Michigan Boogie

Weather Report

Since the lamented passing of King Pleasure there has been a conspicuous absence of big name jazz entertainment in Ann Arbor. Sunday night, thanks to the management of Chances Are, we were granted momentary relief from this drought in the form of Weather Report.
By 9:00 the club was packed to the rafters with a crowd of 800 who had paid $5.00 a head for their night's entertainment. No one was let down.

Sidney James Blair and Visions, a ten piece "electric-jazz rock" group opened the show. All their tunes were original tightly played ensemble arrangements interspersed with short solos. Gary Shunk, on acoustic and electric piano, stood out from the rest of the band with some truly inspired playing. Visions is a good band which should get better if they can smooth out their transitions and manage to better integrate their electronic effects.
After a bit of equipment shuffling the five members of Weather Report strode onto the stage. Vitous is no longer with them but his vacancy was well-filled by bassist Al Johnson. From the very start it was clear that Weather Report had complete control over their music. Few people realize the amount of discipline and control needed to play music at such high energy levels, to keep it from disintegrating into mindless funk or hopeless confusion. Because Weather Report has this discipline they are able to anticipate each others' directions and create music which is extremely tight yet sounds extremely free.

Zawinul functions as a binding force within the band. His keyboard and synthesizer work is so tasteful, using not abusing electronic sounds behind Shorter's soprano. Often they play in unison or parallel motion to produce an angular melody line with the "Weather Report" sound. Shorter has a full-bodied soprano tone and superb technique which he uses in in an understated manner much like Miles Davis, with whom he worked for many years. The drummer (I couldn't catch his name) drives incredibly hard (at one point he drove clean through his snare drum head) and serves to strongly delineate the rapidly changing tempos and metres upon which so much of the music is based.
Textural effects are added by a percussionist who plays a variety of African and South American rhythm instruments and breaks into dancing when ever the spirit moves him.

The program was well paced, predominantly hard driving but spiced with enough lyrical passages to let the audience rest before the next barrage of sound. Perhaps 'barrage' is a poor choice of words, 'wave' might be more appropriate, for Weather Report produced a near-continuous flow of sound for close to two hours. The evening's only failure was percussionist Dom Um Ramao's solo on the berinbau, a Brazilian musical bow- it should have been left in Brazil. The rest of the evening was a complete success regardless of one's previous acquaintance with Weather Report's music.
The band received a standing ovation from the obviously joyous crowd. Although 'ovation inflation' has reduced the value of such a gesture to practically nothing, one would like to believe that in this case there was some meaning behind it.

-- Brad Smith