Dennis Polkow

As the composer of such diverse pieces as the Cannonball Adderley R&B hit "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," the tranquil and evocative "In a Silent Way" for Miles Davis and the Weather Report standard "Birdland," Joe Zawinul could be considered primarily a composer.

But Zawinul's remarkable prowess as a virtuoso keyboard soloist, his craving to find new timbres and textures and to set up rhythmic grooves that can be layered over with his unique stylings indicate his great gift for performance and arranging.

And then there is Zawinul the innovative impresario and bandleader who formed Weather Report with saxophonist Wayne Shorter as the major fusion outlet of the seventies and eighties and who discovered such luminaries as bassist Jacko Pastorious and drummer Omar Hakim, among others.

"I am an improviser," says Zawinul. "I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised."

Such an approach is a far cry from Zawinul's early music training as a child prodigy playing accordion and studying violin and piano at the Vienna Conservatory in his native Austria in the postwar years.

"One day I heard a pianist play `Honeysuckle Rose,' " Zawinul recalls, "and I was hooked. I said, `What is that?' He said, `jazz,' which was a word I had never heard, and I asked him to spell it for me. My life was changed after that."

Soon after, Zawinul was lucky enough to come across a neighbor's jazz-record collection, "a treasure chest that I began exploring." Throughout the 1950s, Zawinul worked with various Austrian musicians and even formed his own trio that performed in European clubs, but his real goal was to get to America, which he did in 1959 on a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music in Boston.

After stints with Maynard Ferguson, Slide Hampton, Dinah Washington, Harry "Sweets" Edison and Joe Williams, Zawinul joined the Cannonball Adderley Quintet and helped it reach its creative heights with his arrangements, compositions and early use of the electric piano. "On the basis of that new sound alone," Zawinul says, "promoter Bill Graham brought us to Fillmore to back up the Who."

Asked how he feels about the irony of his appearing at the Chicago Jazz Festival following a Cannonball Adderley tribute band with the group's then-drummer Louis Hayes, Zawinul is quick to compliment the group, the state of Hayes' playing and notes that the young trumpet player is "particularly good."

Could Zawinul imagine himself performing in such a configuration?

"It was great music," says Zawinul, "but it has passed. It is wonderful to recall it, fun to hear it, but that is not for me: I get too restless, too bored; I need something new."

That constant restlessness that informs his need to experiment with his music is something that Zawinul has in common with his late "boxing buddy" Miles Davis, with whom Zawinul recorded such classic fusion albums as "In a Silent Way," for which Zawinul wrote the title track, "Bitches Brew," "Live-Evil" and "Big Fun."

And yes, in addition to making music together, Davis and Zawinul boxed regularly and often went to the fights. "He was little," says Zawinul, "but tough. We both loved the sport and sparred together. We met when I was 26 and he was 31 and we were very close buddies until the day he died.

"Boxing is such a great sport and so much like making jazz music," adds Zawinul. "There is the footwork, the jab, the constant setting up and reacting to your opponent."

Weather Report, the massively popular and longest-continually-performing fusion band, is often cited as a major influence by artists around the world, but according to Zawinul, particularly in Africa. "Musicians from Africa know Weather Report music inside and out," says Zawinul, "but often didn't knew who was playing it because it would be distributed on pirated cassettes that had no labels. Many such players couldn't believe that some of us were white."

Indeed, despite a Teutonic accent, Zawinul contradicts stereotypes about his Austrian heritage that he should be playing Mozart and Beethoven. "There is another Austria," says Zawinul, "much less known, and that is the folk music of Austria. Even the way we speak is very musical, like a walking jazz bass. Classical music is so dusty that the dust has dust. And much of jazz is following in the same dusty path, recreating its glories rather than moving forward."

For Zawinul and his current incarnation of the Zawinul Syndicate that just released a double-CD set of live music called "Vienna Nights" recorded at Zawinul's Vienna club called Birdland, the current state of jazz is that of a truly international art form. "I don't plan it that way," says Zawinul, "but I end up with these bands who have players from literally all over the world."

At a spry 72 with five decades of innovative performing now behind him, does Zawinul know where jazz itself is heading? "I have no idea," says Zawinul, "but as a good improviser, I know where it is not: the past."

Joe Zawinul & the Zawinul Sydicate headline the Chicago Jazz Festival's seventieth-anniversary salute to Downbeat magazine along with John Medeski and Louis Hayes and the Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band on September 1 at Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan, (312)294-3000.

(2005-08-30)

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