Josef Zawinul: A Personal Appreciation

If you want basic info about Joe Zawinul, here are the links to his entries in Wikipedia and All Music Guide, and to his official Web site. He led a fascinating and productive life, and it's worth investigating. But this is about what he meant to me over the years.

It's 1966. There's an instrumental song that's being played on the radio, and while I like it I don’t track it down to buy it. This is not unusual. I'm thirteen, and I expect the world to offer me interesting things on a regular basis. Usually it complies, so if I miss one thing another will be along soon. Years later I learn that the song I heard was called "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." It was performed by Cannonball Adderley and written by Joe Zawinul.

It's an early morning sometime in 1970. For whatever reason I'm doing something I rarely do before I head off to school, which is to watch the Today show on TV. For whatever reason the people who run the Today show are doing something that they rarely do, which is have a jazz band on to play. I'm an ordinary rock music fan, who's been following the Beatles since they arrived in America, grew excited by the explosion circa 1967 that turned rock'n'roll into rock, and I try to make it a point to have my ears open (for one thing, I own the obligatory Ravi Shankar album). I've also been casually listening to classical music all my life, and it's harmonies, advanced beyond the ability of most rock musicians, provide me with a lot of pleasure. Jazz I know about, but think of as old music for old people. (The links between, say, jazz, boogie-woogie piano, and Chuck Berry's rolling guitar rhythm are completely unknown to me at the time.) I've seen Gary Burton on TV, but he's so young (and white) he could be a rock musician.

Either I've got a few minutes to kill or I'm not going to school that day, because I watch the jazz band, a small combo actually. I've heard the name Cannonball Adderley before, but that's about the extent of my knowledge of the group and what they're doing. I listen, and they play something…different. It's not wild, certainly not a Hendrixian freak-out of the sort that is never shown on that era's network television, but neither is it dull. It's definitely not what I think of as jazz. For one thing, it's neither frantic nor dull. It's very bluesy without being strictly blues, and I can hear the family resemblance to a lot of music I already love in rock'n'roll. For another thing, the piano player is sitting behind what I recognize, thanks to the brochure I'd gotten at a music store, as a Fender-Rhodes electric piano. It too sounds like nothing I've ever really heard before, but it sounds good. It's not tinkly or cheap, or as loud as a rock guitarist, it just sounds…cool. And like a real musical instrument, not a novelty item. At the end of the song, Cannonball Adderley announces that his quintet has just played the title song off their new album Country Preacher, and that it was written by the piano player. Oddly, he is the only white member of the group. A few days later I track down and buy the album. It's not one that my friends are particularly interested in, so it becomes a sort of secret pleasure. Like the best secret pleasures, it very gradually opens a portal into a new world. I listen to it over and over. The country preacher turns out to be the young Reverend Jesse Jackson, and the live recording before a predominantly black audience, which politely but freely lets the musicians know how they feel, begins to tell me about a world I barely know.

So--the man behind the electric piano was Joe Zawinul, who had been born in Vienna nearly forty years earlier, but whose most productive years lay ahead of him. He had come to America in his twenties and quickly established a presence as a reliable sideman. (He learned to speak English mostly from his African-American colleagues. Reading his interviews was fun. "Beethoven was a motherfucker," he'd say, and was probably the only person in the world who could make such a statement without sounding like he was either pandering or being deliberately cute.) As a guest musician, but more importantly as a composer, he had already made the recordings with Miles Davis that would serve as a foundation for the rest of his career. In a Silent Way (1968) and Bitches Brew (1969) marked Davis's first serious forays into the electric work that would bitterly divide old fans, attract millions of new fans (here I raise my hand), and cement his reputation as a musical chameleon of genius. Zawinul wrote the title song for the first album, the first song for the other, and then in 1971 with Davis's longtime sideman of genius started the group Weather Report.

I bought their first album but couldn’t really figure it out. It was simultaneously adventurous and lightweight. Zawinul said later that it took Shorter and himself a while to figure out what the band should be. For the next few years (and indeed throughout the band's life) other bandmembers came and went. As keyboard technology changed Zawinul expanded his sonic palette, adding a ring modulator to his electric piano, then exploring and using each new generation of synthesizers as they came along. The music was good, and sounded not quite like anything else being made. (It's worth pointing out that for all the charges of selling out made by older jazz fans about the so-called fusion musicans, Weather Report, unlike for example Return to Forever or Miles Davis himself, never had a guitar player. If they really wanted to sell out to gain a larger audience, that would have been the route to take. They never took it.) But the music of these years was also rarely as inspired as the Bitches Brew work.

Then bassist Jaco Pastorius joined the band, and suddenly they kicked into overdrive. It was also the era of the first good polyphonic synthesizers (the early Moogs and Arps circa 1968-74 were monophonic—Switched-On Bach was made by overdubbing multiple single-note lines) and the band's sound blossomed into a lush, neo-Ellingtonian aural feast.

When Heavy Weather came out in 1977, it was a revelation. All the excitement that had been found in rock music for the previous decade or so (and to be fair, in such fusioneers as the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Miles Davis himself) was matched by a guitarless quintet that possessed what even the finest rock music did not: musicians who knew their instruments inside and out, subtle and sophisticated chord changes, and a particular kind of slightly off-center song structure. Wayne Shorter in particular had perfected this songwriting style in his years as Miles Davis's principal composer in the mid-1960s. And Zawinul's opening "Birdland" was a genuine hit single, even spawning cover versions, including a vocalese version by Manhattan Transfer.

When the live album 8:30 came out a couple of years later, its version of "Birdland" had a significant difference. The beat had changed and the song was now much more "jazz-like." But in fact the name Birdland came from a club on New York's 52nd Street in the early 1950s, one of the true homelands of real jazz. And the big hit single with its rock beat was actually composed as a tribute to the sort of multi-horn band sound that rock had displaced.

8:30 was drawn mostly from a 1978 tour. I saw one of those shows, and it remains in my mind as one of the best live performances I've ever witnessed. The only rock band that could even approach the sort of harmonic sophistication found in jazz was the jazz-influenced Steely Dan (with whom Shorter had guested on Aja), but their improvisatory skills were not up to jazz standards. As Zawinul said more than once, in Weather Report nobody soloed but everybody soloed. While not strictly true, it was clear what he meant: extended post-Coltrane soloing was out, but since every member was a skilled musician, every member knew each song's structure so well that he could play whatever he wanted at any time, and be trusted to make it fit. In addition, just about every possible way that four musicians could work together was explored. Besides solo segments, at times that night there were sections of improvised harmonic and rhythmic counterpoint (also known as "jazz"), contrasted with unison passages that packed a huge wallop. What I remember from that night is a mix of energy, passion, and skill that I still remember nearly thirty years later. There is a well-known quotation from the novelist John Barth: "My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill; but what you really want is passionate virtuosity." Passionate virtuosity is what we witnessed that night.

Nothing lasts. Jaco Pastorius developed severe mental problems and stopped working with Weather Report several years before his death in 1987. None of their later recordings proved as vital as Heavy Weather, and eventually the band disintegrated. Zawinul started a band with his name and worked steadily, often returning to Europe. He died in his hometown of Vienna last Tuesday, leaving behind several children and a large recorded legacy. And many people whose lives were changed, at least a little, for the better. Here I raise my hand.