Music I used to like #8: night passage, with dark matter, dust, starlight and chili sauce

Weather Report: ‘Lusitanos’ from Tale Spinnin’ (1975)

I INTERVIEWED WAYNE SHORTER once, in 1987. I was a very green young music journalist. He was Wayne Shorter, one of the very greatest jazz saxophonists and composers who ever lived. His CV could hardly have been more impressive. He had been a key creative associate of Miles Davis throughout the second half of the 1960s and subsequently a co-founder of Weather Report, which had by 1987, over the passage of 17 years, delivered itself of a body of work that was both outwardly searching and rock-solid in its footing, if not all that concerned with what goes on on the inside of a human bean — and it remains the case nearly forty years later. They were one of the great institutions of modern jazz’s after-party.

Shorter cut a slightly anxious figure in his London hotel room where we did the deed that day — it was an airless box so plushly anechoic as to give the impression that its mustard carpet covered ceiling and walls as well as the floor, and probably extended into the bathroom. Shorter was 54 years old, more than a decade younger than I am now (which is genuinely astonishing for me to reflect upon). He was wearing, I think, a beige safari suit, belted, and he sat slightly uncomfortably at an oblique angle to his wife, who faced me square-on and was clearly not just along for the ride. She took a full part in the proceedings and made it quite clear from the off that any impertinence would be dealt with sharply.

Her husband was a small man, physically, and his presence slightly watery, not in the usual sense of “wet” but as if his main constituent were steam. There was something of the genie about him, something of the recently boiled kettle. It was impossible to pin him down, even to catch him for a moment and hold him steady for the purpose of showing him to the readers of the magazine I then worked for. He was too vaporous. His eyes were moistly watchful and it seemed they were the only part of him that moved over a long forty minutes or so. I could not say from that encounter whether I liked him or not, but then it is difficult to hold an opinion of steam.

Furthermore, he was minded to talk about the cosmos and cosmology, and almost nothing else, and every question I offered him gently in that deadening room, questions about his past and his present, his whys and his wherefores, was deflected or simply ignored. Stars, planets, dark matter, dust and light. Those were his concerns that day.

It was the single most hopeless interview I ever conducted as a young journalist, or so I thought at the time, steamed up as I was by the renewed importance at the time of jazz to our impoverished earthly culture. “I got absolutely fuck-all from him,” I remember telling a friend gloomily who was keen to hear what the great man was like. “I know I was there and I know he was there — and his wife, who looked as if she’d have my knackers on a plate if I so much as looked at him the wrong way, but… but all I got was outer space and the Big Bang and the making of the universe.” I really did get nothing out of him.

NOTHING. AND OF COURSE everything — though I missed the ‘everything’ part of it at the time. I think I wrote a small and disappointing piece in the end and only much later did I realise my failure to spot a great opportunity. For this was surely a chance to describe the extraordinary music of Weather Report with the active involvement of the group’s secundum mobile, in terms that were suitably fundamental to do with physical mass and chemical reaction and emptiness and huge presence. The night sky. The rock on which we spin. The oxygen we breathe. The rhythm that is in everything good.

Weather Report were always good. Well, nearly always. Actually, not always. But when they were on it, they really were.

I’d had my first encounter with them camein either 1974 or ’75, when I was fourteen years old, trying to wriggle out of my contract with progressive rock, which I had co-signed in mingled blood with the two other junior hairies in the village I grew up in on the edge of the Fens. To we three greasy nodules in our ex-military greatcoats beneath untamed thatches, Weather Report were a musical operation without real context — yet we did recognise that their music was somehow elemental, rather more aptly identified with forbidding weather systems than with the careful adjudications of meteorological reportage. We no more knew, nor cared all that much, that the saxophonist was a seriously heavy jazz dude or that the group’s co-founder, the Austrian pianist Joe Zawinul, was another great Miles Davis collaborator (“In a Silent Way” was his) who had further distinguished himself in the jazz trenches of the 1960s as chief sideman to Julian “Cannonball” Adderley.

Zawinul and Shorter founded Weather Report jointly but it was always obvious whose band it really was; who was author-in-chief, the musical director. You only have to listen to the thick, propulsive roar of the music, the lash of percussion beneath blocks of synthetic keyboard harmony and stabs of oddly abrupt melody (played to begin with on a standard Fender Rhodes electric piano adapted with a ring modulator and cry-baby wah, later augmented with analog single-note synths which became polyphonic as time and digital evolution allowed), all of it rolled out often in subjugation to a monster riff-melody played in the bass register … These were the marks of Zawinul. And to confirm that, consider the minuscule, little more than decorative bubble-spaces in the music occupied by Shorter’s soprano or, very occasionally, tenor sax, apparently tooting away to himself outside the membrane that contained everyone else’s hullabaloo. Wayne was often the vapour given off by Joe’s music.

