Joe Zawinul

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Josef Erich "Joe" Zawinul (July 7, 1932 – September 11, 2007) was an Austrian jazz keyboardist and composer.

First coming to prominence with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, Zawinul went on to play with trumpeter Miles Davis, and to become one of the creators of jazz fusion, an innovative musical genre that combined jazz with elements of rock and world music. Later, Zawinul co-founded the groups Weather Report and the world fusion music-oriented Zawinul Syndicate. Additionally, he made pioneering use of electric piano and synthesizers. Zawinul was named "Best Electric Keyboardist" 28 times by the readers of Down Beat magazine.

A number of prominent musical artists have honored Zawinul with compositions, including Brian Eno's instrumental "Zawinul/Lava", John McLaughlin's instrumental "Jozy", Warren Cuccurullo's "Hey Zawinul", Bob Baldwin's "Joe Zawinul", Chucho Valdés's "Zawinul's Mambo", Biréli Lagrène's instrumental "Josef" and Toninho Horta's instrumental "Balada para Zawinul". Zawinul's playing style was often dominated by quirky melodic improvisations – traversing bebop, ethnic and pop styles – combined with sparse but rhythmic playing of big-band sounding chords or bass lines. In Weather Report, he often employed a vocoder as well as pre-recorded sounds played (i.e. filtered and transposed) through a synthesizer, a method or technique called sampling, creating a very distinctive synthesis of jazz harmonies and "noise" ("using all the sounds the world generates").

Zawinul (album)

Zawinul is an album by jazz composer and pianist Joe Zawinul recorded in 1970 by Zawinul performing music for two electric pianos, flute, trumpet, soprano sax, two contra basses and percussion. The album reached number 17 in the Billboard Jazz album charts.

Reception

The Allmusic review by Richard S. Ginell awarded the album 4 stars stating "Conceptually, sonically, this is really the first Weather Report album in all but name, confirming that Joe Zawinul was the primary creative engine behind the group from the beginning".

Track listing

All compositions by Joe Zawinul

Personnel