Joe Zawinul that Herschel Dwellingham is on the phone.’ I thought, this guy isn’t going to remember who the hell I am, but he came to the phone and said, ‘The Boogie Woogie Waltz man!’ I said, ‘You remember me?’ He said, ‘Man, are you kidding?! There wouldn’t be no Weather Report if it wasn’t for you.’ That’s what he called me, ‘The Boogie Woogie Waltz Man.'”

I will miss Herschel. He was a good man. Rest in peace.

Wayne Shorter, 1933–2023

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“Jazz shouldn’t have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be required to sound like jazz. For me, the word ‘jazz’ means ‘I dare you.'”
—Wayne Shorter

Left to right: Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, Wayne ShorterJoe Zawinul, Chick Corea, and Wayne Shorter, June 1984. I'm sure they're all having a good time jamming somewhere in the beyond. Photo posted on Chick Corea's Facebook page several months before his death in February 2021.

Wayne Shorter passed away this morning at the age of 89. I’m still letting that sink in as I write this. What a remarkable career he had. He was an absolute giant in the world of jazz. The legacy of music he leaves us is vast. There’s no question that musicians and listeners alike will never cease to find new inspiration from Wayne’s recordings and compositions.

My social media feeds have been flooded with memorials and tributes to Wayne from fans who love his music, as well as those who were fortunate enough to work with him or call him a friend. I did not know Wayne well. I interviewed him twice. The first time was in conjunction with liner notes I was asked to write for a CD reissue of Weather Report’s album Tale Spinnin’.

Before we got around to discussing the individual tracks in detail, Wayne spoke from a more expansive perspective. The interview took place in December 2008, when the world was coping with the aftershocks of 2007-8 financial crisis. Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States the previous month. Here is the initial portion of that interview, which I have never published.

•

Wayne Shorter: This is what should have been done way back in 1971 [referring to my speaking with him about the album]. They didn’t do any real promotion for those fourteen years we were with them. But then again, they were resistant to the creative process. So just like an airplane needs resistance to take off? That was their main function, to be the resistance so that we could take off in ways that transcended making money. (laughs) That’s their real function. The real function of wealth is to be so resistant that it wakes people up, so people can be creative enough to do things that they wonder, how do you do things without money? How’d they do that without us?

Curt Bianchi: That’s a good way of putting it, especially with the record company.

WS: Everything! Everything. Creative diplomacy, everything. And then you have to have a certain life condition to be reciprocal to that. You have to have a higher life condition. That’s why when people negotiate stuff they come to a stalemate, because their life condition is low. They are parlaying from a position of greed, anger, and animosity. I’m speaking Buddhism now.

CB: Those words are interesting given the current economic conditions we find ourselves in.

WS: Right. Now Tale Spinnin’…

CB: I’ve owned this album since it came out as a record. I was a teenager at the time. In our household we used to buy Weather Report records when they came out. So I’m really glad to be able to do this and to speak with you, too.

WS: You know, that title tells about the content of the album. We used to sit around in the studio trying to think of a title for the album, and we talked about how people told tales in the old days—folk tales—and we actually started talking about these stories. Like Joe Zawinul talked about when he was a kid, talking about werewolves and things. And there were the old people, the grandfathers and great grandfathers, who said if you weren’t good the Krampus would come and get you. And I asked, what is Krampus? He said it was somebody who transformed into some kind of animal, like a large bunny rabbit or something, but so large that it would be frightening to a kid. And that was the word, Krampus, in Austria, in folklore. And we went on from one story to another, and everybody started contributing, bringing stories in, and we arrived at that name, Tale Spinnin’.

CB: You anticipated my question about that title. But also, you know how people always tried to describe Weather Report’s music, assigning it a term like fusion, but the term never actually worked very well. So I wanted to ask you about this idea of storytelling. Would that be a more accurate way of describing Weather Report’s music than a specific genre?

WS: 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’.

It’s almost like musicians taking photographs totally without their instruments. The photographer asks, can I get a shot of you with your horn, or your piano? No. (laughs) The thing is, we would say we were born without our instrument. (laughs) We were trying to force them to portray us as personalities—they do that after you are well known, but we started out that way—and not as a way of marketing the music, the ways that they thought were guaranteed so that you would have to conform to, and actually, do what they did by—like disrobing, like leaving your integrity at the door.

CB: So how do you manage to maintain your integrity through that process? This was a band that was together for a long time.

