LIVE JOE ZAWINUL RECORDING
MARKS JAZZ LEGEND’S FINAL BIRTHDAY
75 Due In Stores February 24, 2009
Keyboardist and composer Joe Zawinul, who succumbed to cancer September 11, 2007 at age 75, left behind a half-century legacy of brilliant music that will last for generations. Born in Austria and originally trained in classical music, Zawinul embraced the jazz tradition at a young age and eventually pushed the art form to unprecedented limits via his two most innovative projects, Weather Report and later the Zawinul Syndicate.
Despite the medical and physical challenges of his final months, Zawinul’s regimen of composing and performing never let up. Indeed, one of his final performances proved to be one of his best.
The aptly titled 75 (HUCD 3162), set for release on Heads Up International on February 24, 2009, was recorded in concert at a festival date in Lugano, Switzerland, on July 7, 2007 – the last birthday Zawinul would celebrate before his death two months later. The two-disc set is a final snapshot of this brilliant and dedicated road warrior of jazz, surrounded by his revered Zawinul Syndicate, a collection of stellar collaborators hailing from every corner of the globe. In addition to the Switzerland performance, 75 also includes a track recorded on a Hungary stage, where Zawinul is joined by legendary saxophonist and Weather Report co-founder Wayne Shorter. read more
LIVE JOE ZAWINUL RECORDING
MARKS JAZZ LEGEND’S FINAL BIRTHDAY
75 Due In Stores February 24, 2009
Keyboardist and composer Joe Zawinul, who succumbed to cancer September 11, 2007 at age 75, left behind a half-century legacy of brilliant music that will last for generations. Born in Austria and originally trained in classical music, Zawinul embraced the jazz tradition at a young age and eventually pushed the art form to unprecedented limits via his two most innovative projects, Weather Report and later the Zawinul Syndicate.
Despite the medical and physical challenges of his final months, Zawinul’s regimen of composing and performing never let up. Indeed, one of his final performances proved to be one of his best.
The aptly titled 75 (HUCD 3162), set for release on Heads Up International on February 24, 2009, was recorded in concert at a festival date in Lugano, Switzerland, on July 7, 2007 – the last birthday Zawinul would celebrate before his death two months later. The two-disc set is a final snapshot of this brilliant and dedicated road warrior of jazz, surrounded by his revered Zawinul Syndicate, a collection of stellar collaborators hailing from every corner of the globe. In addition to the Switzerland performance, 75 also includes a track recorded on a Hungary stage, where Zawinul is joined by legendary saxophonist and Weather Report co-founder Wayne Shorter.
“For me, this recording is both sad and joyful at the same time,” says filmmaker Anthony Zawinul, Joe’s son who has recorded many of the senior Zawinul’s performances. “He was so full of life, so full of amazing musical ideas. He knew his illness was terminal, so maybe all the creative channels were open and operating at full capacity, and he was just expressing what he felt by doing what he did best – playing and improvising. I look at the recording as a kind of extension to what he was feeling in those last weeks and months.”
Disc one of 75 gets under way with “Orient Express,” a song first heard on Zawinul’s 1996 masterpiece, My People. The track opens with a highly atmospheric and otherworldly introduction built upon the Middle Eastern riffs of Moroccan vocalist Aziz Sahmaoui. The intro quickly catapults into a driving, high-energy track – ten minutes in all – that resembles the legendary train from which it takes its name.
The exotic “Madagascar” (from Weather Report’s 1980 recording, Night Passage) gets its groove from Mauritius-born bassist Linley Marthe doubling Zawinul’s familiar synth line before settling into a Jaco-esque walking line, while drummer Paco Sery slams with authority and uncanny precision underneath. “Dig Joe’s funky, facile electric piano solo in the middle,” says veteran jazz critic Bill Milkowski in his liner notes. “Clearly, this cat was not about to give up. The gift of music burned brightly inside him, always.”
