Collection: Weather Report

Weather Report formed in late 1970 out of a very specific frustration. Joe Zawinul had spent nine years in Cannonball Adderley's quintet writing and arranging within an idiom, and Wayne Shorter had done the same with Miles Davis, and both had contributed to Davis's fusion experiments on "In a Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew" before deciding they wanted a band with no fixed format, no eight-bar structure, no bridge. Zawinul later put it simply: "We always solo and we never solo." The founding trio, Zawinul, Shorter and Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš, released their self-titled debut on Columbia in 1971 to immediate critical recognition: DownBeat called it "music beyond category" and gave it Album of the Year. The early records were atmospheric, improvised and genuinely strange. The shift started with "Sweetnighter" in 1973, when Zawinul began steering the group toward groove and funk over open-ended improvisation, a direction Vitouš resisted until he left. Alphonso Johnson replaced him, then Jaco Pastorius arrived midway through the "Black Market" sessions in 1976 and changed everything again. The band won four consecutive DownBeat Album of the Year awards from 1974 to 1977, and "Heavy Weather" (1977), with Pastorius, Zawinul's "Birdland" as its lead track, and Peter Erskine on drums, sold over a million copies and made the band famous in a way that had nothing to do with jazz radio.