Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 1976

AMG Review of Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 1976

Thom Jurek
All Music Guide

What is immediately arresting about this performance of Weather Report at the Montreux Jazz Festival on Eagle Rock Entertainment -- the first of two -- is how the band is beginning to really come together around bassist Jaco Pastorius. Pastorius' entry into the lineup gave the band its final and most memorable, historically anyway, identity. The writing axis of saxophonist Wayne Shorter and keyboardist Joe Zawinul had always made room for a looser, more groove-oriented band where lots of space and rhythmic invention held sway. When Pastorius entered the group Zawinul's tunes became tighter ad more melodic in nature and Shorter's tightened up the groove. However, Pastorius also became one of the band's chief writers and eventually fought it out with Zawinul for center stage, leaving Shorter, arguably the greatest pure jazz composer in the group, in the wings, waiting for his turn to solo. Here, the trio is backed by drummer Alex Acuńa and percussionist Manolo Badrena. The album they were touring to support is "Black Market," a classic in the Weather report catalogue, and the coming together-and splitting apart-of the various exigencies of the band's former identity is obvious in the various tensions displayed here, though the music is flawless, and full of inspiration and vision. Indeed, it is possible to actually see in this wonderful four-camera shoot how excited the group's members themselves were at what was coming together on tracks like "Cannon Ball," "Black Market," "Scarlet Woman," and "Elegant People." There are two long solo duets, one between Pastorius and Acuńa, and the other between Shorter and Zawinul -- this would change later in the band's history and the pairing would be Zawinul and Pastorius. This is as revealing a video statement as one is likely to find of a band in transition who is at the point of realizing its greatest live potential.