by John L. Walters, editor, Unknown Public
portrait by Eamonn McCabe (taken five minutes after Joe was interviewed by JLW)
An urchin piano prodigy in war-scarred Vienna, Joe Zawinul threw himself into American jazz, then turned the music upside down with his other-worldly electric tone poems for Miles Davis and Weather Report. Now in his 70s, he’s still travelling, with musicians from Africa, India and the Caribbean, the plugged-in prophet of World Music.
In 1986, when the Viennese-born, US-resident keyboard genius Joe Zawinul released his solo album Dialects, the man and his music seemed out of joint with the times. The fifteen-year career of Weather Report, the group he had created with saxophonist Wayne Shorter had come to a natural end. For certain influential critics, Zawinul and Shorter’s distinctive interweaving of structure and improvisation, of ethnic percussion and electronics, of melody and timbre, was a dead end; their legacy derided as unrewarding ‘fusion’. Jazz was about to enter an acoustic neo-classical phase that has dominated the genre for nearly two decades. With the deaths of Jaco Pastorius (Weather Report’s troubled bassist) in 1987, of Gil Evans in 1988 and Miles Davis in 1991, a whole turbulent era seemed to be shutting down.
As many of Zawinul’s contemporaries hitched rides on the neo-classical bandwagon, jazz labels closed or got swallowed up. While jazz history gripped the colleges, ‘smooth jazz’ (the bastard offspring of soft fusion and MOR soul) began to dominate the airwaves. Meanwhile, Zawinul, whom Miles Davis once described as ‘cliché-free’ entered a new phase in his working life. He has remained a prolific composer and performer, working constantly with the Zawinul Syndicate, whose new-blood musicians have increasingly come from outside the United States. Now in his early 70s, he seems to be the great prophet of twenty-first century music. Many current forms of music, and the myriad sounds, samples and beats that inform them, were influenced or predicted by Zawinul, the grand old man of electronic world jazz fusion.
‘He’s one of those people who have changed the world,’ says composer and Provocateur label boss Colin Towns of Zawinul. Author and jazz trumpeter Ian Carr observes that Zawinul’s career reverses the usual pattern of a jazz musician’s career: ‘instead of doing his most innovative work when he was young, the whole of his earlier like seems like a prolonged apprenticeship and preparation for the brilliant originality and sustained artistry of Weather Report He became one of the first Europeans since Django Reinhardt to have a major influence on the course of the music.’
Zawinul was born in 1932 in Vienna. His twin, Erich, died of pneumonia at four. His musical gifts became clear early on: he had perfect pitch and entertained his family by playing the accordion. He speaks warmly of the musical culture of that city, and its dialect, preferring it to German: ‘The way we speak is a soft language, a musical language, it’s like a walking bass line.’ His mother sang - she also had perfect pitch - and his father, a clerk with the gas company, played harmonica. They lived in a municipal apartment block, in the poor Third district, and there was no piano in the home. At seven he was given a free place to study piano at the Vienna Conservatory, where he also played clarinet and violin.
He discovered jazz at 12, and in the postwar years found he could easily work out the harmonies on the American jazz records that came his way. He saw Stormy Weather 24 times, impressed by the grace and intelligence of the black musicians and dancers: Lena Horne; the Nicholas Brothers. He played for dances and functions with Thomas Klestil, later president of Austria, and began to earn a living as a musician. In 1952 he played for a short time with Hans Koller, the leading Austrian saxophonist, and over the 1950s Zawinul rose through the hierarchy of Austria’s burgeoning jazz and commercial music scene, with a growing reputation among his fellow musicians.
According to Brian Glasser’s book In A Silent Way: A Portrait of Joe Zawinul (Sanctuary), the musician had his sights on the US from the beginning. His colleagues in the band led by German jazz musician Fatty George, teased him about this, and on one occasion faked a call requesting that Zawinul travel to another city to play with Ella Fitzgerald. The pianist packed his bags - only discovering the deception at the last minute. Later, when he received a genuine call from Clark Terry, he suspected another hoax, and lost the chance to play with visiting Americans.
