Fifty Years Ago Today—Weather Report at the Smiling Dog Saloon

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On September 15, 1972, Weather Report made its way to Cleveland, Ohio, for the first of three nights at the Smiling Dog Saloon. The band was in the midst of a four-month stretch in which Bob Devere kept them regularly booked, primarily at jazz clubs, with some college and university dates thrown into the mix. So the Dog, as it was affectionately known to the locals, was just another date in a string of dates. And yet this gig would have ramifications for Weather Report that lasted well beyond these three nights in Cleveland, as we shall see below.

Opened in October 1971, the Smiling Dog was housed in an old bowling alley. Bowling was big in the Midwest, so it was unusual for an alley to fail to draw enough business to sustain itself, but this one did. Perhaps this is because it was located in a rather seedy part of town off Interstate 71. As local saxophonist Ernie Krivda remembered, “If you were going to open up a club and bring in jazz, the last place you would think of was this particular area of West 25th Street. It was rough.”

There was a motorcycle shop across the street where bikers hung out working on their motorcycles. The Dog’s owner, Rodger Bohn, looked the part, attired in biker leathers and a bowler hat, with his hair pulled back in a long ponytail. But his looks belied a big heart, and many young musicians grew to love hanging out there.

Bohn ripped out the bowling lanes and replaced them with a stage and tables and chairs. In front, there was a bar and a game area with shuffleboard and air hockey games—holdovers from the bowling alley days. A biker-type known as Bear ran the front of the house, looking out for the young ladies who worked as barmaids because, as drummer Skip Hadden put it, “you never knew what was going to happen with that crowd.” Hadden also remembers being pressed into server as a bouncer when he wasn’t working in the house band; it was that type of place.

At first the Dog relied on local musicians and folk artists. Eventually, Bohn got the idea of booking touring jazz acts. At the time, there wasn’t a jazz venue in Cleveland, so there wasn’t any competition. Plus, a club in Cleveland would offer an additional way station for touring bands traveling between the East Coast and the Midwest, making it an attractive proposition to them. The first major jazz band Bohn booked was Weather Report. “I feel Weather Report is the heaviest jazz to happen in Cleveland in a long time,” Bohn told a local newspaper.

If he was going to be successful in his bid to draw national jazz acts, he needed to make a good impression with this show. Realizing he didn’t have the type of sound reinforcement Weather Report required, Bohn asked a couple of young musicians to help him out: Alan Howarth and Brian Risner. They were fixtures in the local rock scene and sometimes performed at the Dog. Howarth and Risner brought their own equipment down to the club and provided Weather Report with proper sound.

In fact, it was better sound than Weather Report was accustomed to. Howarth and Risner had an early form of Quad sound, for instance. They impressed the band so much that Bob Devere wanted to hire them as the band’s road crew. At age 24, Howarth was the older of the two, so he was probably given first consideration, but he wasn’t prepared to hit the road. Risner was, so Devere hired him as the band’s first roadie. He was 19 years old. At the end of the Smiling Dog engagement, he kept Weather Report’s equipment in his parents’ garage before driving it to the next gig.

Almost immediately, Risner assumed a much larger role with the band than that of roadie. In addition to setting up the band’s gear before gigs and packed it up afterward, he also handled travel logistics, getting the equipment on and off airplanes and arranging ground transportation. “Basically, I did everything,” Risner recalled. “They would book the hotels, but as far as getting the band around and getting them set up, and doing their sound, and keeping all the electronics going, I was it.”

Risner was a capable electronics technician and sound mixer, and he quickly became Joe’s righthand man. Joe now had a technical accomplice willing and capable of pushing the envelope. In many ways, they were partners; Zawinul supplied the musical vision, and Risner provided the technical expertise to help him bring it to fruition. Risner kept the ARP 2600s operating (not an easy feat considering they weren’t designed for the rigors of the road), built a custom on-stage mixer for Joe’s keyboard rig, outfitted Zawinul’s Rhodes electric piano with a superior sound system, and attended to countless other tasks.

