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Within the pages of an Austrian publication of Joe Zawinul’s autobiography, there’s a photo of the pianist seated at his instrument, playing, circa 1963. Leaning over him, looking somewhat teary-eyed, is Duke Ellington.
Some of Ellington’s band members had invited me down to a recording session,” Zawinul says, his voice crackling as he recounts that moment. “And one of them told Duke that he had to hear me play ‘Come Sunday.’ So that picture is of me playing it for him. When I finished, he told me, ‘You play that better than I do.’”
Now, Ellington may have been acting his gracious self. And Zawinul himself is prone to overstatement. Still, the point was well made: The Austrian-born musician has always intuitively understood what African-American music was about, and he’s consistently expressed it in a compelling way. So it’s not surprising that Zawinul nailed “Come Sunday”—a signature ballad composed by an icon of jazz—when he played it some 40 years ago.
The story is believable, for many reasons, including a lovely rendition of the tune he offered at a recent concert in Istanbul, Turkey. There, Zawinul’s Syndicate, as he calls his band, included Sabine Kabongo, a former member of the vocal group Zap Mama, whose family background is both Belgian and African. She sang “Come Sunday” in duet with Zawinul, who this time was sitting behind a battery of electronic keyboards and synthesizers, as has been customary for him since the 1970s. As performed that night, the song would have sounded contemporary to a casual audience member. Yet it retained the gospelish power and authenticity of the more traditional renditions.
Yet this was one isolated moment of a two-hour concert that spanned generations and continents as it brought the Turkish audience to its feet in appreciation. Zawinul’s current Syndicate is about as international a band as you’re likely to find. In addition to he and Kabongo, in Istanbul, there was drummer Paco Sery (from the Ivory Coast), bassist Etienne M’Bappe (from Cameroon), guitarist Amit Chaterjee (Northern India), and percussionist Manolo Badrena (Puerto Rico).
Badrena had worked with Zawinul decades ago in the groundbreaking fusion group Weather Report, which found Zawinul paired famously with saxophonist Wayne Shorter and bassist Jaco Pastorius. And the audience in Istanbul seemed well acquainted with Zawinul’s long and illustrious musical career: his early tenure with jazz standard-bearers such as saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley in the early 1960s his brief but significant work with trumpeter Miles Davis in the late ’60s the phenomenal popular and critical success of Weather Report in the 1970s and ’80s his work as a soloist, bandleader and composer in the years since. In fact, after the concert, at least one Turkish fan went backstage with a pile of albums for the pianist to autograph.
“I want to play music, but I also want to entertain people,” Zawinul said when asked about his consistent appeal. “You practice, and you get your stuff together and then you get out there. But you don’t just show people what you can do—that’s not the way. You tell them stories. I was fortunate to have worked with some of the greatest storytellers in music when I was young.”
Zawinul seems to have always had a knack for telling stories that capture the spirit of a particular moment. It’s worth noting that his compositions have become standards in each phase of his career: “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” was a signature tune of Adderley’s band “In A Silent Way” virtually set the tone for Miles Davis’ electric period “Birdland” was an anthem around the world for Weather Report.
“This is one of the best bands I’ve ever led,” Zawinul boasts. And with stellar instrumentalists from various world traditions, as well as five different vocalists (including Zawinul, as processed through his Vocoder), he may be right. Even more compelling is his most recent new CD, Faces And Places (ESC Records), which augments the group with a number of master musicians, including tabla player Zakir Hussain. The album is a wide-ranging musical journey that documents various elements of Zawinul’s life. And since he was an early pioneer of digital sampling and processing, Zawinul is able to include clever artifacts in his sounds: one track, “Rooftops Of Vienna,” about his homeland, contains the sampled voice of his father, as well as his accordion playing at a family gathering years ago.
In an interview years ago, the R&B singer and bassist Me’Shell NdegéOcello captured the appeal of the almost indescribable grooves that power much of Zawinul’s music. “You cannot resist the grooves in his music,” she says. “His music just enters your body without you realizing it.” Throughout the recording, the combination of bassist M’Bappe and drummer Sery aid that process mightily, and they form a combustible mix.
That’s the same rhythm team that recorded on Amen, a landmark 1991 album that Zawinul produced for Malian singer Salif Keita, who is among Africa’s most prominent stars. And it’s easy to hear the close relationship between Zawinul’s music and the music of Africa. It would be just as easy to assume that Zawinul’s music is a response to African sounds but the process of musical development is not that simple: As with so many styles, the sounds are really the result of a process of cultural transmission back and forth.
“When I did that record with Salif Keita,” Zawinul says, “it was easy to play with these guys because they grew up on Weather Report, especially the album Black Market. In Mali and Senegal and Nigeria, that album was part of the diet that nourished their own music. But that work with Salif was the first time I really sat down and checked out that music. I was always a jazz freak. After a while, I found my own way of expressing myself and now I realize that their music was very close to my concept.”
More examples of the cross-cultural chemistry, and sheer musicality, of Weather Report’s achievements can be heard on the recent two-CD reissue Live And Unreleased (Columbia/Legacy), which documents a 1972 performance.
“I consider Joe one of my musical fathers,” Keita says when asked about Zawinul, and his smile broadens noticeably. “I did not know him when we began working together but I knew his music. And I knew that he understood mine.”
One of the highlights of the concert in Istanbul was a duet between Zawinul, on synthesizer, and Sery, who stepped out from behind his drum kit to display dazzling skills on the mbira (thumb piano).
Zawinul relishes these moments. “It’s a different version every night,” he says of the mbira break, “all based on a pentatonic scale. I just challenge him to keep developing it.”
The development of Zawinul’s music since the 1970s has involved a mastery of all things electronic. For the past few decades, Zawinul has not even had an acoustic piano on the stage when he performs. And, just as in the case of Miles Davis, this has led to some criticism.
This frustrates Zawinul, or at least, confounds him. “I was surprised when people acted so strange when electronic music took hold,” he says. “The problem is that so many people can’t play these instruments. They play them like a piano, which is wrong. An instrument is just a tool. I’m not a piano player, I’m a musician. And I traveled around enough to know that it’s not the instrument that counts, it’s the musician, and the stories he tells.”
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