The buoyant, African-flavored “Zansa II” (from the 1998 live recording, World Tour) features some marvelous kalimba work by Sery and some marimba-sounding synth accompaniment from Zawinul, while “Café Andalusia” (from Faces & Places, 2002) highlights the dramatic intensity of vocalist Sabine Kabongo, the Belgian singing sensation from the ranks of Zap Mama.
The second disc opens with an invigorating medley of “Fast City” and “Two Lines” (from Night Passage and World Tour, respectively). The tempo and energy here are mind-boggling, thanks in large part to Marthe’s phenomenal bass work.
Zawinul then reaches all the way back to the early and mid ‘70s with the back-to-back Weather Report compositions, “Badia” and “Boogie Woogie Waltz” (from Tale Spinnin’ in 1975 and Sweetnighter in 1973). These are followed by a lighthearted moment wherein Kabongo leads the Swiss audience through a heartwarming chorus of “Happy Birthday” to the maestro.
Fittingly, the concert closes with the gentle “Hymn,” performed by Zawinul on church-like organ with accompaniment from percussionist Jorge Bezzera.
As an added treat, this collection contains a rare and beautiful moment from an August 2, 2007, concert in Veszprem, Hungary, the second to last show Zawinul ever played. He is joined onstage for an emotional reunion with his longtime musical partner and Weather Report co-founder Wayne Shorter for a moving sax-synth duet on Zawinul’s anthemic “In a Silent Way,” a piece the two recorded together on Miles Davis’ landmark 1969 album of the same name. The two musicians’ telepathic exchanges and empathetic playing over the course of the 14-minute track is pure magic.
“My dad raised the bar in the music world as a true artist to his profession,” says Anthony Zawinul. “He never compromised his art. You either liked it or you didn’t. One thing is for sure though, you always knew it was Joe Zawinul. As a bandleader, he was able to pull out performances from his bandmates and take them to heights they never knew existed.”
Seventy-five years from now, the legacy will still be very much alive.
In a business where the word “legend” is tossed around all too often, the tag is not an overstatement when referring to keyboardist/composer/bandleader Joe Zawinul. This titan of the jazz world – whose innovative and genre-bending sensibilities gave rise to such visionary musical entities as Weather Report and the Zawinul Syndicate – took his final bow on September 11, 2007, at age 75 after a battle with cancer. Equally tragic was the loss of his wife, Maxine, who died less than two months earlier on July 26, 2007. Nevertheless, Zawinul has left behind a body of work and an enduring legacy that will inspire jazz musicians and fans for generations to come.
Although physically compromised by terminal illness in his final months, the quality of Zawinul’s music remained unparalleled to the very end. “In a Silent Way,” a track from Brown Street – released on Heads Up International in February 2007 – won a GRAMMY Award in February 2008 for Best Instrumental Arrangement (the track was arranged by Vince Mendoza).
But Brown Street was by no means the last word from this brilliant and dedicated road warrior of jazz. The aptly titled 75 is scheduled for posthumous release on Heads Up on February 24, 2009. The two-disc set was recorded in concert at a festival date in Lugano, Switzerland, on July 7, 2007 – the last birthday Zawinul would celebrate before his death two months later. In addition to stellar, high-energy performances with the Syndicate, 75 also includes a track recorded on a Hungary stage in August 2007, where Zawinul is joined by saxophonist and Weather Report co-founder Wayne Shorter. 75 is unwavering proof that Zawinul, like so many great artists, clearly saved some of his best work for last.
Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1932, Zawinul emigrated in 1959 to the United States, where he played with Maynard Ferguson and the great Dinah Washington before joining alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley’s band in 1961 and staying for almost ten years. With Adderley, Zawinul wrote several important songs, most notably the slow, funky often-covered hit “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” which reached the top of the Billboard pop Charts in 1967. Other songs from the Zawinul pen during his tenure with Adderley include include “The Country Preacher,” “Walk Tall” and “Seventy Miles Away.”
