HEAVY WEATHER

Sometimes you hear a lot about an album but you simply can´t get a hold of it for years. That´s exactly what have happend to Weather Report´s Heavy Weather in my case. A lot of people talked about it and I heard it was a kind of classic jazz-rock/fusion. Recently I finally got it on CD and Imust say I was not impressed. Condiering the talents of the people involved, it sounded bland, tamed, popish and, frankly, a bit boring.

Of course there are good moments like the second track A Remark You Made (a song Kenny G must have heard a million times when he was young) an their biggest success, Birdland. The inclusion of a live track Rumba Mama, which is a simply drum solo with some goofy spanish words thrown in, is a mystery. The rest is nice: Jaco Pastorius bass playing is realy awesome. I also enjoy Wayne Shorter sax a lot. But in the end I found everything here too slick and predicable.

Maybe I was expecting too much. Maybe it was innovative for the time and it got copied a lot. Maybe it is not as representative of their best work as I was told. I don´t know. What I do know is that there was much better and more exciting records in that genre during that year. Guess I´ll have to look for other WR stuff to see if I change my mind over their sound. But Heavy weather, despite its title, has nothing really heavy on it. On the contrary, is very light. Too light.

Rating: 2 stars.