Ultimately Risner became Weather Report’s recording engineer, supervising the recording of 1982’s Weather Report album, and recording Procession, which was released in 1983. Brian was the longest-tenured member of the band after Joe and Wayne, and they christened him the “Chief Meteorologist” on the Heavy Weather album jacket.

Alan Howarth joined the band in 1977. By then Joe’s keyboard rig had expanded to the point that it required a fulltime technician. Like Risner, Howarth was well-versed in electronics and was well-suited to this task. He guided Joe through the acquisition of the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 synthesizer, staying on for a couple of years before launching a career in motion picture sound design and music composition.

With the Weather Report gigs, the Smiling Dog became the jazz venue in Cleveland. Between 1972 and 1975, when the Dog closed, virtually every touring jazz band came through its doors, including Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, Stan Getz, Sun Ra, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, McCoy Tyner, and Ornette Coleman.

Despite these names, the Dog perpetually operated on a shoestring budget. The club was always “hanging on by the skin of its teeth,” Bohn later acknowledged. Six months of unrelenting financial losses forced him to finally close the doors. “Good weeks were not enough to make up for bad weeks,” he said.

After Weather Report, Brian Risner toured with Miles Davis, among others, before settling in Los Angeles, where he specializes in sound design and sound editing for television and movie studios. When I mentioned to him that the fiftieth anniversary of his joining the band was upon us, he sent me this note:

Fifty years ago. You never know what door you’re going to walk through and what you’ll come out to on the other side. But once you do, there’s no turning back. There is no back, only forward. This was Joe and Wayne’s take on life and their music: moving forward—always moving forward.

I was twenty years younger than the masters. We explored new ideas and new music technologies. Joe was ready to be as big as The Who! From Sweetnighter thru Heavy Weather, and beyond to Procession, each album had different sonic textures and mixes.

Fifty years. Timeless music.

Forward.

Fifty Years Ago This Month—Weather Report at Ronnie Scott’s

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Melody Maker, July 22, 1972.
Fifty years ago this month, Weather Report performed in London for the first time, holding forth for two weeks at Ronnie Scott’s Club. Their visit was highly anticipated. Melody Maker, Britain’s leading music weekly, called the band the “undisputed leaders at the crossroads where jazz meets rock,” and their engagement “possibly the most important date in London this week.”

These gigs, which began on July 17 and concluded on the 30th, came on the heels of a busy month for Weather Report. Bob Devere, the band’s new manager, kept them on the road for most of June, 1972, with week-long stints at the Jazz Workshop in Boston, the Esquire Show Bar in Montreal, and the Lighthouse in Southern California’s Hermosa Beach.

Melody Maker dispatched its lead jazz writer, Richard Williams, to review the London performances. He also interviewed Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, resulting in feature articles of both in the coming weeks.

Williams’s review reads as follows:

Weather Report is quite plainly one of the most effective bands of its type in the world. Where fusions are concerned, they operate seamlessly and effortlessly in the limbo between the electronics of rock and the creative improvisational interplay of jazz.

Their opening sets at Ronnie Scott’s Club, London, on Monday night obviously impressed the audience—indeed, who could fail to be moved in one way or another by the extreme facility, empathy, and power of this quintet?

They moved through sequences of highly sophisticated compositions with a practised ease which made it hard to define where writing left off and improvisation began, and there’s no doubt that they managed to create a far more spontaneous atmosphere than the Mahavishnu Orchestra or the Miles Davis groups, both of which seem rigid by comparison.

Individually, all five are masters. Joe Zawinul comes over as the leader, intentionally or not, playing with fuzz-tone and Echoplex to produce alien sonorities on the Fender piano. I do wish, sometimes, that he’d make use of the instrument’s softer tonalities—as he’s done on record in the past, to great effect.

