Category Archives: Weather Report

Fifty Years Ago Today (More or Less)

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[Second in an ongoing series highlighting significant events in Weather Report’s history on their fiftieth anniversary. The first post in the series covered Weather Report’s inaugural public performance.]

The second public performance of Weather Report that I know about took place at the Third International Music Forum, held in the lakeside resort town of Ossiach, Austria. The exact date isn’t clear, for reasons that I will explain below. But first, a bit about the festival itself.

Third International Music Forum

The “3. Internationales Musikforum Ossiachersee 1971,” as it was titled in German, was organized by Friedrich Gulda, a world class concert pianist with broad musical interests, and a friend of Joe’s going back to the early 1950s. Two years older than Zawinul, Gulda was also born in Vienna, and came to prominence by winning the prestigious Geneva International Music Competition in 1946 at the age of 16. Gulda made his United States concert debut at Carnegie Hall in 1950. While there, he found time to pursue his interest in jazz, visiting the clubs in New York and bringing jazz records back to Austria. For jazz musicians in Austria, Gulda’s tales about what he saw in New York, and the records he came home with, served as a lifeline to the jazz world at large, and reinforced the almost mythological standing of the jazz club Birdland to his fellow countrymen.

Gulda had organized the first two music forums in 1968 and 1969 (there was no event in 1970), and for the third festival he envisioned a significant gathering on an international scale, spanning eleven days, and presenting all kinds of music, including classical, exotic, folklore, pop, jazz, and electronic music. Some referred to it as the “Woodstock of Carinthia.” Among the headliners were Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, Weather Report, and Gulda himself.

Not everyone was happy with Gulda’s ambitions. The large crowds the festival attracted so overwhelmed the bucolic village of Ossiach (population approximately 500) that it wasn’t invited back. At one point Gulda was confronted in a local tavern and called an asshole to his face—something he later laughed off to the assembled press.

The exact date of Weather Report’s Ossiach performance remains a mystery to me. You can find unofficial recordings on the Internet that claim the date was July 27, but the festival took place from June 25 through July 5, so July 27 can’t be right. That led me to speculate that maybe the date was off by a month, making it June 27, which would fit within the festival’s schedule.

However, I have a partial reproduction of the festival program, which was originally posted as part of a piece about Pink Floyd’s performances in Austria (of which there were six over the years). Only the program pages pertaining to Pink Floyd were posted, including a page showing the festival calendar for June 25 to July 1. The next page, which would have described the remaining days, wasn’t posted. (We were so close to unraveling this mystery!) Based on this, we see that Weather Report wasn’t listed on any performances through July 1. So either Weather Report wasn’t included in the program (unlikely, though maybe it was a late addition), or it would have performed after July 1.

Third International Music Forum program excerptThird International Music Forum program excerpt

We also know that Weather Report was scheduled to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island on the afternoon of July 5. To make that date, the band would have had to fly back to the United States no later than July 4, implying that Weather Report performed at Ossiach on July 2 or July 3. Furthermore, Ossiach is about a four-hour drive from Vienna, where the nearest international airport is located, so it seems likely that Weather Report performed on July 2, traveled to Vienna on July 3, and flew back to the United States later that day or on July 4. I hate unresolved questions like this, so if anyone out there has more definitive information, let me know!

Despite the uncertainty of the date of Weather Report’s gig, we do know they were there because there is surviving video of the band at Ossiach. In the video below, Weather Report makes an appearance at the 1:34 mark, where you see all of the band members setting up for their concert. Later, at 2:20, we see them in action.

Another snippet of video can be found at YouTube (with Gulda nodding along):

I understand that video of Weather Report’s entire Ossiach performance exists, and was at one time was posted on YouTube, but has since been removed. You can find the audio on YouTube, however. In addition, a triple-LP, Ossiach Live, was released in 1971 and includes Weather Report’s performance of “Eurydice.”

It seems likely that Weather Report could have played other dates while in Europe, perhaps at clubs, but no information to that effect has surfaced. We know that Weather Report performed at Penn State University on June 9 (according to Zawinul, this was in fact the band’s first public performance), so there would have been time for Weather Report to do some gigs in Europe leading up to the Music Forum.

Weather Report would make another trip to Europe in 1971, late summer. More about that later.

Publication Day!

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Brian Risner with his copy of Elegant People

Today is publication day for Elegant People, at least here in the United States. I know that it is delayed two months in the United Kingdom. Not sure why they do that, nor what the date is in other parts of the world.

I do know that friend of the website Martin Jarosch, who lives in Germany, got his copy a couple of days ago. After digging in, he wrote, “Thank you for this fantastic book.” I said I was glad that he is enjoying it, and he replied, “I am actually devouring it.” Martin is definitely a fan of the band. I wrote this book for people like him, so it’s gratifying to hear his response.

The attached photo is of Brian Risner, aka the Chief Meteorologist, holding an advance copy of Elegant People that I sent him. Brian was a big help in bringing this book to fruition. “The Old and New Testaments according to Curt Bianchi,” he wrote me. “This will become the de facto reference bible for Weather Report and modern jazz history.” I’m glad we made it to the finish line, Brian!

