I do like it when I’ve never heard of an artist, and get no idea from the artwork what to expect. I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to go a bit Trump sometimes and assume that because I’ve personally not heard of something, nobody has. And vice versa, that artists I’ve heard of are familiar to everyone. Surely I’m on safe ground assuming that anybody reading this will have heard of Hotel California by Eagles, though?
Anyway. I’d never heard of Weather Report, but maybe you have? Especially if contemporary jazz is your thing, because that’s what we get here. Prominent are Joe Zawinul who has been on here before playing keyboards for Miles Davis, and Jaco Pastorius who was here not long ago playing bass for Joni Mitchell. Also figuring is another saxophonist, Wayne Shorter, who wasn’t immediately familiar to me. Maybe he’s been on some other albums so far, but I didn’t look him up.
Shorter’s sax playing is easy jazz, and for the most part this is quite “lounge jazz” to me. You can tell Pastorius’ bass playing a mile off once you’ve heard it, and he does fit some nice slides in, as well as the kind of mellow walks that he did with Joni Mitchell. Suddenly in the middle of the album there’s a brief explosion of Afro-Latin percussion from Alex Acuña and Manolo Badrena that feels completely different from the urban-sophisticate late-night kind of music that the rest of the album gives us.
Pastorius makes some good bass elements, but they don’t give the same kind of mellow as on Hejira. Zawinul doesn’t seem as exciting as he does with Miles Davis (when paired with Chick Corea). The opening track Birdland is pretty good, but no other tracks particularly stood out to me except the aforementioned Rumba Mamá surprise percussion. Since I started doing this project, I've come round more to jazz than I thought, but this one didn't do much for me.
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