Weather Report (L to R) Joe Zawinul, Alex Acuña, Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Manolo Badrena 

 

Callin' out around the world / Are you ready for a brand new beat? / Summer's here and the time is right / For dancin' in the streets / They're dancin' in Chicago / Down in New Orleans / Up in New York City / Philadelphia, P.A. / Baltimore and DC now / Yeah don't forget the Motor City / All the way down in L.A. California / Not to mention Halifax Nova Scotia / Manchester / Alexandria, Virginia / All we need is music, sweet music / There'll be music everywhere / There'll be swingin', swayin' and records playin' / And dancin' in the street, yeah / Oh, it doesn't matter what you wear / Just as long as you are there / So come on, every guy grab a girl / Everywhere around the world--Martha and the Vandellas  1964 summer hit written by William "Mickey" Stevenson and Marvin Gaye .

Miroslav Vitous' new CD honors Weather Report

Around the world, indeed--from North to South America; from France, Germany, and England to India and Australia. With the flip of a switch, the Weather Channel's cultural tsunami--unexpected and relentless--quietly surges through the web of communication satellites and fiber-optic cables that envelope the world like strands of extruded spider silk enveloping its prey.

Out with Spyra Gyra--in with the Eagles.

On Thursday, Geoffrey Darby (Weather Channel's executive vice president of programming since February) said, "I think we've been doing an injustice to our viewers playing, for the lack of a better word, elevator music (during 'On the 8's') segments for all these years"

The two-minute "On the 8's" segments feature a local weather and traffic at eight minutes past the the hour and every 10 minutes thereafter.

Although a CD of "Weather Channel Smooth Jazz" stormed to the No. 1 on Billboard's Current Contemporary Jazz Album Chart, viewer focus groups revealed that programming--and commercials--receded into the background like the olfactory bouquet of cleansers, soaps, detergents, and air-freshening aerosols engulfing Weather Channel viewers in their hotel rooms.

"People would have it on but they wouldn't be watching and they wouldn't be listening. We wanted music that would get their attention--and this has," Darby said.

Darby's music programming philosophy avoids "thematically intrusive" music--Bob Dylans's Desolation Row and the Doors' The End are unlikely to make Weather Channel's hot-100 rotation.  He went on to say the new sound can't be "too dramatic" either, in which case the greatest jazz-fussion band ever, appropriately named "Weather Report," will likely not make the cut.

After seeing "Weather Report's" legendary 1982 Playboy Jazz Festival fireworks (attended by this writer), the late LA Times' music critic Leonard Feather said,  

'Weather Report' is less a collective of five men than a single instrument with 10 magisterial hands; a soaring sonic spaceship controlled by two far-from-automatic pilots, Zawinul and Wayne Shorter."

After Zawinul's death in 2007, Shorter talked about the band's initial concept. "When we got together, we spent very little time describing what we wanted to do. In the beginning, we mostly talked about music as literature. Almost compared like to James Joyce -- sentences without periods or commas, without capital letters, or maybe with all capital letters."

While you probably won't find "Weather Report" on the Weather Channel, you can liven up your day with this version of Black Market.