Band | Formed 1970

Weather Report formed in late 1970 when Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, both veterans of Miles Davis's fusion recordings, recruited Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš to make music with no fixed structure and no soloists. Their debut on Columbia (1971) earned DownBeat's Album of the Year and the description "music beyond category." The early records were improvisational and atmospheric in a way that had no real precedent in jazz or rock. The personnel rotated constantly while Zawinul and Shorter remained the only fixed members across sixteen years and fourteen studio albums. The shift that defined the band's most famous period came when Jaco Pastorius joined midway through the "Black Market" sessions in 1976: his fretless bass playing and compositional contributions pulled the band toward a new kind of precision and propulsion, and the arrival of Peter Erskine on drums in 1978 completed that lineup. "Heavy Weather" (1977), featuring Zawinul's composition "Birdland," sold over a million copies. The band won five DownBeat Album of the Year awards in total, four of them consecutively from "Mysterious Traveller" (1974) through "Heavy Weather" (1977), and won the Grammy for Best Jazz Fusion Performance for the live double album "8:30" in 1979. Weather Report disbanded in 1986.