years earlier. A Space Supergroup was, of course, inevitable.
The supergroup is Weather Report, coming your way this month from Columbia with expectedly lavish attention: pianist Joe Zawinul and saxman Wayne Shorter, both alumni of the Davis band, In a Silent Way and Bitches' Brew, (with the added credit in Shorter's case of his own great Blue Note set Super Nova, one of the best jazz albums of 1970), bushy-headed young Miroslav Vitous (bass for Davis, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Mann), percussionist Airto Moreira (Davis mainly, though he has a new album out on Buddah with his own group featuring Ron Carter), and drummer Alphonze Mouzon (Chubby Checker, Gene McDaniels, Tim Hardin, Roy Ayers and Gil Evans).
What all this means is that each of these men has distinguished himself so consistently, and been involved in crucially important bands at the right time, that the product of their collective talents should presumably outstrip even their rosters of past accomplishments. Whether it does is, despite the beauty and excellence of Weather Report, open to question.
For the essential problem is that this bold new style has by now become so familiar that it's not, in and of itself, so bold or mindstretching anymore. In fact, it has just as much potential for boredom and bad sets as any plain prole funk. In a Silent Way made history, but despite all the reviews which compensated for being unable to come honestly to grips with it by praising it with thickets of expressionist imagery, Bitches' Brew remained for many of us not only inaccessible but so consistently unpromising in its inaccessibility that we finally just gave up. It wasn't just that it was so hard to hear–it was that when you did hear it was so hollow, a vast windy cavern with grand designs and no inner substance.
So one approached Weather Report with high hopes but also a certain slight wariness compounded by the Supergroup riff. The album is out now, and it certainly offers much more than either Bitches' Brew or Miles Davis At Fillmore, but falls far short of the astounding innovation touted for it.
It's Zawinul's and Shorter's trip all the way, although Vitous gets off some nice, energetic John McLa
Zawinul's biggest seller is an experimental masterpiece that finds him revisiting the same terrain he helped Miles Davis craft with In A Silent Way. Not as commercial as his soon-to-be-formed Weather Report, it shows off the ideas that he, Miles, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Woody Shaw (the final three all play on this) were bringing to jazz during this era.
