Weather Report came out of the same New York sessions that produced Miles Davis's electric period. Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter had met in 1959 in Maynard Ferguson's big band, and by 1969 both were contributing to Miles Davis's In a Silent Way (Zawinul wrote the title track) and Bitches Brew. Zawinul was simultaneously finishing a nine-year run in Cannonball Adderley's quintet, where his 1966 tune "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" had become a crossover hit. In 1970 he and Shorter formed a band of their own, with Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš, drummer Alphonse Mouzon, and Airto Moreira on percussion. Who actually founded it is still disputed: Zawinul said he and Shorter recruited Vitouš, while Vitouš maintained that he and Shorter started the group and Zawinul came in afterward. The self-titled debut was cut at Columbia in February and March 1971 and won Down Beat's Readers Poll album of the year along with a Swing Journal Grand Prix in Japan.

The first three years were the group's most abstract. Eric Gravatt took over the drum chair in late 1971 and Dom Um Romão joined on percussion (an NDR radio broadcast from Berlin on September 3, 1971, later issued as Live in Berlin 1971, catches Mouzon and Romão together before the handover). On January 13, 1972, the band played Shibuya Kōkaidō in Tokyo; the full concert came out in Japan as the double LP Live in Tokyo, and edited versions of the same performances filled side two of I Sing the Body Electric, whose studio side was recorded in New York in November 1971 and January 1972 with Hubert Laws on flute and Ralph Towner on twelve-string guitar. Sweetnighter (recorded February 3 to 7, 1973) pushed hard toward funk vamps, and the argument that followed split the band: Zawinul wanted the groove, Vitouš wanted the open collective approach, Shorter sided with Zawinul, and Vitouš left. His last contribution, acoustic bass on "American Tango," survives on Mysterious Traveller (1974), an album that otherwise belongs to his replacement, Alphonso Johnson, and to a rotating cast of drummers including Ishmael Wilburn and Skip Hadden.

Johnson's three years brought the rhythm section into focus. Leon "Ndugu" Chancler drummed on Tale Spinnin' (recorded February to early April 1975), Chester Thompson took over for the touring band that year, and Alex Acuña arrived on percussion. Black Market (recorded December 1975 to January 1976) documents the transition literally: Johnson plays electric bass on five tracks, Jaco Pastorius plays fretless on two including his own "Barbary Coast," Thompson and Narada Michael Walden split the drums, and Acuña and Don Alias divide the percussion. Pastorius stayed, Acuña moved to the drum kit, and Manolo Badrena took over percussion. That quartet-plus-one made Heavy Weather in Devonshire Sound, North Hollywood, over December 1976 and January 1977. It reached No. 30 on the Billboard 200, topped the jazz chart, was certified platinum by the RIAA in 1991, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011. Its opening track, Zawinul's "Birdland," entered the standard repertoire.

Pastorius brought Peter Erskine in on drums for 1978. Mr. Gone, recorded February to June 1978 and released that September on Maurice White's ARC imprint at Columbia, topped the Billboard jazz chart with guest drum spots from Tony Williams and Steve Gadd, then drew a one-star Down Beat review that provoked a furious rebuttal interview from Zawinul, an unprecedented reversal after five straight five-star notices. The double album 8:30, drawn mostly from the 1978 tour, won the Grammy for Best Jazz Fusion Performance at the 22nd ceremony in 1980. Percussionist Robert Thomas Jr. joined for Night Passage, taped July 12 and 13, 1980 at The Complex in Los Angeles in front of an invited audience of about 250 (one track, "Madagascar," came from Festival Hall, Osaka, on June 29). By the 1982 self-titled album, recorded July and August 1981, Zawinul was writing nearly everything, Shorter contributed one piece, Pastorius was absorbed in his own Word of Mouth, and the group came apart.

Zawinul rebuilt it with two musicians in their early twenties: drummer Omar Hakim, then 23, and bassist Victor Bailey, with José Rossy on percussion. That lineup made Procession (recorded July and August 1982, released February 19, 1983) and Domino Theory (recorded 1983 in Osaka, Pasadena and Los Angeles), the latter the first Weather Report album built partly on drum machines and an Emulator sampler. Mino Cinélu replaced Rossy for Sportin' Life (recorded August and September 1984, released June 25, 1985), which the band expected to be its last. A remaining Columbia obligation produced one more: This Is This!, taped in December 1985 and released August 26, 1986, with Erskine back on most of the drums, Hakim on one track, Carlos Santana guesting on guitar, and no Shorter compositions at all, the only Weather Report album of which that is true. Shorter had announced in February 1986 that he was leaving for solo work. Zawinul carried the personnel forward as Weather Update, a 1986 to 1987 band with Bailey, Erskine, Cinélu and a guitar chair filled first by John Scofield and then Steve Khan, before founding the Zawinul Syndicate in 1988. Pastorius was killed in Fort Lauderdale in September 1987, Zawinul died in Vienna in September 2007, Bailey and Mouzon both in 2016, and Shorter in March 2023.

Weather Report's working method was the thing other fusion bands copied and mostly failed to reproduce: no fixed soloist, no fixed accompanist, everyone free to step forward or drop out, which Zawinul summarized as getting away from "eight bars shit and then you go to the bridge." Wayne Shorter played less than almost any saxophonist of his stature would have, leaving space that Joe Zawinul filled with a steadily expanding electronic palette: Fender Rhodes through Mu-Tron phasing, two ARP 2600s, the Oberheim polyphonic, the Prophet 5, and the TONTO system on Tale Spinnin'. Zawinul worked directly with ARP and Oberheim on new voicings, and the band's records document synthesizer development in real time across fifteen years. Jaco Pastorius changed what an electric bass could be inside that setting, carrying melody and countermelody on fretless rather than holding a bottom, and his four studio albums with the group (1976 to 1982) are the ones most often cited. The band won Down Beat's readers poll for album of the year repeatedly through the 1970s, took one Grammy from six nominations, and left a compositional legacy in "Birdland," which crossed into pop and vocal repertoire and remains the most widely played piece any fusion group produced. Peter Erskine and Omar Hakim both used the drum chair as a career springboard, and the roster read backward is a map of 1970s jazz-funk rhythm playing.