Weather Report - Birdland - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae0nwSv6cTU 
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Still largely sunny, but with occasional squally showers
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Originally posted by Old Grumpy View PostStill largely sunny, but with occasional squally showers
(You can't say that generally about Scandinavia)
nb I like them - especially Zawinul.
Last edited by Lat-Literal; 02-10-15, 21:26.Comment
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The nights are drawing in, condensation and frost on the windows. Time for some dinner jazz?
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Tenor Freak (sadly no longer of this parish) gave a very informative thread:
Alyn did a Jazz library episode on Jaco Pastorius, but no longer available:
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I've never been convinced by Zawinal. Weather Report are listenable and some of their recordings could be hugely entertaining but I was never convinced that they were a "great" jazz group. To my ears, they have been totally eclipsed by Wayne Shorter's quartet which will probably prove to have a far lengthier and important legacy.
Zawinal's later stuff almost bordered on World Music and had little real jazz content , irrespective of the fact that what he produced sounded twenty years behind the times. All the gadgets he employed made the music seem a bit superficial . However, I am not too fussed with Fusion to begin with.Comment
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Ah, I recall that thread now. I guess what I have in mind is the criticism from jazz fans that a lot of jazz in the 21st Century doesn't swing. I just wonder whether there is sometimes an absence of thrilling innovation too. This does run in parallel with other genres including world music. Is there anything to be said for Weather Report being the last great innovators, notwithstanding the fact that were essentially fusion as Ian says? I worked my way through perhaps 50 or 60 releases in each of the years 2012-2014 based on several "best of" lists. I have an awareness of Harris Eisenstadt, The Bad Plus etc. I tend to prefer jazz made prior to the early 1980s. Unlike in many other areas, that hasn't much to do with nostalgia.Originally posted by Oddball View PostTenor Freak (sadly no longer of this parish) gave a very informative thread:
Alyn did a Jazz library episode on Jaco Pastorius, but no longer available:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qf7jzComment
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Ah, I recall that thread.Originally posted by Oddball View PostTenor Freak (sadly no longer of this parish) gave a very informative thread:
Alyn did a Jazz library episode on Jaco Pastorius, but no longer available:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qf7jz
I guess what I have in mind is the criticism from jazz fans that a lot of jazz in the 21st Century doesn't swing. I just wonder whether there is sometimes an absence of innovation too. This does run in parallel with other genres including world music. Is there anything to be said for Weather Report being the last great innovators, notwithstanding the fact they were essentially fusion as Ian says? I worked my way through perhaps 50 or 60 releases in each of the years 2012-2014 based on several "best of" lists. I have an awareness of Harris Eisenstadt, The Bad Plus etc. I tend to prefer jazz made prior to the early 1980s. Unlike in other areas, that isn't much to do with nostalgia and is therefore about the music.
I would welcome suggestions that knock down this not hugely informed impression!
Last edited by Lat-Literal; 03-10-15, 14:36.Comment
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Lat-Lit
I don't think that the perceived lack of swing has any bearing on Weather Report, it just seems to me that their music hasn't stood the test of time. A lot of 1970's music sounds dated and WR were guilty of gimmicks which I don't feel Zawinul really ever grew out of. As I said, I don't mind a lot of WR's stuff and some tune like "Brown Street" are very catchy and hugely enjoyable. I don't think WR represents Wayne Shorter's best music.
It is funny how some jazz dates and remains of it's time whereas other musicians seem to produce jazz which transcends it's time. I feel that much of ECM's music from the 1980's doesn't sound too great these days, especially where there are synthesizers employed. Some of Jan Garbarek's work or even Eberhard Weber sounds of it's time and much of the "Downtown" jazz from the 1980's also doesn't seem as cutting edge as it did at the time. That said, I tend to find that I am coming across musicians like Thomas Chapin and Ken Vandermark who I missed at the time they arrived on the scene yet seem as great as anything prior to 1980.Comment
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A listen to Michael Janisch's Paradigm Shift on JLU in a few minutes might offer post hoc Fusion skeptics one idea among many others that are available of how the idiom or idioms therein have insinuated themselves subtly or less into the warp and weft of contemporary mainstream jazz today as appreciated by Ian and others.
