This is Mily Way, from Weather Report’s first album, released in 1971. This track is a brilliant collage of reverb and all acoustic sounds.

Amazingly, the atmospheric track that sounds like an artifact of early electronic music, includes none of the machinery associated with that genre. Zawinul talked about the instrumentation: “Horn and acoustic piano — no electronics whatsoever. But I think it’s a new way of doing something with the pedals and with the saxophone.” In 1984 Zawinul expanded on how the band created the sounds on that unique track: “I silently held a chord down on the piano and had Wayne play an arpeggio of the same chord, blowing his saxophone right inside the piano at the soundboard. The tape recorder was started on the echo at the end of the sound, not when he was playing.”

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