Category Archives: Weather Report

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.

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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.

The Time Weather Report Was So Loud It Shut Down the Venue

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If you attended a Weather Report concert back in the day, you know it was loud. This is because Joe Zawinul liked it that way, perhaps inspired by the raw power that he admired in rock bands. And so as part of my “Fifty Years Ago Today” theme, we remember the time Weather Report was so loud that it actually shut down a music venue.

After a month-long break that began just before Christmas 1972, Weather Report resumed performing in late January of the following year, with gigs at the University of New York at Stony Brook, a weeklong return to the Smiling Dog in Cleveland, and three nights at a tiny Atlanta music venue called the Twelfth Gate.

Weather Report then traveled up the Eastern Seaboard to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where it spent five days in early February recording its third album, Sweetnighter. After those sessions, the band immediately hit the road again, arriving in Boulder, Colorado, for a gig at a new venue called Edison Electric on February 12.

At the time, Boulder’s live music scene was dominated by Tulagi, located just a few blocks from the University of Colorado campus. But in late 1972 Talagi found itself in competition with Edison Electric, a short-lived and little-remembered music venue (“behind the McDonalds” according to the advertising) that angled for many of the same acts that Talagi was attracting. Taking over the space of a previous club, Edison’s owners upgraded the premises with newly installed quad sound systems, new stage lighting, and “supergraphics” (whatever those are) on the walls, plus seating for 600 patrons. It was considered one of the best live music venues in town, and in its first few months of operation Edison Electric hosted Hot Tuna (when over a thousand people crammed inside), folk musician John Stewart, and the Dillards. The owners had eyes on bigger things for 1973, and booked Crazy Horse, Gram Parsons and Weather Report for early the next year.

So it was that Weather Report blew into town and proceeded to put on a well-received show for an audience of 550. It went so well that Weather Report vowed to be back soon. Everyone was pleased; that is, everyone but the motel owner next door.

Unhappy with the noise and crowds that Edison Electric attracted, he managed to get Colorado state officials to turn up at Weather Report’s show armed with decibel meters. Standing outside the club, they determined that the sound emanating from within ran afoul of the state’s legal limits and shut the place down.

According to contemporaneous reports, the legal limit was 55 decibels, whereas Weather Report was measured at 62 dB outside the club. How loud is 62 decibels? 60 dB is about the loudness of a normal conversation, or background music, or normal piano practice. As a point of comparison, the city where I live limits outdoor music to 70 dB measured 25 feet or more from the source until 10:00 p.m., after which it can be no louder than 60 decibels. The same applies to indoor music as heard outside the business. So a threshold of 55 dB seems a bit low, but that remains Colorado state law in commercial areas from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Maybe the club should have invested in more sound insulation than “supergraphics.”

In any event, Edison Electric was instantly caput. “Thanks to my good neighbor at the motel next door, I’ve got a permanent injunction not to open,” club owner Conboy grumbled to the Colorado Daily. “My voice right now is about 60db. The traffic out on the turnpike is more than that. The Boulder ordinance is 80 dB. They came out and measured outside our door. Sixty-two dB, but…”

“If I sound bitter, I am,” Conboy added. “I just took a $560,000 bath. Out of business, bankrupt, down the tubes.”

With or without Edison Electric, Weather Report did return to Boulder, performing at Tulagi for five nights in June, and giving a concert in October at the 2,000-seat Macky Auditorium on the University of Colorado campus. That was a lot of gigs in an eight-month period for a metro area of about 140,000 people. Evidently Boulderites had good taste in music.

Remembering Weather Report’s 1972 Tour with Santana

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Advertisement for Weather Report's performance in Lubbock, TX. Check out the ticket prices: $4 in advance, $5 at the door!
So in keeping with my “fifty years ago today” theme, I should have written this post in mid-December. Oops! Still, it’s worth highlighting these unique gigs, even if a month late, so here goes.

In December 1972, the rock group Santana was fresh off a 19-concert, 27-day jaunt across Europe when it returned to the United States for a short tour that kicked off in New Orleans on December 9. At the time, Santana was hugely successful commercially—its previous two albums had hit #1 on the commercial charts—and it had just released its fourth studio album, Caravanserai. That record was a departure from Santana’s previous work, emphasizing improvisation and open-ended structures. In that endeavor, Carlos Santana and his musical partner Michael Shrieve were influenced by “all sorts of funk and jazz stuff,” but especially Miles Davis, Weather Report and Herbie Hancock. So a concert pairing with Weather Report wasn’t completely outlandish even though Weather Report was still essentially an avant garde jazz group at this point. And given that both were signed to Columbia Records, it was probably welcomed by the label.

