Weather Report
1974-01-31
Williamstown, MA
Chapin Hall
Williams College

Master tape, recording and lineage info below.
The recording is mono and has been properly presented that way,
i.e. the two channels waveforms are identical.

01  Directions
02  Blackthorn Rose
03  Dr. Honoris Causa
04  American Tango?  I'm not sure of this title.
05  It's About That Time
06  Percussion/Bass Interlude
07  Boogie Woogie Waltz

Joe Zawinul
Wayne Shorter
Alphonso Johnson
Ishmael Wilburn
Dom Um Romao

Awhile back I posted a version of this that I had
found on an internet blog.
After it was up for awhile I was contacted by someone who
told me that he had a copy of this show from the master tape.
He offered to send it to me and he did.  He sent it to me as a data file.
Thank you so muchâ€¦

It is quite an improvement over the other.
And it's a bit longer.  The pitch is more accurate.
On the first share Boogie Woogie Waltz is edited.  Some music is missing.
It's complete here.  And at the end of the show Wayne introduces the band.

The first share would all fit onto one CD.
This one needs two.
For burning to CD split between 03 and 04.
On this new share there is a cut/tape flip after 03 so
I added a quick fade.

EQ wise this share peaked around 200 Hz.
I wanted to bring up the low end some.
I couldn't do much though without introducing a lot of low end
noise during the quiet parts.  I was able to bring it up a bit around 100 Hz.
The synth gets a bit piercing at one point. I didn't want to do anything
to it though because then the rest of the show would suffer from that cut.

Below is some info that was supplied by our kind benefactor.

------------------------------------------------

"The band consisted of Josef Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Alphonso Johnson, Dom Um Romao and Ishmael Wilburn.
The taper sat in the first row of the relatively small and stately hall, directly on the center aisle.
At the very end of Blackthorn Rose, Zawinul gently tossed a small ball onto the strings of the open grand
piano to create a hushed  sound. Twenty seconds into the opening of the sixth piece-- a percussion segment
by Romao that kicks off an intro to Boogie Woogie Waltz--there is an audible thump as Romao jumps from the
stage. He then runs past the taper down the long center aisle of the hall, strumming as he goes,
before eventually coming back up the aisle to stand next to the taper and then getting back on stage.
The taper used Memorex cassettes and a Panasonic Slimline cassette recorder.  Many years later,
the cassette reels were transferred to new cassette shells and the recordings were digitized into WAV files
via Goldwave before being losslessly compressed into APE files.  Years after that, the APE files were
decompressed back into WAV files before being compressed into FLAC files.
Goldwave was used to mildly edit the beginnings and endings of the files,
boost the volume of files as needed, divide the files into tracks, and to detect and correct DC offsets.
No EQ was applied".

-------------------------------------------------

That 'ball hitting the piano strings' is about 14 seconds from the end of track 02.

Dom Um Romao jumping off the stage is about 20 seconds from the start of track 06.


    length     expanded size    cdr  WAVE problems  fmt   ratio  filename
    15:54.35      168367964 B   ---   --   ---xx   flac  0.2744  Weather Report 1974-01-31 master 01.flac
     8:11.38       86701820 B   ---   --   ---xx   flac  0.2351  Weather Report 1974-01-31 master 02.flac
    14:53.73      157696940 B   ---   --   ---xx   flac  0.2719  Weather Report 1974-01-31 master 03.flac
     4:20.28       45929900 B   ---   --   ---xx   flac  0.2268  Weather Report 1974-01-31 master 04.flac
    14:45.72      156283388 B   ---   --   ---xx   flac  0.2733  Weather Report 1974-01-31 master 05.flac
     8:07.07       85923308 B   ---   --   ---xx   flac  0.2275  Weather Report 1974-01-31 master 06.flac
    16:39.10      176247164 B   ---   --   ---xx   flac  0.2769  Weather Report 1974-01-31 master 07.flac
    82:52.38      877150484 B                            0.2633  (7 files)