Zawinul then moved on to a brief but fateful encounter and collaboration with Miles Davis, just as Miles was moving into the electric sound. It was Zawinul’s “In a Silent Way,” which served as the title track of Miles’ first electric foray, and Zawinul had a potent impact on Miles’ classic Bitches Brew as well.
Zawinul was one of a rare handful of synthesizer players who made the instrument an expressive, swinging part of his arsenal. Prior to the invention of the portable synthesizer, his approach to the keyboard helped bring the Wurlitzer and Fender-Rhodes electric pianos into the jazz mainstream.
After releasing his self-titled solo debut album on Atlantic in 1970, Zawinul and saxophonist Wayne Shorter founded Weather Report, a progressive ensemble that would become the most important jazz group of the 1970s and beyond. Drawing on the power and theatricality of rock and R&B, while maintaining allegiance to jazz and the pure spirit of improvisation, they tapped into the so-called “fusion” movement of the decade while carving out their own unique niche. Despite frequent personnel changes – including Miroslav Vitous, Alphonso Johnson, Jaco Pastorius, Victor Bailey, Peter Erskine and Omar Hakim – the band’s innovative spirit remained intact over the course of 17 albums, including the ground-breaking Black Market (1976) and the massively popular Heavy Weather (1977), which featured Zawinul’s infectious “Birdland.” That song, in versions by Weather Report, Manhattan Transfer and Quincy Jones, won separate GRAMMY awards in three successive decades. Weather Report itself won a GRAMMY for their brilliant 1979 live album, 8:30.
In 1985, after he and Shorter parted company and Weather Report disbanded, Zawinul continued to pursue adventurous new grooves with the short-lived Weather Update, followed by the Zawinul Syndicate, whose albums included the GRAMMY-nominated My People in 1996 and the GRAMMY-nominated World Tour two years later. GRAMMY-nominated Faces and Places was released in 2002, followed by Vienna Nights, the 2005 double-live Syndicate CD recorded at Zawinul’s own Birdland jazz club in Vienna. Other special projects included an adventurous solo album, Dialects (1986), and work as producer and arranger on Salif Keita’s landmark album Amen (1991).
Separate from his jazz pursuits, Zawinul also proved himself to be a skilled classical composer with his ambitious Stories of the Danube in 1993 and his collaboration with renowned classical pianist Friedrich Gulda. His special solo project, Mauthausen, a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, was released in Europe in 2000 and was performed on the site of the Austrian concentration camp from which the project takes its name.
Among his prizes and awards, Zawinul was named Best Keyboardist by Downbeat thirty times. During its fifteen-year trajectory, Weather Report was a perennial winner in the Best Band category in Downbeat,Swing Journal and other music publications around the world. Zawinul is also a recipient of the Charlie Parker and Miles Davis Awards, and holds honorary doctorates from Berklee School of Music, Three Town College in New York and the Acadamy of Music in Graz, Austria. He was also the official Austrian goodwill ambassador to seventeen African nations. In January 2002, he received the first International Jazz Award, co-presented by the International Jazz Festival Organization and the International Association of Jazz Educators.
Brown Street, Zawinul’s maiden voyage on Heads Up, is a triumphant two-disc live recording that unites the veteran jazzman with the Cologne-based WDR Big Band. Recorded in the Zawinul Birdland club in Vienna, the two-disc set features big-band arrangements of classic Weather Report material, and includes persussionist Alex Acuna, bassist Vistor Bailey and drummer Nathaniel Townsley.
75, the bittersweet followup to Brown Street, is a reminder that the Zawinul legacy is still very much alive. “My dad raised the bar in the music world as a true artist to his profession,” says filmmaker Anthony Zawinul, Joe’s son who has recorded many of the senior Zawinul’s performances. “He never compromised his art. You either liked it or you didn’t. One thing is for sure though, you always knew it was Joe Zawinul. As a bandleader, he was able to pull out performances from his bandmates and take them to heights they never knew existed.”