I have contemporaneous confirmation for four shows: New Orleans; Dallas; Lubbock, Texas; and Tuscon, Arizona. A website visitor remembers a show in San Antonio, Texas, and there may have been one in El Paso as well. They were arranged by Bill Graham, the San Francisco–based promoter who was an early supporter of Santana’s, and who accompanied the troupe on this tour. (Brian Risner remembers him always being first off the airplane and immediately on the pay phones, conducting business.) When Graham asked Santana who he would like to have as the opening act, it took him “less than a second” to say Weather Report.

Santana was especially enamored with Wayne’s playing, and he and other band members would listen to Weather Report’s sets from the side of the stage each night. However, it wasn’t the happiest of tours for Weather Report. They got about 45 minutes of stage time in front of crowds that weren’t there to see them, and the response could be rather rude. Even Carlos found it uncomfortable when people would scream “Santana” while Weather Report was playing, as he related in his autobiography, The Universal Tone. “I wanted to go onstage, grab the mike, and say, ‘Hey, shut the fuck up! This is Weather Report—this is Wayne Shorter. You’re embarrassing me!’” He thought that maybe Santana could open the shows instead, but Graham dissuaded him of that idea, explaining, correctly, that people would leave as soon as Santana was done.

I have one review from these shows (from Tucson) and it confirms the audience’s attitude toward Weather Report.

The unknown and the well-known—that’s what it was at the Community Center Arena last night. Santana and Weather Report. Who has ever heard of Weather Report? Well, now Tucson has. They weren’t well received at all and it’s difficult to say why. I’m sure they won’t be forgotten.

None of Weather Report’s five men spoke a word—not even to introduce their songs, if that’s what you call them.

It was very free-form music, the success of which depends upon how well the musicians can interact with one another spontaneously. All of this added up to a set pervaded with subtle, fleeting, morsels of music followed by tense moments of waiting for them to do it again. I waited gladly, but “boos” could be frequently heard between numbers along with the cheers of the few but vociferous devotees.

Maybe the day will come when teenagers can trust a group with a balding piano player.

After that show, Santana recalled going up to Wayne and finding him “a little cool to me. I could tell that opening for Santana was not his favorite experience.” Nevertheless, Wayne took away some lessons that he recalled 35 years later in a JazzTimes article by George Varga.

There was a big snowstorm [in Lubbock]. And even after the storm let up a little and we went to the venue, we didn’t see any cars in the parking area, just a few buses. Then we went inside and the place was packed! We, as Weather Report guys, kind of realized, “People will get here super-early, even in a snow storm, to hear Santana.” This kind of affectionate crowd, with that degree of dedication, was something we didn’t see in a straight jazz-oriented setting.

Beyond the music, I could see in Carlos’s eyes and even in the attitude of the guys in the band that there was a humanistic approach to almost everything they did and were doing. I noticed that they were not like a band, but like a family. And I just couldn’t help but see this tremendous, reciprocal respect from Carlos to the band and from the band to Carlos. Of course we’d heard about him from Woodstock. But when we signed with Columbia Records, Carlos was the number one record-seller. Where Carlos was a challenge for us was to try to achieve that kind of audience, to gather that kind of audience in those kinds of numbers, to hear what we were doing. Carlos’s fame, audience-wise, ignited our imaginations to see if we could do that our way and accomplish that kind of audience recognition. We considered our music [to be] storytelling and almost very visual.

Another byproduct of this tour was the friendship that developed between Miroslav Vitous and Santana bass player Doug Rauch. The latter introduced Miroslav to former Sly and the Family Stone drummer Greg Errico, and the three of them would jam at Errico’s house in the San Francisco Bay Area. This would eventually lead to Errico joining Weather Report in June 1973.

The day after the Tuscon gig, everyone took a charter flight to San Francisco, where Graham gave Weather Report two more gigs at Winterland, opening for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention the first night and B.B. King the second night. The San Francisco crowd seemed more receptive to the band than those of the Santana tour. Philip Elwood, the longtime music writer for the San Francisco Examiner, wrote that Weather Report was “the first new-sounds, or ‘jazz,’ group to have ever gotten a Winterland rock crowd really turned on.” The band turned in “a perfectly beautiful short set. Their ability to indicate rhythmic integrity and use dynamic surprise to perfection made their music exciting while still artistically valid. . . . If you are going to Winterland tonight be sure to hear Weather Report. Incredible.”

