On paper the titles here are very familiar, with numerous live releases covering the ‘Jaco Pastoius years’, and yet there's never been anything quite like this. Covering the three- year period just after drummer Peter Erskine joined the band, and up to when Pastorius left, he, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter set about a ferocious game of creative one-upmanship. Curated and produced by Erskine from his private soundboard tapes, recorded by Weather Report's longtime mixing engineer Brian Risner that had only ever been heard by the band, they are of a consistently high quality throughout and run as selected highlights from the period, not as a single concert per disc. One always suspected that there were nights when the adrenalin-soaked musical sparring between Zawinul and Pastorius would take on Raging Bull proportions, but rarely has it ever sounded as febrile as it does when Jaco drops an almighty double-time bassline bomb halfway through the 10-minute ‘Badia/Boogie Woogie Waltz’, tipping disc one into overdrive. This soon spirals into a twister of a Zawinul solo, the band dropping dramatically to a low simmer, before building to a distorted bumblebee bass onslaught with Erskine going positively death metal with a thunderous bass drum barrage. Is this the same band that was so sensitively swinging through ‘Three Views of a Secret’ just minutes earlier? Further highlights include Jaco's Osaka solo spot that, while containing his characteristic take on Hendrix's ‘Third Stone from the Sun’ and The Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’, is suddenly joined by Zawinul's synth in a beautiful, if brief, micro-symphony. There are vast chasms of space too on an extended yet consistently exciting version of ‘Madagascar’, Pastorius delivering a spicy solo out of the blue, Shorter wandering bluesily, Zawinul interjecting with some synth- fuzz while Erskine and Thomas percolate subtly in an enthralling ever-shifting on-the-fly arrangement. Every track is packed with unexpected twists and turns, and an impeccable sense of dynamics that range from the poetic to the profane. This is a magical motherlode of must-have music from one the great jazz-rock bands at the peak of their powers.