Josef Zawinul, Wayne Shorter and Co. have wandered far afield from the original Weather Report, assimilating and passing off new drummers and bassists with astounding speed. The wandering in itself is no big deal, for they couldn't have played the understated and airy music of their early albums forever and kept it fresh.

If they have lost anything, it's the resonant, pulsing space between notes...

Electronics can be cold. At high volume levels those nuances of phrasing and texture which have always communicated the essence of jazz, from Armstrong to Parker to Coltrane, tend to blur or disappear altogether. In the beginning Weather Report seemed to be an unusually cold band, programming textures and rhythms from an immense distance, sculpting impressive lines but from solid ice. Mysterious...

Tale Spinnin' sets up a hypnotic groove, loose and funky with more than a touch of Afro-Latin in the rhythm section and engaging melodic detail on top. The compressed lyric intensity and experiments in acoustic/electric orchestration which lent Weather Report's recent Mysterious Traveller its intriguing surface and structural intricacy are largely missing, and only Josef Zawinul's "Man in the...