Weather Report — Heavy Weather

Zawinul's synthesizer orchestrations are what make the record cohere when it does and what date it when it does not. He layers the ARP 2600, the Oberheim polyphonic and the Rhodes into sustained chords that function as a horn section, a string section, or a bassline depending on the register and the patch. On Birdland, the stacked synths double the melody in octaves while the bass and drums stay locked into a shuffle that never shifts. On Havona, the synthesizers create harmonic movement underneath a composed line that cycles through key centers without ever settling. The production, handled by Ron Malo, keeps the keyboards from bleeding into each other, which is the hardest thing to do with that much analog electronics in one mix. When Zawinul switches to acoustic piano on the bridge of Birdland or the intro of The Juggler, the contrast works because the electric timbres are clear enough to make the shift audible.

Pastorius plays the role of a lead guitarist in a rock band, taking the melody on Teen Town and anchoring the groove on everything else. His tone is bright and nasal, with enough high-end attack to cut through Zawinul's synthesizer layers, and his phrasing is rhythmically restless in a way that makes the straight-ahead beats feel busier than they are. On Teen Town, where he also plays the drums, the bass carries the entire harmonic and melodic load for two minutes and fifty-one seconds, and the track justifies its reputation because the performance is flawless and the composition knows when to stop. On Birdland, the bass part is a two-bar loop that never varies, and the repetition is the point: the melody can float because the bottom never moves. On Palladium, Pastorius switches to steel drums for the lead line, and the track goes nowhere because the gimmick is not enough to carry four minutes and forty-six seconds of vamp.

Wayne Shorter is underused. He takes short solos on Birdland and Havona, plays the melody on Palladium, and sits out Rumba Mama and Teen Town entirely. A Remark You Made is the only track where he leads, and even there the soprano saxophone states a theme twice and then leaves Zawinul's Rhodes to finish the piece alone. The issue is not the quality of the playing—the tone is warm and the phrasing is economical—but the amount of it. Shorter is billed as a co-leader, but the album treats him as a featured soloist who appears for thirty seconds at a time. The rhythm section of Pastorius, Alex Acuña on drums, and Manolo Badrena on percussion is airtight when the material gives them something to do, but the grooves are often static rather than evolving, which is a choice that serves the pop ambitions of Birdland and undercuts the longer pieces like The Juggler, which meanders for five minutes without building or releasing tension.

The sequencing puts all three essential pieces in the first four slots, which means the album peaks at the thirteen-minute mark and coasts for the remaining twenty-four. The opener sets the terms: this is fusion as a radio format, with a hook and a runtime under six minutes. The second essential piece is the comedown, a ballad that earns its slow build by keeping the arrangement minimal. The third is the technical display, a demonstration of what Pastorius could do that no one else was doing in 1977.

The first stretch ends with a three-minute sketch featuring a wordless vocal from Badrena that functions as a palate cleanser. The back half is where the pacing falls apart. The first piece there is a live excerpt from a 1976 concert in Montreux, a percussion feature for Acuña and Badrena that runs two minutes and eleven seconds and feels like it was included to justify the live recording budget. The next has the steel drum gimmick but no development, followed by five minutes of aimless vamping.

The closing track salvages the end with a composed theme that cycles through harmonic areas and gives Shorter a rare extended solo, but by that point the album has already burned through its goodwill. The forty-seven-minute expanded edition adds live versions of three tracks already present in studio form, which are redundant rather than revelatory. The original eight-track LP is already padded; the expanded version just makes the imbalance worse.

Heavy Weather ranks as Weather Report's most successful album because it is their most accessible, and accessibility was not the band's strength on earlier records like Black Market or Mysterious Traveller. The trade-off is that the earlier albums had more ideas per minute and less dead air. This one has three tracks that belong in any fusion canon—Birdland, Teen Town, A Remark You Made—and five tracks that exist to fill out the LP. If you are coming to Weather Report for the first time, start here because the three essential tracks are essential. If you already know the band and are working backward through the catalog, this is the record where Zawinul's pop instincts won out over the group's earlier interest in space and improvisation, for better on the hits and for worse on everything else.

The album aged well in the sense that Birdland became a standard and Teen Town became a bass curriculum piece, which means those two tracks have a life outside the LP. The rest of the record aged poorly in the sense that the synthesizer timbres that sounded futuristic in 1977 now sound like 1977, and the weaker tracks do not have the compositional or improvisational depth to compensate. For serious listeners, this is the fusion record to own if you only own one, because the peaks are higher than most of the genre's other commercial successes. For Shorter completists, this is a minor entry in his catalog, one where he plays a supporting role rather than steering the music. Play Birdland, Teen Town and A Remark You Made first. If those three tracks connect, try Black Market or Mysterious Traveller next to hear what the band sounded like when they left more room for improvisation.