A quarter-century on, Weather Report's music has dated in a way that Miles Davis' best fusion efforts haven't. That's especially true of the albums the band made beginning with Mysterious Traveller (1974), at which point it began looking more to technological advances to further its sound than the creative brain trust of keyboardist Joe Zawinul and saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Shorter largely fades into the background here as Zawinul tests out his battery of ARPs and Moogs and Echoplex-equipped electric piano against a busy battery of percussionists.
Still, there's a lot of good music on the album, which is issued here in 24-bit digitally remastered form. "Blackthorn Rose" is a piano (and melodica) and soprano sax duet of lovesome beauty while the phase-shifting "Nubian Sundance" generates excitement through its orchestrated effects, complex rhythmic scheme and simulated crowd explosions. New to the evolving Weather Report is bassist Alphonso Johnson, who lends a funkier and more musical touch than his sacked (and highly overrated) predecessor, Miroslav Vitous. --Lloyd Sachs
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"I'm loyal to Weather Report's vision. I can understand how some people come in through the wrong door with them. This album is from a point where they're coming out of this improvisational period. Their first few albums were really exploratory and you had to be quite committed to them; they weren't instant records. But they had plenty of acclaim and backing from their record label. It's amazing that there was a point in time when record labels backed that kind of music.
But this was the point when they were playing a lot of colleges and they added a more funky span to what they were doing. So the bass guitar started to get more prominent. It was Alphonso Johnson playing bass here and not Jaco Pastorious, and people forget that Alphonso Johnson did a lot of the groundbreaking stuff for the fretless bass.
There's a painterly quality about this album and the orchestration gets more densely textured. You've got tracks like 'Jungle Book', that closes the album, and it's a beautiful track that could be put together by coloured pencils. It's a very pastel-y track where they've taken an improvisation and drawn round and over the top of it. Tracks like that are really funky.
We didn't have ""world music"" back then, but this was the beginnings of that idea; of something beyond the horizon of our culture and something that was kind of hidden. It wasn't about doing an authentic version of ethno-musicology, but taking different elements; it was all about colours."