Peter Erskine

This is primarily a biography by drummer Peter Erskine and is only very partially a "Chronicle of Weather Report" as given in the subtitle. Erskine's performances and recordings with Weather Report between 1978 to 1982 are certainly covered but that is a relatively small portion of the book. It is also a very small portion of Erskine's musical life but as Weather Report was probably the group with widest commercial success (esp. the years with bassist Jaco Pastorius which mostly overlapped with Erskine's) the reason for the highlighting is understandable.
Otherwise you will certainly learn an enormous amount about the wide variety of projects that Erskine has worked on during his 50-year or so career. Often you don't hear about the jingle and session* work that professional musicians do behind the scenes but Erskine is happy to talk about all of it. This is very low on stories that paint musicians in any kind of bad light. Presumably some enemies and rivals exist in the professional drum world but you won't hear about that here. Also, as opposed to those rock/jazz musician biographies that usually take a drugs & debauchery angle as their selling point, this collection of tales of musical encounters and anecdotes was almost completely free of that. So it was quite a complete pleasure to read and I found out about a lot of interesting music and musicians that I had never heard of previously.

*The biggest surprise to me was that Seth MacFarlane (of Family Guy, Ted, etc.) recorded a jazz crooner/big band album (with Peter Erskine on drums of course) in 2011 called "Music is Better that Words", and yes, he's a pretty great singer in the Frank Sinatra style.

p.s. The title "No Beethoven" is a quote from Weather Report keyboardist Joe Zawinul in one of his less profane moments when he simply said "I ain't afraid of no Beethoven."… (altro)