In some ways the arguments that washed around Weather report at the end of the 1970s - had they sold out, etc? - have been rendered redundant by examples such as the Michael Janisch, thereby possibly throwing into question any reassessment of where the music was when aftershave accessory revivalist hard bop and smooth jazz supplanted Jazz-Rock as we often called Fusion or Crossover's domination of listings until around 1984. From what I do well remember disagreements soon arose over Zawinul's increasing imposition of compositional "solutions" to make up for what he felt to be the undependability of inspired improvisation to keep the attention of stadium audiences. The three other most publicised Fusion groups of the time all found different solutions to this presumed problem: Herbie Hancock making The Headhunters his vehicle for amalgamating the repetitious superimosed trance textures of Steve Reich to James Brown funk riffs with modal improv atop; John McLaughlin melding Indian modes and time signatures to rock energy; Chick Corea using Return To Forever to espouse harmonic simplification following his radical Circle with Anthony Braxton while applying Fusion's adoption of electronic keyboards etc to his beloved Latin jazz; Weather Report initially applying electronics to the free improvisational idea of moment-by-moment interaction. In terms of evolving larger scale compoisitional structures to offer atmospheric symphonic equivalents with more intelligent improvisational moments to Progrock pastiche, Weather Report certainly offered a preferable alternative to perpetual languid guitar trips on the blues scale in Pink Floyd as far as what was generally put over on the wavelengths was concerned, (you had to get into the pubs and hear the homegrown offerings by Henry Cow or Isotope or buy the records), and in terms of evocation of locale Pat Metheny's group in the 1980s with Lyle Mays certainly proposed a follow-on from Weather Report and Mahavishnu; but by that time No Wave had arrived in equally varied manifestations and a lot more edge, and while there was something of a Fusion revival here among the Jazz Warriors generation (Cameron Pierre etc) in the early 1990s, that has been superseded and absorbed into more of a multicultural look at developing the idiom but still on jazz terms, even when bringing in Rap*. Weather Report seems a long time ago!
*Where younger British jazz musicians such as the highly talented Robert Mitchell and groups around the F-Ire and Loop Collectives have re-approached 1970s Fusion, it has often been to lend a distinctive "British" or "British-Caribbean" slant to those points where other directions had been implied (the way Stravinsky did with The Rite of Spring) and not followed up - as in the case of Herbie Hancock's early 1970s Sextet - but ditched for a different pathway.Comment
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SA
I agree to a point as "Fusion" has never gone away. I feel Weather Report are difficult to consider outside the 1970's context where jazz was at a low ebb and also alongside the kind of pop that was prevalent at the time and which, from a perspective of 2015, perhaps seems more "jazz orientated" than it did at the time. i.e. Groups such as Earth , Wind and Fire come to mind.
The context of Fusion seemed to leak in to the 1980's with Chick Corea's electric offerings and labels like GRP which blurred in to Smooth Jazz. Getting in to jazz at the same time, I suppose I grew up distrusting this approach and never really listened to it as it seemed so old fashioned. The continuing decades seemed to offer their own individual approaches to "Fusion" with varying degrees of success (thinking of the likes of Gary Husband) or not but by the 2000's and the arrival of "Nu Jazz" it seemed to mutated in to something that increasingly reflected popular music. I am sure that the likes of Nls Petter Molvaer with records ike "Kymer" will come to be considered in the same light as WR but I would suggest you either have to love it or reject the oeuvre. The same debate will no doubt continue with NPM and the likes of Bugge Wesseltoft against in the future. Personally, I hate it as it sounds like a betrayal of jazz.
What is intriguing is that Weather Report now seem increasingly detached from more genuine , traditional forms of jazz and more a precursor of the kind of things that pass as jazz today. I can appreciate their importance in this respect yet I feel that Fusion has a limited shelf life as the liaison with Rap in the 1990's increasingly suggests. (Albeit I did hear this combination done well back in the summer.)
I am not too sure that Metheny could be lumped in this same category although it is tempting. The PMG offerings are similarly pretty slick from a studio perception yet this does translate to live performances. Like John Scofield, I hear a lot of Ornette in Metheny's playing and it is fair to say that he is as much of a chameleon at Herbie Hancock in his ability to play in different styles.
I can't comment on the likes of F-ire Collective and I don't know their music that well as, to be honest, it isn't of interest. Again, it seems to be hyped up rather like EST and this does make me more prejudice as I would rather explore stuff by my own volition as opposed to having critics telling me what I should listen to.Comment
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You people want a Weather Report?