Late in 1958 came the opportunity that Zawinul hungered for: he was awarded a scholarship for four months of free tuition at Berklee College in Boston, the jazz school which has been a seedbed for many gifted musicians over the past few decades: composer Mike Gibbs, guitarists John Scofield and Pat Metheny. ‘I met Zawinul in 1959,’ says Gibbs, who cites Weather Report as an influence. ‘We arrived at Berklee at the same time. He stayed three minutes and I stayed four years.’ Zawinul spent his evenings playing on the Boston scene and the word got around: within weeks, he was offered a job in Maynard Ferguson’s big band, and left the college for good. A brief stint with the trumpeter’s came to an end when Dinah Washington offered Zawinul a gig.
Zawinul’s anecdotes of his early career create the impression of an unstoppable force, a European young gun in the New World, making friends and influencing people. But when Miles Davis tried to hire him in 1959, Zawinul refused, saying that when the time was right they would make history together. While Zawinul spent most of the decade playing with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, the jazz scene rapidly evolved and splintered into several factions. Jazz was slowly becoming marginalised, due first to the British invasion of pop in 1964, and then to the growing dominance of rock, folk and soul as the soundtrack to the culture. The Adderley band was notable for playing genuine jazz while maintaining a popular following; intelligent but ‘funky’. Zawinul had helped the band reach a bigger audience in 1966 by writing their hit Mercy, Mercy, Mercy - a mid-tempo, gospel-influenced tune that embodied the spirit of its time. Their appearance at the 1970 Monterey Festival can be glimpsed briefly in Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut Play Misty For Me.
At some point in his mid-30s, Zawinul made some important changes in his life, beginning an intense programme of self-improvement. He cites the ‘little crisis’ when bebop piano master Barry Harris, a predecessors in the Cannonball congratulated him for an Adderley recording on which Zawinul played exactly like Harris. For a few moments, the former felt he had ‘arrived’, a Viennese émigré who could play bebop like a native New Yorker. ‘The great Barry Harris thinks it was him playing when I was playing.’ After a few more seconds reflection, he decided, to ‘pack all my records up and not listen to music.’ Though still obliged to play others’ music, he was determined to forge a path for himself.
In 1966, on the recommendation of his Austrian friend, classical composer-pianist Freidrich Gulda, Zawinul took weekly lessons with Raymond Leventhal, as the ‘greatest living pianist’. He had rejected his formerly ‘wild and undisciplined’ life, coming to terms with the responsibilities of his growing family. ‘I said I’m gonna totally concentrate on myself, to become what I’m supposed to be. I had all the gifts so I’ve got to pay back.’ After seven months’ study, Leventhal assured him that he could play anything he wished in the piano literature. The teacher presented him with a leaving gift, an 88-key silent practice piano that he could use in hotel rooms while on the road. Zawinul’s wife had bought him an electric range with two burners so that he could save money and eat well. ‘While I was cooking I never wanted to leave anything on fire in the room, so I was practising for hours on the silent keyboard. And I played those Alkan etudes. My fingers were so strong - when I came to the gig every night, I blew everybody away!’
Another significant decision for Zawinul came one winter: he played two gigs with Ella Fitzgerald when her regular accompanist was snowbound. Within minutes of getting home, jazz impresario Norman Grantz telephoned to offer Zawinul $1400 a week, plus a per diem of $80, plus all hotels, to play with the great jazz singer. ‘I mean $80 a day is already much more than the $300 a week I’m getting with Cannonball,’ recalls Zawinul. ‘I’m here with small children, so I wanted to give my life partner the opportunity to make up her mind.’
He asked Grantz to call him back in five minutes and talked with Maxine, who said, ‘No. You do what you have to do. I can make do with $300 and I have time to wait until you have your thing.’ Zawinul breathed a sigh of relief. ‘And then things happened,’ he says. I wrote a lot of music, because I was so happy,’ He repeatedly credits the importance of his wife Maxine, in providing a stable and loving home life for their three boys, and supporting his career choices. ‘I have a great wife,’ he says. ‘And I believe it takes a great wife to become a great man.’
The late 1960s were an important time for Zawinul, when he found his voice as a composer, with tunes such as Dr Honoris Causa, Early Minor and In A Silent Way. ‘In the period between 1967 and late 1971, the music world changed beyond recognition,’ writes Chris Heaton in Changing Platforms. ‘Contemporary classical music entered a period of self-doubt (the new electronics, American minimalism), the jazz avant-garde became detached from its American culture and jazz-rock became the predominant musical direction in jazz.’ Zawinul, perhaps more than any other single musician, was the man who engineered this change in direction. With an instinctive understanding of the jazz tradition, harmony, rhythm, sound and his hard-won instrumental prowess, he provided jazz-rock with its soul and intellect - perhaps even its conscience.
