BLACK MARKET

A consistently catchy album of comparatively accessible fusion from Weather Report, Black Market gets a lot of props for being Jaco Pastorius' first album with the group, though in actuality he only appears on two tracks. Granted, one of them is his own Barbary Coast, but I the fact that this empty technical showboating made it onto the album as being a fairly clear symptom of the weakness of the songwriting this time around. Personally, I don't consider Black Market to be the unalloyed classic it's often made out to be - not only are the band playing a style of fusion which by this point in the 1970s had become fairly safe and mainstream, they don't even do anything particularly novel or interesting with it.