Fifty Years Ago Today

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Penn State Daily Collegian

Weather Report’s first public performance took place fifty years ago today, on June 9, 1971, at Penn State University. (About two weeks earlier the band gave a preview performance to members of the press at Columbia Record’s Thirtieth Street Studios.)

The Penn State performance was presented by the university’s jazz club and admission was free. At the time, the club numbered about 150 members. Joe later remembered there being about 170 people in attendance–so most of the jazz club and a few others. This would have also been the first time Dom Um Romão performed with Weather Report other than at a rehearsal shortly before this gig.

On the right is page 3 of the June 2, 1971, issue of the The Daily Collegian, which includes a display ad for Weather Report’s upcoming performance.

Andrew Nathaniel White III, 1942–2020

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Andrew White

Andrew White—saxophonist, oboist, bassist, educator and scholar—passed away on Wednesday, November 11. He was 78 years old. White is best known to Weather Report fans for playing electric bass on Weather Report’s third album, Sweetnighter. He also played English horn on the band’s previous LP, I Sing the Body Electric.

When I think of Andrew White, the first phrase that comes to mind is “one of a kind.” There truly was no one quite like him in the jazz world, if not the world at large.

For nearly fifty years he ran Andrew’s Music from the same unassuming house in Washington, D.C. He never entered the computer age, never had an email address, and didn’t use a cell phone. If you wanted to contact him, you either had to call his home (which invariably resulted in getting his answer machine, one of his few nods to the modern age), or you had to write him a letter and send it via postal mail.

Whenever I wrote him, I addressed him as:

Mr. Andrew White
President, executive producer, producer, editor, collaborator, transcriber, copyist, recording supervisor, arranger, accountant, publicist, typist, engineer, composer, performer, author, manager, booking agent, package handler, mail boy and janitor

I got these titles from his books. It’s how he described the various roles he undertook while running the one-man shop that he used to produce and sell his own records and publications. He billed himself as “the most voluminously self-published artist in the history of the music business (so I’ve been told),” and his catalog listed thousands of items for sale from Andrew’s Music.

White was recruited by Joe and Wayne to play electric bass on Sweetnighter because Joe had seen him with the Fifth Dimension on television. Zawinul thought White could provide the funky underpinnings that he wanted for Weather Report’s new music. Before the Fifth Dimension, White played bass in Stevie Wonder’s band. These gigs paid well, and they bankrolled his other activities, including making his own records and faithfully transcribing hundreds of John Coltrane solos.

He also sold a transcription of his bass part on “125th Street Congress.” “That’s one of my biggest bass transcriptions in terms of sales,” he told me in 2017. “And every time Columbia puts that record out, people look on there to see who the bass player is, and it’s me. And then they start calling me. And I say, well, if you want to play like me, you buy that transcription. I’ve been selling that transcription for thirty years.”

White was a music scholar, graduating cum laude from Howard University in 1964 with a major in music theory and a minor in the oboe. He continued his academic career at the Paris Conservatory of Music, Dartmouth College, and the State University of New York, and became the principal oboist for the American Ballet Theatre Orchestra in 1968. But he also had a bawdy sense of humor that was unfiltered by the norms of polite society. One of the forty-odd LPs he self-produced was Far Out Flatulence: A Concerto for Flatulaphone, which consists of 56 minutes of White farting into a microphone.

While jazz was White’s primary love, he was never fully accepted as a jazz artist of stature. In a 2019 Jazz Times profile, White said, “My whole career started out, even in 1960 when I came to Washington, with a severe handicap, which is, I was told very early on that I had no commercial viability,” he says. “My saxophone sound has too much resonance in it, and I was told it would not register well on recording tape, so I couldn’t make good records-and they wouldn’t even know what to do with the records anyway. So I’ve been off in the corner ever since. But nobody ever said I couldn’t play.

“Nobody was knockin’ on my door, so I knocked on my own door, because I had the resources from [professionally performing] rock ‘n’ roll. There are other fellas in my ilk like Coltrane and Eric Dolphy and Ornette [Coleman], they probably didn’t have the resources to do it themselves, and if they did who knows what we could have had from those cats, because they were working under what they call professional supervision. I’ve done all this myself, so I’ve never had anyone tell me what won’t sell,” he laughs in his deep, distinctive guffaw. “I put it all out myself and it’s done well for me, but then I’m not ambitious either. I’m happy with the sales I get, which wouldn’t impress somebody else who would tell me what won’t sell and who probably wouldn’t put it on the record. And who knows how much music that Coltrane had, and all those cats, who never got to even play it in the studio because somebody told them, ‘Well, we don’t need this.’

“I was considered an oddball just like they were. I think Coltrane and Eric and Ornette, to a lesser degree, they didn’t have so much resonance in their sound that it wouldn’t register well on tape.”

If that lack of acceptance hurt Andrew, you wouldn’t know it by talking to him. He was a cheerful man with a big, hearty laugh. He conducted himself with the satisfaction of having done things on his own terms. I will miss him.