Weather Report Heavy Weather ( 180g vinyl LP )

Release date: 08-12-2011 (originally released in 1977 )

2011 EU reissue 180g vinyl LP

Weather Report's biggest-selling album, including the catchy crossover hit 'Birdland,' the haunting tone poem 'A Remark You Made' and the rocking undertow of Pastorius  'Teen Town.' It is the band's second album with bassist Jaco Pastorius, but on this one he is a permanent member of the band (He was also present on 2 tracks of Black Market.

Tracks: ( reissue 180g vinyl LP)
A1 Birdland
A2 A Remark You Made
A3 Teen Town
A4 Harlequin

B1 Rumba Mama
B2 Palladium
B3 The Juggler
B4 Havona

Its opening track, "Birdland", was a significant commercial success, something not typical of instrumental music. A striking feature of "Birdland" is Pastorius picking harmonics on his fretless bass.

Released just as the Jazz-rock or Fusion movement began to run out of steam, this landmark album proved that there was plenty of creative life left in the idiom.

There were many different incarnations of Weather Report during the fusion band’s 15-year lifespan, but what gave them a unifying sense of continuity and cohesion was the omnipresence of co-founders Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter. 1977’s Heavy Weather was the group’s eighth album and their second with fretless bassist extraordinaire Jaco Pastorius. Like Shorter and Zawinul, Pastorius was a gifted composer, and his tunes ‘Teen Town’, a funky vehicle for outrageous bass pyrotechnics, and ‘Havona’, a superb ensemble piece, highlight his growing maturity as a jazz conceptualist. But it was Zawinul’s chirpy opener, ‘Birdland’, that earned the most plaudits and became the group’s most widely-known tune, spawning many cover versions. Arguably the most perfect of Weather Report’s 14 studio albums, Heavy Weather remains one of the best jazz albums of the fusion era.