WS: Yeah, thirteen, fourteen years. We just kept doing what we did without asking anything, and we knew that it would take a long time for anything to start clicking. And they would kind of throw a tease in there. “Well, you know, this group Genesis, it took them nine months to click.”

CB: That wasn’t just a tease, that was a dig, wasn’t it?

WS: Yeah. And other things. They wanted us to simplify the music, to make it A-B-C. And I’m thinking, hey, life ain’t simple!

CB: What was cool about those Weather Report records was that each one was different, as you suggested. It was like the musical universe expanded with each one. Tale Spinnin’ was different from Mysterious Traveller, Black Market was different from Tale Spinnin’, and so on. It just seemed like there was a lot of creativity and expansion in those records that was really remarkable.

WS: Yeah. And it’s a funny thing. Those records like Tale Spinnin’ and stuff, right now there’s a sort of a call in those records to, at this time, to really be creative in the midst of a financial meltdown and all the fears that people have. When you are really scared, that is the time to muster the courage to create with no money. And the sincerity of creation will activate the ultimate law of cause and effect.

I don’t call it the beginning of creation—to me there is no such thing as the beginning—but it activates what I call eternal potential. And that potential emanates through every living being. And when things happen that you don’t understand, you say, “How the hell did that happen? How did Obama come to be?” You know what I mean? Or a simple lottery, somebody wins. In many circumstances it just seems like this thing happens. And the many become less-many and more large—instead of micro, more macro.

Back in the fifties, besides the process of payola, when something became a hit that didn’t sound like the usual ding-dong three-chord changes or four-chord changes—“moon June swoon, I love you, my baby left me,” and all that shit—they said they didn’t know why something became popular when it wasn’t supposed to be popular. And I think it’s this whole thing of cause and effect, where something profound strikes the dormant profundity in people. It’s dormant most of the time, but some of the time it wakes up a little bit, you know?

CB: And do you think that in times like now, when a stressful situation exists for many people, that it awakens that quality that you are describing?

WS: Yeah. Or somebody might call it your spiritual enlightenment beginning to take definite form—the path of enlightenment. Your wisdom has been waiting to grow. The potential is there, but it is waiting to burst through all these layers of bullshit. But you need the bullshit in order to grow! (laughs)

And there’s a great example of that: the lotus flower. The lotus flower only thrives in a swampy area, in jungles, in murky water. And when the flower blooms, the murky water around it becomes clear. So the murky water equates to the world that we live in—the spice and all that—and when enlightenment happens, the clarity starts. There have been many examples of that, and then it gets covered up and starts again, and covered up. And more people wake up to their eternal potential.

I’m not spinning a tale right now, but I guess in music we try to do that without having that kind of philosophical base. I hadn’t had that until I arrived at investigating it at age forty [when Wayne began to study Buddhism]. You know, “What in the hell is all this for? What is music for? What is anything for?” And sometimes we discussed that in other words. And those album titles, and the music that we did in Weather Report, were what you might call an instance of transcending business as usual, and having the music become interior decoration rather than just decorative stuff to reminisce with.

CB: Well, the fact that they’re putting this album out again thirty years later means that you had some success in that regard, right?

WS: Yeah. But in relation to the creators and their families, the heirs of the people—I’m not talking about anything financial—but something greater than music can grow out of that thirty years later. Music can be kind of like a flashlight into this unknown. (laughs)

But anyways, Tale Spinnin’, I don’t know how you can put this, but we were telling stories, a lot of stories. And the guys in the recording room, in the studio, were bringing their version of folk tales and ghost stories, and all that stuff. Incidents that are not mysterious or ghostly, but something akin to small miracles—very interesting anecdotes. And you try to, as Miles Davis said, (imitating Miles) “You know all those stories you talk about? Try to play that.”

CB: Joe always talked about how he was a storyteller.

WS: Well, Joe and I spoke a lot about things, and he and I talked about how his family got started. And when Jaco came on the scene, Jaco would add things to it. Peter Erskine had things to say. Alphonso [Johnson] had stores to tell us; not just stories, but things that really happened. And we would kind of polish off a recording session with that kind of thing simmering at the completion of the record. That kind of stuff would be simmering. No conversation, no words. That idea that nothing is wasted in life. Good or bad, negative or positive. Nothing is really wasted. Everything goes somewhere to become fertilizer for something else.

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Rest In Peace, Wayne. Thanks for the music, your words, your being.