Weather Report performed with Santana at least one other time, at the Cleveland Coliseum in 1976. John McLaughlin’s Shakti was also on the bill. (Weather Report and Shakti did a number of joint concerts that year.) Over the years, Wayne and Santana also performed at several benefit concerts and a friendship developed, culminating in them touring together in 1988. Their performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival tour is preserved in CD and DVD form (Live At The 1988 Montreux Jazz Festival by the Carlos Santana–Wayne Shorter Band). And of course, one other Weather Report–related Santana connection is that he played on Weather Report’s final album, This Is This, effectively substituting for Wayne, who had already begun his post–Weather Report career and was unavailable for all but a cameo on that record.

Fifty Years Ago Today—Weather Report At the Bitter End

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Village Voice advertisement for Weather Report's performances.
Fifty years ago today, Weather Report opened a two-night stand at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. The club seated 230 people and according to contemporaneous reports, it was packed for Weather Report’s performances. The band had been working steadily throughout 1972, thanks to the booking efforts of Bob Devere, who took over Weather Report’s management early in the year. Many of these gigs were multi-day engagements at clubs, often for a week at a time.

What makes the Bitter End gigs notable is that according to Brian Risner this was Joe Zawinul’s first public performance with a synthesizer. Joe had owned his ARP 2600 for over a year—actually it was given to him by ARP “for evaluation”—but he regarded it as too fragile to travel with. However, given that the band was performing in town, Risner suggested that they bring it down to the club. Joe was reluctant at first, but Risner won him over, taking the synth to the Bitter End by taxi, wrapped in a blanket to avoid potential damage.

Dan Nooger reviewed the first night’s show for the Village Voice. “The atmosphere recalled a concert hall or art gallery on opening night,” he wrote.

I last saw the group a little over a year ago at the Beacon, when drummer Eric Gravatt and percussionist Dom Um Romáo had just joined. Their music then seemed rather formless, consisting mostly of undirected riffing, with only occasional sax or electric piano lines breaking through to the surface of the percussion-dominated sound.

Although their first number recalled the aimlessness of their earlier appearance, the rest of their material, drawn from their latest album I Sing the Body Electric, gave each musician sufficient solo space to construct cohesive statements. “Crystal,” which featured Josef Zawinul on synthesizer, was built around repeated cycles of ascending arpeggios, recalling Terry Riley’s experiments in the area of “trance music.” The high, keening sounds, offset by Romáo’s percussive effects, established a pervasively mysterioso atmosphere for a graceful, leaping tenor solo by Wayne Shorter that developed into a free-blowing conversation among all the players.

Nooger’s description of “cycles of ascending arpeggios” likely referred to the sample and hold feature of the 2600, which could automatically create repeating sequences of ascending or descending notes, or rapidly triggered random tones, depending on how it was configured. In surviving unofficial recordings from 1973, Joe can be heard using this feature, changing the 2600’s configuration as the notes played in order to vary the sound. Of course, Joe would add his own playing to the mix, as well as those of the other musicians, to create highly improvisational performances.

Nooger offered other insights about Weather Report’s performance that night:

Romáo garnered cheers from the crowd when he made the group’s only concession to theatricality (or perhaps simply our presence) by dancing down the center aisle while playing a metal-strong bow with an exotic gourd rattle. At the conclusion of the set, after the other men had filed offstage, Gravatt announced the band members—the first words spoken by any of the group—and that was that. Their music was mostly excellent, but their utter disdain for their obviously devoted listeners was a trifle disconcerting, though it didn’t seem to bother most of them.

Nooger was describing Romáo playing the berimbau, an instrument from Brazil that was little known in the United States at the time. In fact, it is said that Romáo was the first person to play a berimbau in public performance in the United States when he was with Sérgio Mendes’s Brasil ’66.

Nooger’s observation that no words were spoken other than Gravatt’s band introductions remained true of virtually all of Weather Report’s performances. After Gravatt left the band in June 1973, Wayne Shorter took over the introduction duties.

Nooger’s other observation—that the band seemed to hold “utter disdain” for their audience—wasn’t true, but it was a perception other reviewers hit upon as well. Earlier in the year, Don Heckman of the New York Times attended Weather Report’s performance at the Gaslight Au Go Go, writing that while the music was “magnificently executed,” he “couldn’t help but feel that it was more enjoyable to the musicians than to the listeners.”

These were sentiments that likely wouldn’t have sat well with Zawinul. As he would say a few years later, “For me, happiness has something to do with getting across to people.” Less than two months after the Bitter End gigs, Weather Report would record its third album, Sweetnighter, which would be an attempt to do just that.

As for the Bitter End, it’s still in business at its original location, 147 Bleecker Street, where a virtual who’s who of the music world has performed. The heavy wooden doors that have served as the club’s entrance since 1961 are now adorned with a plaque from by the City of New York proclaiming the Bitter End as an official historic landmark.