The album that piece that signalled an important change in the music was In A Silent Way (1969). Zawinul’s title track signalled the beginning of Miles Davis’s electric period. The extent to which the trumpet player relied upon Zawinul’s compositions can be heard on subsequent albums such as Bitches Brew (1970) and Live-Evil (1971). Yet Zawinul never joined Davis’s band, and had previously turned down offers to work with him, showing a remarkably purposeful sense of his own destiny. When he made Zawinul, his third solo album for Atlantic, Davis wanted to play on it. Zawinul told Davis: ‘If you’re on the record, your presence will be so powerful I cannot find out what I am worth,’ and asked the trumpeter to write a sleeve note instead. Davis wrote: ‘In order to write this type of music you have to be free inside of yourself and be Josef Zawinul with two beige kids, a black wife, two pianos, from Vienna, a Cancer and ‘Cliché-Free.’’
Soon after, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter formed Weather Report, ‘the last of the great storytellers,’ according to Zawinul. Determined to escape the dying jazz club scene, and the intense, lengthy solos favoured by the young lions of the New Thing, they created a new world of sound, melody, rhythm and technology for jazz, whose implications are still being worked out today. While other jazz stars of the period either embraced commerciality, or were freelance and project-based, Zawinul and Shorter invested most of their time and creativity in the band.
With a changing cast of characters on percussion, drums and bass over their fifteen-year career, the Weather Report sound was immediately recognisable; consistently creative, as confirmed by ‘Live & Unreleased’ a double CD containing recordings from five different versions of the band. Fans who attended Weather Report concerts in the 70s and 80s recall the warmth and spirit that informed those concerts. Zawinul and Shorter’s band combined the exuberance and energy of rock and funk with the depth and musicality of jazz. ‘Fusion was heavy on technique,’ says Brian Glasser, ‘but Weather Report was never pretentious. It was accessible but also profound and substantial. How many other people have achieved that, apart from Duke Ellington? People can enjoy it at all sorts of levels and doesn’t dim 30 years later.’
Weather Report’s most commercially successful album, Heavy Weather, contained a hit single in Birdland, a Zawinul composition both catchy and multi-layered, summarising his gift for enshrining tradition while pushing it forward. One of the first jazz tunes to catch the young Zawinul’s ear was The Lullaby of Birdland (written by another émigré, British pianist George Shearing) and the legendary 52nd Street jazz club glowed with significance long before the pianist set foot in New York. Birdland opens with a typical Zawinul synthesizer bass line, over which Pastorius plays the tune on high fretless, powered by Alex Acuna’s incessant chattering drum part. It incorporates modes and changes, improvisation and swing band riffing and hints at the harmonic sophistication of bebop while maintaining a steady, radio-friendly groove.
Influential club and radio DJ Mike Chadwick has no doubts about Zawinul’s importance in jazz history. ‘That man changed my life.’ Chadwick saw Weather Report on his own at the Manchester Apollo when he was a teenager (his unfortunate friends went to see Hawkwind instead). ‘It completely opened my mind. I remember just sitting there in awe, feeling that I was in the presence of greatness.’
Once Weather Report had broken up in the mid-80s, and disappointed with the path taken by US jazz, Zawinul began to explore a direction that enabled him to blur further the line between improvisation and composition. Apart from wordless vocals, every sound on Dialects (1986), was performed by Zawinul, using Midi technology to operate keyboards, drum machines and samples. A few years later, his new band, the Zawinul Syndicate, added a clattering carnival of percussion, drums, bass and rhythm guitar to the leader’s inexhaustible supply of chords, melodies and riffs. He revisited the jazz tradition with witty wired-up versions of Thelonious Monk’s Little Rootie Tootie and his own Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, while independently predicting a seismic shift taking place in the music business: World Music.
