Trivia / Weather Report (Band)

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• Black Sheep Hit: "Birdland" is much more accessible than most of the band's material, and most jazz fusion in particular.
• Contractual Obligation Project: Their final album, This Is This!, was only made because the band had one more album left in their contract. Shorter was mostly not involved in it, preferring to focus on his solo project, and the album suffered for it.
• Creator Breakdown: Jaco Pastorius suffered an incredibly tragic downfall brought on by substance abuse and severe, untreated bipolar disorder. Tragically, he became homeless and was killed by a nightclub guard just a few short years after having been the biggest name in jazz.
  • Joe Zawinul took Jaco's death very hard, because he was the one who introduced Pastorius to alcohol. Though in all fairness, neither he, nor even Jaco himself knew of his mental illness at the time, not to mention that heavy drinking is a fairly standard pastime for touring musicians.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: A weird example. AllMusic lists the band's first album as the "Album Pick" instead of Heavy Weather, which features their best-known song, "Birdland" and Jaco Pastorius.
• The Pete Best: Original bassist Miroslav Vitouš, who played on the first three albums but was then steadily sidelined by Joe Zawinul, who claimed that Vitouš couldn't play convincing funk and didn't bring in enough compositions (Vitouš, for his part, claimed that he did bring in compositions, it was just that Zawinul couldn't play them.) Vitouš remained bitter about the extent to which the others not only downplayed his contribution to the band, but also denied him financial remunerations that he was owed.
  • Alphonso Johnson, to a lesser extent. While he's far from obscure, and incredibly beloved by jazz fans and bassists in particular, his star within Weather Report was understandably eclipsed after his successor Jaco Pastorius essentially was seen as, and still is by many as the single greatest bassist in history. Granted, Pastorius presence and later on, his tragic end, made him the most well known of any member in Weather Report.
• Referenced by...:
  • In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, the name of a Stand that controls weather phenomena is named Weather Report, and given that it belongs to an amnesiac man, he refers to himself as Weather Report. Later on in the story, Weather Report unearths a secondary ability named after the Weather Report album Heavy Weather, which manipulates the atmosphere to make people subliminally think they're snails.
  • Brian Eno's instrumental track, "Zawinul/Lava", from 1975's Another Green World, is titled after Joe Zawinul.

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