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Saturday, March 27, 2010

WEATHER REPORT: Black Market (1976)

This is one of Weather Report's well-known tracks from one of their most popular albums. Lumped as a jazz-fusion band, they combined their jazz background with world music, and in this case, funk and Caribbean rhythms. Much of the unique keyboard sounds were from Joe Zawinul's continued modifications of the synths at his disposal. In this song, he inverted the keyboard voltages on the ARP 2600 "so that the upper portion of the keyboard played the lower sounds and vice versa" (from Weather Report Annotated Discography). What's also interesting is that drummer Chester Thompson plays the first half of the song, and with an edit it switches to Narada Michael Walden for the second half! And overall, an all-star lineup.


Song : "Black Market" by Weather Report
From the LP "Black Market" (Columbia) Apr. 1976

LINEUP :
Joe Zawinul : keyboards
Wayne Shorter : sax, lyricon
Alphonso Johnson : bass
Chester Thompson : drums
Narada Michael Walden : drums
Don Alias : congas and percussion
Alex Acuna : percussion
Link in title. 

1 comment:

Captain Beyond said...

Link updated; in title.