In 1990 Joe Zawinul produced Amen, an album by Salif Keita. The Malian singer’s album Soro had helped boost World Music as a new music sales category in 1980s, attracting the kind of intelligent but non-obsessive audience that used to follow jazz. Africa was a revelation to Zawinul - it was his first visit to the continent - but the musicians were more of a surprise. ‘In a break, Paco (Sery), Etienne (Mbappe) and me just played,’ recalls Zawinul. I was astonished by the way they played my music. I’m not talking about my tunes, but my feeling of playing. I found out that when they were in Africa, growing up, they listened to Weather Report; Black Market was for 20 years a theme song on Radio Dakar in Senegal. There was this connection.’
Zawinul also toured for several months in 1993 in a duo with Indian drummer/percussionist Trilok Gurtu. Mike Chadwick saw them at North Sea Jazz Festival: ‘I got there early, and it was fantastic, but there were 2000 people trying to get into a 400-seater hall!’ Gurtu recalls the tour: ‘But what I value most is his composition, his arrangements, his chords, which I think comes from his classical background, though he doesn’t talk about it. People were telling us that two people sounded like a big band. When we played in Argentina and Chile we sometimes played Duke Ellington for three hours: Joe loves Ellington.’
Over the past decade, Zawinul has recruited with many more musicians from cultures outside the narrowing world of American jazz: bassist Richard Bona, percussionist Arto Tuncboyaciyan, guitarist Amit Chatterjee, singers Thania Sanchez and Sabine Kabongo. But he insists that he’s still playing his music - not appropriating someone else’s culture. ‘you have these guys in America who are supposed to be able to play,’ says Zawinul with a dismissive shrug. ‘I have musicians in my band, not because of where they come from, but because they absolutely play my music better.’ The contribution of this new wave of sidemen is evidenced in the fiery double CDs World Tour (ESC) and Vienna Nights (BirdJam), the video ‘Two Years with The Zawinul Syndicate’ (directed by his son Anthony) and the recent Joe Zawinul, A Musical Portrait, directed by Mark Kidel. ‘Zawinul is a habitual adventurer,’ says Ian Carr. ‘He’s very akin to Miles Davis because his music is full of feeling and the musicians believe in him. He has an almost bottomless, unfathomable passion for music.’
There have been occasional excursions outside Zawinul’s usual patch: further collaborations with his old friend Freidrich Gulda; Stories of the Danube, a full-length symphonic work. Zawinul initiated an anti-pollution scheme in Senegal, which later led to the Austrian government appointing him their goodwill ambassador for seventeen African nations, which prompted further contact with musicians from the continent.
Musician Adam Glasser recalls an occasion when South African singers the Manhattan Brothers (for whom Adam is the musical director) were invited to perform with the Zawinul Syndicate. Adam’s job was to lead the tunes in. ‘Once the feel, key and chord sequence was established, then they could just groove away,’ he says. ‘The intensity and accuracy of their band feel was something else. It was like riding in Ferrari after you had been driving a family saloon.’
Zawinul has provided jazz with some new rhythmic templates, changing the role of the drummer with an influence way beyond the confines of the jazz world. He claims to have invented the hip-hop beat in 1970. ‘The only person who really understood it was my father. My father was immediately having a little groove with it. I have a special lope in my feeling which if the guys can play it, it swings you to death.’
‘As much as I respect jazz drummers like Jack DeJohnette and some of those guys, I would never play with them. For me, there’s not enough information. It’s too miscellaneous, swimming along.’ But this doesn’t mean that he accepts the glossy rigidity of rock: ‘Very very seldom will you hear a back-beat in my music. It’s almost not there, because I believe back-beats hold things back.’
Zawinul engages attention by spinning tales; he recounts his anecdotes about Miles, or Cannonball or Birdland with the relish you imagine his Austrian grandfather telling folk tales. There’s usually a moral to each story. ‘When you meet him, it’s like being eyeballed by a boxer in the ring,’ says Mike Chadwick. ‘He maintains eye contact all the time you wait for that little smile to know that it’s going OK. He’s one of the last living greats.’
This drive to make things better - an undimmed passion for change and discovery - means that Zawinul is unlikely to retire, sit back and enjoy the royalties. He’s both the grand old man, and the itinerant gypsy storyteller of jazz, proud and ambitious; pragmatic and down to earth. An outsider whose music stoked a new blaze in the heart of the music.
© John L. Walters, 2002
Review of Live and Unreleased by Weather Report.
Review of The Best of Weather Report.
Live review of The Zawinul Syndicate at Ronnie Scott's in 2002.
Review of Brown Street, 15 December 2006.
