Weather Report – Live in Tokyo (CBS Japan/Wounded Bird, 1972)

Joe Zawinul (p, el p, syn); Wayne Shorter (ss, ts); Miroslav Vitous (b); Eric Gravatt (d); Dom Um Romão (perc)

Recorded on January 13, 1972

From Curt Bianchi's excellent site, Weather Report: The Annotated Discography:

In January 1972 Weather Report played five sold out concerts in Japan. The January 13 performance at the Shibuya Philharmonic Hall in Tokyo was recorded by Columbia, from which came the tracks on the second side of I Sing the Body Electric.  Live in Tokyo presents the entire evening’s performance, capturing the “sheer power the group could generate in performance,” as Zawinul biographer Brian Glasser put it. “While side two of I Sing the Body Electric gives us heavily edited glimpses of Weather Report as heard live in Tokyo, this two-disc Japanese import contains entire group ensembles from that concert--and as such, it is a revelation.” He goes on to say, “This would be the radical apogee of Weather Report on records, though they could retain this level of fire in concert for years to come” (143-144).

Part of the fire seemed to come from the Japanese people themselves. “When we went to Japan,” Zawinul recalled, “we didn’t know what kind of a response we would get, but I couldn’t believe what happened. We thought, ‘What are we gonna do with these Japanese people, man?’ They’re so beautiful, such wonderful listeners, but laid back. That was their culture. So we said, ‘Let’s hit ’em hard, right from the first note,’ and we hit ’em hard! We improvised, because the tunes we had written at that time were not very long--eight bars here, a nice little melody, and so on--but we worked it over, and sometimes we’d play it long, sometimes short. It was an inspirational way of doing things, and through that slowly we developed into a band” (144).

This music is such a strange combination of visceral impact and abstraction!  I can't think of anything else like it.

Incidentally, I strongly agree with Zawinul biographer Brian Glasser that this concert is the "apogee of Weather Report on records."  I enjoy the band's studio albums, but the live recordings seem to stand apart -- particularly Live in Tokyo and the archival 4-CD set The Legendary Live Tapes: 1978-1981 (Sony, 2015).  Although Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter were the de facto leaders of the band, it seems like Wayne sometimes exerted little influence in the studio, choosing instead to defer to Zawinul's leadership.  But, on stage, Shorter was much more forceful and willing to lead musically.