5. Weather ReportDomino Theory
It reminds me of Glastonbury 1984. I was in Egypt ’80 and we had about 40 dates on the road and we drove up to Glastonbury. And I saw this live. These guys, I don’t know how they did it. Can you imagine that at Glastonbury on the big stage, pumping through the speakers? Bloody hell, these guys were like gods, musical gods. Listen to that drummer – he is like a machine. Watching that live, I don’t think you can picture me watching these guys live. And with Omar Hakim on drums – [air drumming] I was going, is this humanly possible?! These guys! I was young, impressionable. How old was I? Seventeen going on eighteen, or eighteen going on nineteen.
I walked up to them with a couple of Fela albums and said: "You all don’t know me now, yeah, but you are going to know of me soon. I’m the keyboard player in Fela Kuti’s band, so I’m going to autograph these albums to you guys. Now you guys got your autographs to give to me." And they were like: "Okay, sure." And they gave me a cassette of this. It hadn’t come out then. So I was one of the only people to have a promo cassette signed by Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Omar Hakim, Victor Bailey and José Rossy.
Listen to this, it just takes you to a completely different level. But the track that got me on this was ‘D♭ Waltz’. And if you listen to it you will see the relation it has to Afrobeat. Rock, Afro, jazz, funk. I love groove. When it comes to groove, man, I can sit on groove for hours. [makes spacey sound effects] The quality of the musicianship on this just inspires me. And this is one of the rare albums. You can’t find it. A lot of Weather Report you can get, but this was like a limited edition kind of release and suddenly it just went underground and nobody can find it.
I met Joe years later. He gave me a residency at Birdland in Vienna, Austria. He played with me and we did a couple of songs at his charity event for the lost children of Hurricane Katrina: he got us together and we played a great show and raised about $250,000 which was donated to the orphans of Hurricane Katrina.
This reminds me of a time when this was ahead of time.