Red Garland - "All kinds of weather" Prestige 1958.
"All of his mid-to-late-'50s Prestige dates are
worth acquiring. This CD reissue has six titles
having to do with seasons and the weather (such
as "Rain," "Summertime" and "Winter
Wonderland"). The gimmick served as a good
excuse for Garland, bassist Paul Chambers and
drummer Art Taylor to explore six superior songs
and their interpretations always swing and uplift
the melodies."
We don't want no electrical confusion, fact we're refusing. We choooooosin' Red playing bout the weather. Forever. Sling yer sympathisers.
BN.
Why did Alyn say Alan Dawson was a "bit fidgety" with Booker? I love those bass drum accents etc.Comment
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Southampton 3 - Chelsea 1
Get in there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11Comment
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I think the score was Chelsea 1 v Southampton 3 which when you look at it was even better!!!! Well done!Originally posted by Ian Thumwood View PostComment
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Thank you Ian and Serial_Apologist. I am essentially looking for bearings although I welcome a wide ranging discussion. Many of the references in your post, S_A are somewhat meaningful to me. McLaughlin, Corea, Braxton and for that matter Henry Cow as well as the Jazz Warriors - one album I think - and the Headhunters. But whenever accessing jazz, I am most likely to go to obvious earlier reference points when not searching even further back in time - Monk, Coleman, Brubeck, Tracey, Davis, Ra, Coltrane, etc and all with the possible exception of Ra speak unequivocally of jazz to me. I could also talk with ease about the dates of their key releases. All had/have the capacity to be memorable/thrilling.
Somewhere in the late 1970s or early 1980s, a record executive chucked a dozen albums freely in my direction. One was Chuck Mangione's "Journey to a Rainbow". That album was pleasant in places but none of those albums were jazz including that one. There was Working Week in the early-mid 1980s. I believe I saw someone called Carmel at Ronnie Scotts. Pat Metheny, of course, who by the end of that decade I was listening to a fair bit as he was very much the favoured listening of a rock-ish band I knew, the only one I ever partially managed. Fast-forward to the 1990s and I am sitting in a work meeting and I am chatting to a guy in the break who says to me he is a huge jazz fan. I ask him what he is listening to at present and he tells me he will bring in something as it is utterly fantastic. It turns out to be Bill Frisell. Now I happen to like Metheny and Frisell because I don't mind a bit of "new age" and some of their stuff, in my humble opinion, veers mighty close to it. The first two names I mentioned were fair too but they were one moment wonders - essentially popular artists who were hyped up to be something else. There were, of course, in that era Marsalis, Marsalis and Mehldau as well as Pine and all felt ever so slightly "marketed". I like Pavarotti but even I drew out when it became the big industry that was The Three Tenors. Just in the nature of the promotion itself, none of it really grabbed.
Long before Zawinul was deemed to be so significant he merited a place in the Proms and "Black Market" was being covered on a significant World Music album, it was impossible to escape the name Gregory Porter and then shortly afterwards Robert Fonseca. Is it me or is the singing on Porter's albums very unexceptional while Fonseca is cocktail Cuban at best? So I go to Vijay Ayer who is covering Michael Jackson and not in any way as memorably as Kirk "did" Bill Withers and the aforementioned Eisenstadt who is glacial and glacial is cool enough. But while he is undoubtedly more "jazz" than the Portico Quartet he is either innovating beyond my understanding or not doing so much at all. If Weather Report led to a lot of what we have now, what was it exactly and how broad a range? Quite a lot of what I have often expected to thrill sounds like a bit of a disappointing racket. Neneh Cherry and The Thing were not for me or, it seems, very many other people judging by the sales. Of course, there are mainstays who make a lot more sense - Wheeler etc - and good luck to them. But I suppose I am looking for (a) modern jazz as jazz so I know what jazz is these days (b) the innovative and the genuine thrilling and (c) elements of fusion or crossover with musicality. I quite like Django Bates actually and also Jacob Garchik but everything just seems so nebulous. I'm still looking for a road map re the here and now. It isn't criticism, this, or a deliberate damp squib but more a sense of frustration at just not being easily able to see the key locations in modern terms from which then to roam.Last edited by Lat-Literal; 04-10-15, 14:06.Comment
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