Weather Report - Heavy Weather (1977 Japanese CBS/Sony Vinyl LP)

Weather Report - Heavy Weather | Vinyl LP - 1977 Japanese CBS/Sony (25AP 357)

By the time of Heavy Weather, Jaco Pastorius had fully arrived. He had joined for the previous album, Black Market (1976), replacing Alphonso Johnson on a couple of tracks, but here he plays bass on everything except the percussion feature, and his contribution goes well beyond the bass chair. He co-produced the album, wrote two of its most celebrated pieces ("Teen Town," where he plays both bass and drums, and "Havona"), and shaped the sound of the record through his knowledge of the studio. His fretless bass functions as a third melodic voice, dancing above the range where a bass is supposed to sit. "Birdland" is the track everyone knows, Zawinul's tribute to the New York club where he had heard Basie, Ellington, Armstrong and Davis, and where he met his wife. The Oberheim synthesiser creates the illusion of a horn section, Jaco plays the melody in harmonics at the introduction, and the whole thing builds through section after section without a wasted bar. It reached the pop charts, which almost no instrumental jazz recording did in 1977. "A Remark You Made" follows, a slow, wordless ballad with Shorter's soprano saxophone floating over Zawinul's Rhodes and Jaco's bass, the most purely beautiful thing on the album.

The rest of the record moves between moods and textures. "Teen Town" is Jaco's showcase, fast and manic, with his bass carrying the melody. "Harlequin" is a Shorter ballad. "Rumba Mamá" (recorded live at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival) is a percussion duet between Acuña and Badrena, all timbales and voices. "Palladium" is a Shorter piece with a driving Latin feel. "The Juggler" brings in Zawinul on guitar and tabla. "Havona" closes the album with Jaco's most harmonically ambitious composition, a fast, complex piece that gives everyone room to stretch. Zawinul had become the band's de facto director in the studio by this point, his synthesisers dictating the textures and his arrangements carefully planned, with less of the free improvisation of the group's early years. But the interplay between Zawinul, Shorter and Pastorius is what makes the album endure. One of the most celebrated albums in jazz fusion history, Weather Report's Heavy Weather stands as a landmark recording that defined the genre's golden era. 

This is the 1977 Japanese pressing on CBS/Sony 25AP 357. Comes with yellow obi and Japanese insert.