Joe Zawinul: An Appreciation
folk music of the future
2007-09-12
By Eugene Holley, Jr.
Most synthesized modern music bears the influence of the Austrian-American keyboardist/composer/bandleader Joe Zawinul, a founding father of jazz-fusion, and co-founder of supergroup Weather Report, who died yesterday of skin cancer in Vienna at the age of seventy-five.
The classical-trained Zawinul’s five decades-long evolutionary artistry began when he arrived in America in 1959 and played Dinah Washington’s signature record “What a Difference a Day Makes.” He also worked in trumpeter Maynard Ferguson’s big band, which also included a young tenor saxophonist named Wayne Shorter. Zawinul enjoyed a nine-and-a-half-year gig with alto sax king Cannonball Adderley, where his talent as a composer bore first fruit on his soul-funk opus “The Country Preacher,” and his 1966 Saturday Night Function/Sunday Morning church service classic “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” marked his blues-drenched debut on the Wurlitzer/electronic piano, at about the same time Ray Charles dropped his chestnut “What’d I Say.”
After Cannonball, Zawinul recorded on Miles Davis’s groundbreaking 1969-70 sessions that gave birth to the controversial LP’s In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew; the former, a ethereal, tantric tone poem penned by Zawinul, and the latter, a two-record collection that included the snaky sax lines from the keyboardist’s former Maynard Ferguson bandmate Wayne Shorter, which featured the keyboardist’s harmonically hypnotic “Pharaoh’s Dance.”
Zawinul and Shorter left Miles and co-founded Weather Report, an almost impossible to define ensemble that blurred, pushed, and fused the boundaries of jazz, funk, and rock and foreshadowed the arrival of world music, which over its fifteen year period from 1970 to 1985 included an incredible array of musicians: drummers Alphonse Mouzon, Alex Acuna, and Peter Erskine; percussionists Airto Moreira, and Dom Um Romao; and bassists Miroslav Vitous, Alphonso Johnson, and the incredible Jaco Pastorius, whose fuzztoned basslines made Zawinul’s “Birdland,” his Afro-anthemic 1976 ode to the famous Manhattan jazz club named for the tragic bop leader Charlie Parker, his biggest hit, with versions by Quincy Jones, and the Manhattan Transfer. By this time, Zawinul was a master of the synthesizer and created eerie, textured expressions counter pointed by powerful, percussive ports-of-call that simultaneously sounded like they were from everywhere and nowhere.
After he and Shorter went their separate ways, Zawinul created two follow-up bands, Weather Update and the Zawinul Syndicate, and released some pleasing recordings as a solo artist, including the Afropop-oriented Dialects in 1986, and Stories of the Danube in 1995, a symphonic work that drew up his musical and cultural heritage. “One thing about Viennese musicians, they can really groove, more than even the German bands can,” he said to Zan Stewart in Down Beat in 2007. “It’s something in our nature, perhaps. We’re cosmopolitan and interracial—Czech, Slavic, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish a little bit. All that [stuff] is conglomerated in one place.”
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