Electronics can be cold. At high volume levels those nuances of phrasing and texture which have always communicated the essence of jazz, from Armstrong to Parker to Coltrane, tend to blur or disappear altogether. In the beginning Weather Report seemed to be an unusually cold band, programming textures and rhythms from an immense distance, sculpting impressive lines but from solid ice. Mysterious Traveller is different. It's about the triumph of feeling over technology.
the room on "Jungle Book," and the piano riff that ties the piece together was obviously recorded on a funky box, with a funky machine. Then, in the studio, the group built up layers of sound around the original inspiration, Zawinul himself adding vocals, guitar, tamboura, organ, kalimba and various percussion instruments. The result sounds like an encapsulation of half a dozen different tribal musics, like an accumulation of centuries of musical tradition. This combination of immediacy and refinement characterizes the entire album.
Wayne Shorter's "Blackthorn Rose" is a duet between the composer's soprano and Zawinul's piano and melodica. It hangs suspended in space and expresses emotion with breathtaking clarity and directness, and it establishes Shorter as the most gifted and original soprano saxophonist since the passing of John Coltrane. In fact, he is the only player using the instrument who is able to operate entirely outside the scope of Trane's monolithic influence. Here, also, there is a homemade feel, but without any of the doodling excesses that usually characterize kitchen-table music-making.
The bulk of the album moves rhythmically and with much fire, spurred by the drums and percussion of Ishmael Wilburn and Dom Um Romao. Founding member Miroslav Vitous is heard on only one track, having departed Weather Report, but it's really Zawinul and Shorter's band anyway. Their layers of electronic and natural sound (an aural equivalent of the layers of inorganic and organic materials that line a Reichian orgone box) are always apposite and often demonstrate an ingenuity which is unique in contemporary music. On the album's title tune, for instance, they voice a Fender-Rhodes electric piano with a seashell.
Electronic jazz that makes use of the studio's resources as well as the musician's abilities is barely five years old, and already several records in the genre are, arguably, masterpieces. Mysterious Traveller reintroduces human proportion into the mix and is far and away Weather Report's most complete and perfect statement. (RS 166)
BOB PALMER
