Weather+report

Essential: a masterpiece of rock music
Free Form Jazz Fusion at its Best
Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric is an album that I’ve only recently been able to handle and appreciate. It’s extremely free form, pulling in sounds ranging from low spoken murmurs to more classic jazz soloing to strange atonal feedback.

The title makes plain the purpose of this five-disc set: to provide a perpetually pumping soundtrack for a workout. To its credit, this set is neither predictable nor monotonous, containing only one kind of high-energy sound. It jumps and skips from sound to sound and era to era, with Apollo 440 rubbing shoulders with Jackie Wilson, Dr. Feelgood’s “Milk and Alcohol” feeling quite out of place next to Adam Ant’s “Goody Two Shoes,” but that’s the appeal of this schizophrenic set – it provides all kinds of high-octane rhythmic hits, all capable of keeping the heart rate at an elevated rate, but it’s also just as entertaining when it’s listened to outside of a workout.