Heavy Weather – Weather Report

**Adam Maness** (0:37)
I'm Adam Maness.

**Peter Martin** (0:38)
And I'm Peter Martin.

**Adam Maness** (0:39)
And you're listening to the Youll Hear It Podcast.

**Peter Martin** (0:41)
Music explored.

**Adam Maness** (0:42)
Explored, brought to you today by Open Studio. Go to opensudiojazz.com for your jazz lesson needs. Peter, things are popping off over at Open Studio. I don't know if you know this, but we've got a bunch of new courses in the camp. We've got a new course coming from legend Larry Goldings. Yes. So anybody who's interested in those beautiful triads that Larry Goldings likes to play, we have a course coming on that. We've got a new course featuring you and I called Jazz Piano for the Bandstand, where we teach you how to play with other people on the Bandstand from our two beautiful pianos over here.

**Peter Martin** (1:11)
I prefer to use the alternate title for that course. Two bad MFs teach you how to live a musical life. But we didn't go with that.

**Adam Maness** (1:17)
Marketing, can we change it, please? And then last but not least, we introduced our pathways to Open Studio just a couple months ago. So we have our Jazz Foundations pathway where I teach you the very beginnings of jazz piano, the Jazz Piano Expansions pathway, where we talk to intermediate players about how to expand their skills, and then of course you're the host of the Jazz Piano Method, which is our ongoing Crown Jewel pathway for advanced players.

**Peter Martin** (1:41)
That's a very nice way of just saying that I only know how to do the advanced stuff because I somehow forgot everything on the way there, so I brought in smart cats like you. Yeah, it's great. And you're bearing the lead as we say.
We have a brand new platform.

**Adam Maness** (1:54)
We do have a brand new beautiful-

**Peter Martin** (1:55)
Which is like a platter, it's like a digital platter in which the courses and pathways are stacked up. That thing is so fast, it actually loaded a page before I clicked on it.
How did it know when I was about to click?

**Adam Maness** (2:04)
It's intuitive. Go to openstudiojazz.com, that's openstudiojazz.com for all your jazz lesson needs. Peter, it's a big day today.

**Peter Martin** (2:11)
It is a big day.

**Adam Maness** (2:12)
This is one of our most requested albums on the show.

**Peter Martin** (2:15)
Does our audience skew fusion? Because if so, they're going to be happy.

**Adam Maness** (2:19)
There's a pocket of our audience that is the fusion pocket.
And they are there. They've got pockets on their pants. Whoa!

**Peter Martin** (2:27)
He's coming in hot. I like it.

**Adam Maness** (2:28)
But they want more pocket. They want more fusion pocket. And this is a classic jazz fusion album. I know the guys in Weather Report don't like that term. But I mean, when you think of jazz fusion, you think of Weather Report.
And I am very excited because, like I said, we've had a lot of comments, a lot of angry comments about why haven't you guys done Heavy Weather? And so today we're doing a 1977s Heavy Weather. But before we get into Heavy Weather, Peter, let's start at the beginning.

**Peter Martin** (2:55)
Let's do it. So this band, Louis Armstrong, 1928, beginning of the recording industry.

**Adam Maness** (3:00)
So it's New Orleans, 1916 No.

**Peter Martin** (3:02)
A young Joe Zawinul gets off the boat.

**Adam Maness** (3:04)
So the beginning is a Weather Report, start with a very familiar name around here at the Youll Hear It podcast, Miles Davis. So just before this was happening, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, who had known each other for years, but they had just played on together in a silent way, and Bitches Brew, two enormous albums in the grand scheme of jazz history. And I think you could say fusion history too, although they aren't exactly fusion albums for sure. But they get together with a few other musicians, and they start this band, this project called Weather Report, and they record a self-titled album in 1971 And it's not like the album we're about to listen to. It sounds more like this.
That's Miroslav on the bass.

**Peter Martin** (4:12)
Czechoslovakian at that time.

**Adam Maness** (4:13)
Bass master. So you could hear how this is straight out of Bitches Brew. I mean, it's not exactly-

**Peter Martin** (4:22)
And in a silent way.

**Adam Maness** (4:24)
And in a silent way. It has more of that tone to it than what Weather Report would eventually become. Weather Report would eventually lean in to the funk a little bit more. And just a few years later, in 1974, they released an album that you and I agree is one of our favorites.