As it was, his hard sound often blotted out the unassertive qualities of Wayne Shorter’s soprano sax—although when Shorter’s bitten-off phrases did cut through, the sound was marvelous. His tenor-playing is rather more aggressive, with a wholly personal tone and a method of phrasing which at first sounds crabbed but later reveals itself as astonishingly subtle.

Miroslav Vitous is a young giant of the bass, and it would have been good to hear more of him, too—particularly that incredibly emotional arco tone. Drummer Eric Gravatt impressed me much more than previously: he’s a neat, compact player who responds immediately to the musical needs of the other players, and who can also steam away at the head of the group when required.

Brazilian percussionist Dom Um Romão added a lot to the rhythmic and tonal palette, and seems much more group-conscious than his better-known contemporary, Airto Moreira. His playing is completely organic to the group’s overall sound, and his traditional melody on the berimbau, incorporating a little dance, was one of the highlights.

But still, I found that they left me a little cold for long stretches. Perhaps it’s the element of electronic sophistication which puts me off—or maybe Zawinul should just go easy on the volume pedal. Whatever, Weather Report have no peers in their ability to create extraordinary textures, and they should certainly be heard.

There are a number of interesting observations in this review. Regarding Zawinul’s “hard sound,” Joe was at the time using a harsh, distorted sound on his Fender Rhodes electric piano, as can be heard throughout the Live In Toyko album, recorded six months earlier. That would change with Weather Report’s next album Sweetnighter, and in the ensuing years Joe would produce among the most expressive bodies of work ever produced on the Rhodes electric piano.

Miroslav’s “arco tone” was a reference to his playing acoustic bass with a bow, something he did to beautiful effect on “Orange Lady” from Weather Report’s debut album. Coupled with Wayne’s soprano, it was a sound that Down Beat editor Dan Morgenstern described as “quite beyond description.”

As for Dom Um Romão, many reviewers of Weather Report’s shows singled out Romão for praise, even if they didn’t know what instruments he was playing. The berimbau, for instance, was an instrument that most American writers were unfamiliar with at the time. In addition to his musical sensibilities, Romão added some showmanship to the band’s performances, often walking though the audience while playing the berimbau.

Lastly, there’s Williams’s observation that Weather Report “left me cold for long stretches.” He wasn’t the only one to write something like that in 1972. Perhaps, as Williams suggests, it was those harsh—and loud!—Fender Rhodes tones that presumably led to ear fatigue among listeners after a while. But maybe there was more to it than that, because at the end of the year Zawinul would move Weather Report in a new and funkier direction.

Dave Smith, 1950–2022

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When I heard the news that synthesizer pioneer Dave Smith died on June 1, my mind wandered to the rendition of “In a Silent Way” that appears on Weather Report’s 1979 album 8:30. I heard it played live at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California. It was a beautiful performance, with Joe’s exquisite string patch backing Wayne’s soprano saxophone. That string sound came from Joe’s newly acquired Prophet-5 synthesizer, the instrument for which Smith is best know.

Smith’s path to the Prophet-5 began in 1972 when he purchased a Moog Minimoog. Utilizing his skills as an electrical and software engineer, Smith soon starting building accessories to the Minimoog for his personal use, one of which was an electronic music sequencer. Thinking he might be able to sell it to others, he founded a small company in 1974 that operated out of his apartment in Sunnyvale, California. He named it Sequential Circuits—a nod to his first product.

In 1977, Smith followed that up with the Model 700 Programmer, which could store the settings of an ARP 2600 or Minimoog. Joe bought two programmers, one for each of his 2600s. They greatly simplified the setup of his 2600s, allowing him to store 64 patches each, which could later be retrieved by pressing a few buttons, bypassing the laborious process of reconfiguring the sliders on the 2600s’ front panels.