It was Mysterious Traveller I’d heard first, somewhere. I know this because I remember rather taking to the cover art and its title typography, an oil painting, or so it appears, of an astral body of some sort falling to earth in a hiss of magnesium fire, a comet of some nature illuminated against the purple bruise of the thinning night sky as daybreak yellows the horizon. Very Weather Report, I would come to learn.

And it is an absolutely wonderful record. I get it now in memory, as a deaf old bloke, in pretty much the same way I got it as a fourteen year-old spotty Herbert. It is cavernous music and it gives the impression of a certain unhurried detachment in its unrelenting momentum, a sense of thrust that feels as if it has been thundering across vast distances for a longer passage in Time than the duration of your life. And then it pauses: the music that’s been traversing the night landscape so remorselessly suddenly relents … and the listening ear drops into non-gravitational space for “American Tango”. Time, lots of space. Little percussion hits. Tsssk. Biff! And out of all that timeless space blats a shockingly loud motif on some coarse synth setting. You can’t call it a melody. It’s a squiggle, a twisted squeeee-weeeyoooo-uuuuy-yoooooo-uuu-squeeee-eeee! — and it’s one of my favourite musical things ever. Right up there in the annals of emblematic American music with the glissando in “Rhapsody in Blue”. A statement that is really a stupendous technical effect. A fanfare for uncommon men.

I don’t think I laid my sticky paws on another Weather Report album for a further five years or more, while my taste went on holiday to punk — five years which included the enjoyment of the excellent Black Market on other people’s stereos, and then the snooty passing-by on the other side of the road when Heavy Weather arrived in 1977 — the one with “Birdland” and “A Remark You Made” on it, that everyone bought and then never played again beyond those two opening pieces, because the rest of it is dull stuff; stuff with the virtuoso bassist Jaco Pastorius all over the front of the music like a particularly attention-grabbing rash. And Mr Gone: despite the delicate hustle of “The Pursuit of the Woman with Feathers in Her Hat” which opens the album appealingly, a very grave disappointment indeed. I was Mr Gone after that.

BUT I’D MISSED one. It came out in between Mysterious Traveller and Black Market, in 1975. I have no idea how I’d managed to miss it, but I did not run across Tale Spinnin’ until halfway through the next decade, when it looked altogether too much like a generic Brazilian jazz-fusion artefact, with its orderly collation of images of tropical poverty and natural disaster cosied up with snaps of bandmembers (complete with new rhythm section, as per), sunkissed and grinning blandly out at you, organised within a hygienic white border. Weather Report as purveyors of Latin-funk-lite to eaters of Lotus and buyers-in to the fatuous philosophy of “Don’t worry, be happy”. That was my first thought. My second thought was, let’s have a listen then.

It’s a splendid piece of work, by and large. It is funky, but not hip-funky like Sweetnighter, which had preceded the flowing syncopations of Mysterious Traveller. Rather, it expresses the collective rattle and thrum of a more Africanised funk-jazz conception, percussion-saturated and mostly hurtling along in a way that anticipates the pan-global wall-of-sound that characterised the Austrian’s post-WR explorations with his Zawinul Syndicate.

Second off the reel on side one, however, was “Lusitanos”, an increasingly rare, once-typically modal Shorter melodic hawser of the kind he used to tension up for Miles, which here stretches thinly and with great deliberation across a carminative bassline (thank you so much, Alphonso Johnson and your quacking wah-baby bass effect) and allows itself to cede space methodically to a chain of short sections which differ from one another dynamically and in texture, each containing bursts of oblique activity by Zawinul on various elements of his keyboard arsenal, linked by bursts of Shorter blowing hard on tenor, just as he used to, and finally declining into a fade that feels as if it might be setting us up gently for a ”Lusitanos II” for our future delectation.

“It’s too slow!” I used to think, whenever I heard it. And I’d moan inwardly, “It doesn’t develop into anything at all, and … and its wilful, rather childish, unresolving obliqueness is Shorter all over, deliberately destabilising ear-brain-limb connectivity because it amuses him to think of us all hobbling around crookbacked and crashing into one another in some unpleasant half-speed parody of ghetto dancing. Oh, spare me Wayne Shorter’s jazzy chamber-funk. It is way too deliberate, way too slow…”

And so on.

Then one day I walked out into the night air to get a kebab, a seven-minute toddle away on Green Lanes where we live in north London, and as I hit kebab-hunter cruising speed, headphones on, half way down our street, “Lusitanos” sidled into my consciousness and I sidled into its weird enclosures as I walked … and was held, as I walked, held as it seemed I had never been held in motion before by music. It was dark but there were streetlights and the odd soul pattering about on the pavements and I did not feel in the least bit alone, but full of a strange and calming joy, hyper alert. Intoxicating. So I repeated the procedure on the reverse journey home, kebab crinkling in its bag at the end of my arm, swinging, and “Lusitanos” held me all the way home too — where I paused on arrival at our front doorstep and looked up … Quite unusually the night sky over London permitted the visibility of stars, and as I stood and looked straight up, for surely no more than a minute while the music slowly faded, I rather fancied that I could see them all.

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press