Gone, as well as a few of Zawinul’s solo projects. “It would’ve been better but…”īeach would continue working for Weather Report, creating the cover for their next album Mr. Originally I thought ‘I’m not gonna change this! This is my art!’ But I needed the dough and besides it wasn’t ‘Lou Beach with music by Weather Report!’ ” Beach said with a laugh. I had scattered dots that I’d made with a hole-puncher across the piece, which added to the rainy image but Joe didn’t like it and told me to take them out. I found the blowing leaves in an old issue of Arizona Highways and the big hat was from an ad in Life magazine. “I was just starting out and hadn’t done a lot of album covers when my girlfriend at the time, an art director at Columbia Records got me the gig,” Beach said. I think Wayne eventually grew tired of that, having to burn on every song. You had to always play with a certain kind of fire. With the Messengers, Art made you build your solos. His solos were more like variations on a theme. “When you improvise, you’re making stuff up out of the blue, where he was spontaneously composing. “Wayne wasn’t really improvising,” Bartz pointed out. And I’d brought it along with me that night, thinking I might sit in, but after I heard Wayne, I kept it out of sight,” Bartz said with a laugh.
I always take my horn with me wherever I go. I love his musical intellect and sense of composition.
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But Wayne really knew how to use time and space. Most people would fill up their solos with a lot of notes, like Bird. With one break, he changed my whole outlook. “They were playing ‘A Night in Tunisia.’ How many times have you heard that song? But Wayne played it like I never heard it before. It turned out to be Wayne Shorter,” Bartz recalled with a chuckle. “Back in the early ’60s Lee Morgan wanted me to hear this saxophonist who was playing a gig with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in Newark. Alto saxophonist Gary Bartz, who, like Shorter, also performed live and recorded with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis, and McCoy Tyner’s bands, provided some insight into Shorter’s legacy: He tended to like music that was soulful and beautiful.”įor those familiar with Wayne Shorter’s music before Weather Report (check out his classic mid-’60s Blue Note recordings), with its various forays into electronic fusion and world music, the band seemed at times like an odd fit for the prolific saxophonist. “He was really into studying Hindemith, Stravinsky and Casals, as well as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Jimmy Smith, Bill Evans, Coltrane, James Brown, Otis Redding, the Beatles, Sinatra, Hendrix, Edgar Winter…all kinds of stuff. Jaco was inspired by everyone,” Peterson pointed out. He seemed to be fishing for a description at the time and described Weather Report’s music as ‘improvised classical music.’ I never once heard him use the term ‘fusion.’ I think it’s safe to say he would have hated that term.
He was very knowledgeable, skilled and comfortable in both idioms. “He liked to play a combination of jazz and R&B. Ray Peterson, former bass man with the brilliant and funky jazz saxophonist Eddie Harris and author of Jaco Pastorius – Bass Method (Hal Leonard 2010), recalled his relationship with the brash, groundbreaking bassist. While Pastorius can be heard on two tracks on Weather Report’s lush 1976 recording Black Market (including his own composition “Barbary Coast”) it was tracks like “Birdland” and “Teen Town” from Heavy Weather that first hipped the world to his innovative playing. Speaking of punks, upon meeting Joe Zawinul in Miami, the young, impetuous Jaco Pastorius boasted that he was “the greatest bass player in the world.” After checking out his demo tape, the skeptical Zawinul found more than a little truth to Pastrorius’ claim and soon invited him to join his band, replacing Alphonso Johnson. Looking back, 40 years ago, it’s striking how Heavy Weather stood in stark contrast to the pervading aggressive esthetic of the time-punk rock. “It’s harder to make a beautiful sound, than an ugly one,” trombonist/conch master Steve Turre once told me.
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