Between the sequencer and the programmer, Smith did well enough to quit his day job and move operations from his apartment to a nearby industrial complex in the heart of Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, the microprocessor revolution had just begun. The first commercially successful personal computer, the MITS Altair 8800, hit the market in January 1975, while the Apple II was released in June 1977.

Smith was well-acquainted with this technology, and he harbored ideas of building a synthesizer around it. But the advantages of doing so were so clear to him that he figured the established synth manufacturers—Moog and ARP—must have already been working on it, so he was inclined to stick with accessory devices. However, when Smith attended his first NAMM show in June 1977, visitor after visitor to his booth suggested that he combine his sequencer and programmer with a synthesizer. On the flight back home, he thought about it some more and had a change of heart.

Smith got together with a musician and clinician named John Bowen, and together they worked out the design for a five-voice polyphonic synthesizer. It would have a sound architecture similar to a Minimoog, but the front panel knobs would control the settings for all of the voices simultaneously. More crucially, digital technology made it straightforward to save all of the synthesizer settings in computer memory, allowing the instrument to have a large bank of programs or patches, each of which could be recalled instantly. At the time, no one else had a synthesizer that could do that. In July 1977, Smith went to work on the project in earnest. His goal was to show his synthesizer to the public six months later.

Smith toiled in secret, but as the winter NAMM show approached, word got around that he had a polyphonic synthesizer. On the first morning of the show, representatives from Moog, Oberheim, and ARP all gathered at Sequential’s booth to have a look, but there was no synthesizer to be found. That’s because the one and only prototype was still in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Smith was working feverishly to get it to the point where it could be demoed.

After pulling an all-nighter, he took the one-hour flight down to Southern California, ambled into Sequential Circuit’s booth at around noon and set up the synth, now named the Prophet-5. “It mostly worked, most of the time,” Smith recalled. “It would crash once in a while and we’d have to restart it. But it was certainly operational enough to blow everybody away.”

Dave Smith at the Sequential Circuits factory in 1978. Photo: Sequential.
The Prophet-5 was a milestone in the evolution of synthesizers. As the first with an embedded microprocessor, its technology leapfrogged the competition. More critically, it gave musicians what they wanted: A polyphonic, fully programmable synthesizer that sounded fantastic. If you were serious about playing keyboards, you had to have one, even if you couldn’t afford the $3,995 price tag. Sequential Circuits came away from the show with orders for 400 units.

Right after Smith got back to the Bay Area, Joe’s keyboard technician, Alan Howarth, heard about “this Prophet-5 thing” from his music store friends back in his hometown of Cleveland, so he put in a call to Sequential’s Sunnyvale office. “Man, I heard you were at the NAMM show and you had something amazing,” Howarth said, asking if he could come up and have a look. “And I went up and visited Dave Smith in his little shop. The Prophet-5 from the NAMM show was sitting on the table. I took one look at it and said, ‘We gotta have it.’”

Inventing the Prophet-5 would have been enough to secure Dave Smith’s place in the pantheon of synthesizer pioneers, but his most far-reaching achievement was spearheading the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard so that instruments from different manufacturers could communicate with each other. It was demonstrated at the January 1983 NAMM show, when keyboards from Roland and Sequential Circuits were connected via a cable and played each other’s sounds. Up to that point, the various synth makers each developed their own schemes for connecting their devices, but no standard existed for general interoperability.

Despite some grumbling from the various manufacturers who were naturally invested in their own technologies, MIDI quickly established itself, and virtually all keyboards released from 1983 on were MIDI-equipped. Soon, personal computers also came with MIDI interfaces, leading to a wave of new software and hardware products that changed the face of music production. In recognition of his efforts, Smith is now known as “the father of MIDI.”

Dave continued to design and implement innovative musical instruments throughout his life, most recently at his company Sequential, which sells a modernized version of the Prophet-5 and Prophet-10 synthesizers. Joe wound up acquiring three Prophet-5s, as well as a successor model, the Prophet-T8, which he continued using right up to his last concert in 2007, 24 years after the instrument was manufactured! (Look for the Prophet-T8 logo at around the 3:32 mark in this video.)

