Zawinul’s magnificently miscegenated background made it easy for him to excel in, and contribute to, African-American music. “The mixing of the races and the mixing of cultures creates the greatest of all things…,” he said in a 1974 interview included in Brian Glasser’s 2001 biography In a Silent Way “[T]ake African people, but African people in America, where all of this mixing has been going on. The Black man in America is so talented because of that.”

Till the end, Zawinul never stopped dipping into America’s - and the world’s - endless supply of  Black, brown, and beige moods and grooves. His last major CD, Brown Street, released last spring, was a live recording from his own Birdland club in Vienna with the WDR Big Band, and featured re-orchestrations of his most celebrated Miles Davis/Weather Report-era compositions, from “In a Silent Way,” and “Black Market” to the Ellington-embered swing of “Night Passage” and the South American syncopations of “Carnavalito.”

Joe Zawinul lives on in some ingeniously sampled hip-hop tracks, including A Tribe Called Quest’s “Butter” from The Low End Theory, DJ Logic’s turntable take on “125th Street Congress” on the 2007 four-CD compilation Forecast: Tomorrow and in remakes like “Indiscretions” from Philip Bailey’s 2002 disc, Soul on Jazz.  He was about the extension and innovation of his art, “I never thought about arrival,” he told Down Beat’s Zan Stewart, “It’s all just part of the flow.”

Discography

With Weather Report
 
Weather Report, Columbia Legacy1971
Black Market, Columbia Legacy 1976
Heavy Weather, Columbia Legacy 1977
8:30, Columbia Legacy 1979
Sportin' Life, Columbia Legacy 1985
Forecast: Tomorrow (compilation), Columbia Legacy 2007
 
As a Leader
Zawinul, Atlantic 1970
Dialects, Columbia Legacy 1986
Stories of the Danube, Polygram 1995
Brown Street, Heads Up 2007
 
With Miles Davis
In A Silent Way, Columbia Legacy 1969
Bitches Brew, Columbia Legacy 1970
 
With Cannonball Adderley
Mercy, Mercy, Mercy Live at "The Club," Capitol 1966
 
With Dinah Washington
What a Difference a Day Makes, Mercury 1959

Ebonyjet.com Joe Zawinul Appreciation 

Eugene Holley, Jr. is an arts and culture writer based in Wilmington, Delaware. His pieces have appeared in Amazon.com, Philadelphia Weekly, Vibe, and the Village Voice. He covers jazz for Ebonyjet.com. Reach him at eholley@hotmail.com