After 15 years and 16 albums, Weather Report quietly became history in 1986 following their final album This Is This. For a while, Zawinul seemed like a singer without a song, unsure where to centre his music. In 1985 he had toured the festival circuit as a single, lone figure behind a bank of keyboards who brought to mind the mad Lon Chaney figure behind the huge organ in the 1925 film Phantom of the Opera. Then he briefly led a band called Weather Update which didn't click and in 1988 came the Zawinul Syndicate's debut album The Immigrants. The overall impression of this and the two albums that followed, Black Water and Lost Tribes, was of exotic electronic tone poems in which Zawinul's keyboard ingenuity occasionally seemed more important than content. This BGO Records two-CD set presents the latter two albums for Columbia, his last for that label. These are essentially a waystation between Weather Report and the final incarnation of the Zawinul Syndicate, unveiled in 1996 and was maintained until Zawinul's death in 2007. They became the hottest ticket on the international jazz circuit and although Zawinul wanted his Columbia Syndicate to groove, it was nothing like the later incarnation of the band. There is a feeling of searching on these albums, but also of not finding.