Live & Unreleased

by

Weather Report

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Weather Report was the Jazz Fusion group of the 70's & 80's. During the period inwhich Ken Burns declared "Jazz died", Joe Zawinul & Wayne Shorter created some of the most intelligent and creative music period. Blending worldly rhythms around well thought out compositions and throwing in some improvisational fire to boot, Weather Report grew to become one of the most recognized music groups in the Columbia stable. During their 15 year recording duration, Weather Report went through four very distinct periods, each of which evolved around the bass player and a revolving group of percussionist. These periods are defined by Miroslav Vitous (71-74), Alphonso Johnson(74-76), Jaco Pastorious (77-82)and finally, Victor Bailey (83-86). This CD captures pieces of six various concerts from three of those four periods. It would have been nice to throw in a live version of "Boogie Woogie Waltz" or "125th Street Congress" from the Miroslav Vitous period. It could have painted a very colorful picture of how the music evolved over the 15 year time-span that Weather Report recorded.

The music is hot and furious in places and flat out cool and uneven in others. I wish the producers would have sequenced the songs in the order they were recorded instead of trying to make this sound like one long concert. The hottest tracks seem to come from the 1975 concert. "Freezing Fire", "Cucumber Slumber" and "Man In The Green Shirt" just flat out smoke. On these tracks the chemistry is magical - Zawinul and Shorter are locked in while the rhythm section cooks. Shorter blows his best when the bassist pushes him, and nobody did it quite like Alphonso Johnson. The Jaco Pastorious band excels on "Elegant People", "Black Market" and "Port of Entry". Here again, Shorter smokes while Jaco flirts and dances around him on bass. The rhythm sections always provided plenty of energy for the band to build an effective launching pad. This is great stuff.

The tracks that don't work well include "Where The Moon Goes". It was easy to like the studio version of this song because Manhattan Transfer worked their magic on the vocals, but the vocorder synthesizer version here does not work at all. It sounds out of place - yet, points to where the group was headed at the time - downhill. If you can program your CD player to play the tracks in the order they were recorded, it becomes very obvious that the magic had left by the time the 1983 concert was recorded.

Overall, this double-disc is a good representation of Weather Report in various live settings. I can only hope that somewhere in the Columbia vaults is the rest of that November 27, 1975 London Concert awaiting release, along with a couple of live tracks from the 71-74 Miroslav Vitous band. Until then, this will have to do.

After being absolutely blown away by the three live sides of 8:30, the rumor of another live Weather Report release had me intently searching the internet for clues daily ... and the fact that the tracks would be hand-picked by Zawinul himself from recordings spanning the entire star-studded history of the band only cemented my decision to order this disc sight-unseen.

Sadly, the music does not live up to my self-induced hype (nor my memories of seeing a post-Weather Report Zawinul band in concert). The tunes which repeat from 8:30 (Black Market, Teen Town) are culled here from pre-8:30 concert dates, before the band had learned to stretch the tunes into the raucous jams and solo showcases from 8:30 that test the limits of my stereo. The other Jaco- and pre-Jaco era tunes are similarly unspectacular performances (for Weather Report, anyway). Interestingly, it's the Victor Bailey and Omar Hakim material that is the most adventurous music on Live and Unreleased, although it is not enough to save an otherwise curiously by-the-numbers outing.

I have never been a big fan of "best of" or "through the ages" live albums -- especially ones that so unnervingly jump back and forth chronologically. Give me a complete concert from start to finish anytime, warts and all (such as the brilliant Miles Davis Complete at Montreux).

Weather Report was a smokin' band, in all its incarnations ... there must be some more smokin' concert recordings available for release, just waiting to blow my stereo once again.