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Boogie Woogie Big Time: Joe Zawinul Gives His Weather Report Songbook its First Big Band Recordings
By Josef Woodard
At the 2005 Berlin Jazz Festival, big band culture to the left of center emerged as a strong thematic current, with groups such as Maria Schnieder’s Orchestra and Charlie Haden and Carla Bley’s Liberation Music Orchestra taking the stage.
The show-stopping big band event of the festival, however, was the pairing of Joe Zawinul and the Cologne, Germany-based WDR Big Band. A gleaming set of charts, mostly arranged by Vince Mendoza, resulted in a bracing “big band-ificiation” of Zawinul’s songbook. The material, drawn mostly from the Weather Report library, also included Zawinul’s classic “In A Silent Way,” recorded by Miles Davis in 1969, “March Of The Lost Children” from the Zawinul Syndicate—his mainstay combo for the past 20 years—and a set-closing favorite, “Carnivalito,” from his 1986 solo project, Dialects.
The show became a “This Is Your Life” summary in a smartly machined, large ensemble way. The WDR project offered a thrilling realization that Zawinul’s elaborate textures and musical puzzle-making prowess—played in his synth-driven Weather Report and Zawinul Syndicate—had natural parallels in big band concepts. It also proved to be a revelation to hear Zawinul’s music with horns again.
For the WDR, accustomed to adapting to different special projects and guest artists, this served as an especially challenging gig, in that Zawinul wanted to maintain his legendary looseness and control the music’s structural fluidity. They sounded razor-sharp in Berlin, having just come from a stint at Zawinul’s own club, Birdland, in Vienna, where they recorded the newly released live account of the project, Brown Street (Heads Up).
Zawinul came into the project with great respect for the ensemble. “They are good musicians who have played together for 25 years,” he said. “They’ve played a lot with American musicians, from Joe Williams to Ray Brown and Milt Jackson. They have a spread of knowledge that’s amazing. But then again, that is some regular jazz. My phraseology threw them off a little bit, because it has another lope. So it took some time.”
Zawinul sat down to talk about this project on a crisp, clear day in Malibu, Calif., just after Christmas last year, as his home buzzed with activity. His son Erich was in town from Vienna, where he runs Birdland. Zawinul’s boxing trainer, Phil Garcia, stopped by to pay respects. The two talked about a trip to Las Vegas to check out a boxing match. Grandchildren scampered about—the progeny of Joe’s son Ivan, who was entrenched in a project in the fully equipped home recording studio, known as the “Music Room.” Ivan, the engineer for his father’s music, live and in the studio, for 20 years, was putting together a three-CD set of material culled from 20 years of performance recordings by the Zawinul Syndicate. He said that he spent eight months poring over two decades of live tapes to whittle it all down to a manageable retrospective.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” said Ivan, his eyeballs strained from peering at wave forms on Pro Tools. “I’m not doing this again. This one will have a lot more Joe on it, all the solos he plays and the interludes. The other albums don’t feature him that much. With these, the tapes are all done, so Joe can’t come in and mix anything. That’s good, in a way.
“This will be the best record for Joe, playing-wise,” he continued. “You hear 20 years of his stuff. It’s not hidden, masked or mixed in a tune that’s part of an arrangement. It’s a live show.”
Joe glowed about Ivan’s work: “He has such a sound. It’s like a montage; it’s visual.”
Roughness and feeling count for much in Zawinul’s musical world. He’s always embraced the power of the improvised moment and resisted preconceptions about structure. Even his bona fide hits—“Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” and “Birdland”—are odd by c
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