Music of Weather Report is Miroslav Vitous's second ECM album devoted to the group he co-founded with Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter in 1970, after Remembering Weather Report in 2009. The Czech bassist, who played in the band until 1974, is drawn above all to the improvisational freedom of its early years. The old rallying call "everyone solos and no one solos" sets the rules, and the familiar themes are taken apart rather than restored.
Vitous plays double bass and keyboards and leads a doubled line-up. There are two drummers, Gerald Cleaver and Nasheet Waits, and two saxophonists on soprano and tenor, Gary Campbell and Roberto Bonisolo, with a keyboard player completing the sextet. In the stereo picture Cleaver and Campbell sit on the left, Waits and Bonisolo on the right, with bass and keyboards in the centre. The sessions took place in March and May 2010 and in February and March 2011 at Universal Syncopations Studios in Clavesana. Vitous produced and engineered the recording himself, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer, and the music waited five years before its release.
Scarlet Woman Variations opens the album with Zawinul's theme surfacing in flashes out of electronic haze and Shorter-like soprano lines, and Vitous adds a new bridge in F major. In Birdland Variations the famous riff is slowed down, split up and repeated like a motif, losing most of its street-funk bounce. Seventh Arrow, a Vitous tune from the band's 1971 debut album, keeps its groove while the two drummers move across different metres at once. Shorter's Pinocchio and Vitous's Morning Lake are also reworked, and three short Multi Dimension Blues from his pen run between them. Throughout, his arco bass often sounds like a third horn beside the two saxophones.
John Fordham in The Guardian heard "a searching mix of free jazz and groove playing" from a supple sextet. Stewart Smith in The Wire called the record "a genuinely intriguing exercise in free fusion". Roger Thomas gave it five stars in BBC Music Magazine, finding it closer to the spirit of Sun Ra's Arkestra than to studio fusion. On London Jazz News, Rob Mallows warned that no familiar Weather Report sound awaits the listener, and described a reading that is opaque and asks for an open ear.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2364, first released on 10 June 2016.