Wayne and Jaco got their own Prophet-5s, too. In fact, Jaco’s second wife Ingrid remembered how Jaco used it to compose his most enduring composition, “Three Views of a Secret.” “He had recently moved into my tiny apartment, and it was the newly acquired Prophet 5 that helped him evolve the tune,” she said.

Not many people can lay claim to changing music. Dave Smith did. Rest in peace.

Banner photo credit: Sequential.

Fifty Years Ago Today—Weather Report in Central and South America

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Melody Maker, July 8, 1972.
Right after the Gaslight Au Go Go gigs, Weather Report flew to Mexico City to start a thirteen-concert tour of Central and South America. The tour was a byproduct of Joe Zawinul’s longstanding friendship with pianist Friedrich Gulda, a fellow Austrian two years older than Joe who also hailed from Vienna. By this time, Gulda was an international star—a “demigod” in Joe’s words—and the headliner of the tour. Weather Report served as the opening act, after which Gulda performed classical pieces on solo piano. He and Joe also played a piano duet each night.

One indication of Gulda’s star power at the point was that he flew first class while Weather Report flew economy. But Weather Report benefited from Gulda’s ability to dictate a relaxed schedule. “For us it was a very comfortable tour because Gulda didn’t want to play every day,” Joe recalled to Gunther Baumann (here translated from German to English). “In Costa Rica, we stayed for a week. The strange thing was, Gulda was nowhere to be seen outside the concerts with us. That he flew first class and we flew economy was okay, but otherwise, he kept to himself. But of course I’m very grateful to him: Through this tour, we were one of the most popular bands in America. In 1978 [actually 1980], we performed at the great Luna Park arena in Buenos Aires, all alone. The hall had 18,000 seats, and they still had to carry in extra chairs. That was one of the most popular—and best—concerts that we’ve ever played. When we wanted to drive an hour to the hotel after the concert, Wayne and I had to be carried over the people. Hundreds of fans waited at the exit for us.”

Wayne Shorter was particularly taken with what he saw and heard on this tour. According to an interview that appeared in Melody Maker later that year, Wayne talked at length about his experiences in Central and South America and claimed to have written a tune inspired by the Aztec pyramids. In Rio de Janeiro, the band cut short its own performance so they could hop in a waiting cab to go see the Brazilian singer/songwriter Milton Nascimento. “He’s digging deeper than Gilberto or Jobim or anyone into certain areas of life and sensibility,” Wayne said. “I heard some things there that made me feel reincarnated!” A few years later, Wayne would team up with Nascimento to record Native Dancer, the only album Shorter made under his own name during the Weather Report years.

Meanwhile, some concert attendees, expecting to hear an evening of classical music, were put off by Weather Report’s style of music. According to one report from Argentina, “The reception of this group was not too good, because the audience here is not much on the avant garde side of things.” That said, some listeners came away as inspired by Weather Report as the band members were by the likes of Nascimento.

Alyrio Lima remembered seeing the band in Rio de Janiero. “They were here in Brazil and I had to go and see them,” Lima told me years later. “My friend was the stage manager for the theater where they were performing, so I got a front row seat, which in fact was a backstage pass. It was a superb performance by the band, especially from Wayne and the drummer Eric Gravatt. That night I decided to go to New York and see how I would manage playing with musicians of that level of art in form of beauty. I was a rock-influenced drummer and initially my wish was to meet Jimi Hendrix and play with him. After the concert in Brazil, it was a turning point because I saw great masters, musicians praying with their playing, at ease with the newness of that magical musical moment, of the fusion.”

Lima subsequently came to the U.S. as a student at the prestigeous New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. While there, he was introduced to Weather Report’s manager, Bob Devere, who ultimately called him for the Tale Spinnin’ recording sessions and the tours that followed.