01	Birdland						05:57
	02	A Remark You Made						06:51
	03	Teen Town						02:51
	04	Harlequin						03:59
	05	Rumba Mama						02:11
	06	Palladium						04:46
	07	The Juggler						05:03
	08	Havona						06:01

Limited Millennium Edition (Nr.: 00688) Weather Report's biggest-selling album is that ideal thing, a popular and artistic success - and for the same reasons. For one thing, Joe Zawinul revealed an unexpectedly potent commercial streak for the first time since his Cannonball Adderley days, contributing what has become a perennial hit, "Birdland." Indeed, "Birdland" is a remarkable bit of record-making, a unified, ever-developing piece of music that evokes, without in any way imitating, a joyous evening on 52nd St. with a big band. The other factor is the full emergence of Jaco Pastorius as a co-leader; his dancing, staccato bass lifting itself out of the bass range as a third melodic voice, completely dominating his own ingenious "Teen Town" (where he also plays drums!).

By now, Zawinul has become WR's de facto commander in the studio; his colorful synthesizers dictate the textures, his conceptions are carefully planned, with little of the freewheeling improvisation of only five years before. Wayne Shorter's saxophones are now reticent, if always eloquent, beams of light in Zawinul's general scheme while Alex Acuna shifts ably over to the drums and Manolo Badrena handles the percussion. Released just as the jazz-rock movement began to run out of steam, this landmark album proved that there was plenty of creative life left in the idiom. By now Weather Report had embraced jazz-rock-R&B fusion and became a massive commercial success on par with contemporary rock acts. The key factor was adding Pastorius to the lineup, which at this point included Shorter, Zawinul, and the facile Latin percussion section of Alex Acuña (drums) and Manolo Badrena (percussion). The three leaders produced and wrote the whole album, and it's a surprisingly quiet batch of instrumentals - much softer than the title would suggest, and not nearly as hard-edged as contemporary fusion efforts by, say, Jeff Beck or Joni Mitchell. That often pushes it close to pure mood music, inoffensive to the point of being completely forgettable; Zawinul's catchy, but amazingly repetitive hit "Birdland" is a typical example. The good points are Zawinul's obsession with his Arp synthesizer, resulting in a shimmering cascade of notes; and Pastorius' slightly dissonant, unpredictable fretless bass lines, which occasionally burst forth into terrifying displays of technical expertise ("Teen Town"). (JA)