Joe Zawinul Biography

Josef Erich Zawinul was born July 7, 1932, in Vienna, Austria.

His musical talent was apparent at an early age, and after his grandfather gave him an accordion, young Josef was often called upon to perform at family gatherings. At age 7, Joe was selected for enrollment in the prestigious Vienna Conservatory, where he studied classical piano, clarinet and violin. In the later stages of World War II, Vienna came under heavy Allied bombardment, and Joe along with 28 of his Conservatory classmates were evacuated to a large estate in the Czech Sudetenland, where he continued his studies while being forced to endure a regimented life, including war training under the direction of injured German SS officers. It was there that Joe heard jazz for the first time when a fellow student performed an impromptu version “Honeysuckle Rose” on the piano one evening.

After the war, Joe returned to Vienna and continued classical piano training while earning money by playing accordion in small combos. During the post-war years, Vienna was occupied by the Allied powers, and Joe began performing at clubs on American military bases, where his lifelong fascination with sound was spurred by access to a Hammond organ. In the 1950s, Zawinul led his own groups and played in a series of increasingly high-profile Austrian bands, including the Austrian All Stars—the first bona fide Austrian jazz combo—and the Fatty George band. Yet, as his standing in the Austrian music scene rose, America beckoned to him. His contact with American culture via the military bases, American Armed Forces Radio and the movies had whet his appetite. But even more, he knew that he could only go so far as a jazz musician in Austria.

In 1958, noticing an advertisement in one of the few copies of DownBeat magazine to reach Vienna, Joe applied for a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music in Boston. Berklee accepted him, and on January 2, 1959, he boarded a boat for the five-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean. He carried with him his Berklee scholarship and $800. “I knew that it wouldn’t be easy,” he once recalled, “because I had no relatives, didn’t know a single person in America. But when I came over on the boat, I did it with the purpose to kick asses.”

Arriving in New York, one of Joe’s first stops was the famous jazz club, Birdland, where he experienced the American jazz scene for the first time. The club held special significance to Joe throughout his life. Not only was it symbolic of his arrival as a jazz musician, it was at Birdland that Joe would meet his wife, Maxine, with whom he would share over 40 years of marriage and raise three sons: Anthony, Erich and Ivan.

Joe’s stay at Berklee was brief. Within a few weeks, one of his instructors sent him to fill in as a substitute pianist at a local gig with bassist Gene Cherico and drummer Jake Hanna. Impressed, Hanna recommended Joe to the flamboyant trumpeter Maynard Ferguson that very night. The next day, Joe auditioned for Ferguson and landed his first job with a major American jazz band. Shortly thereafter, the Ferguson band needed a saxophonist, and among those auditioning was Wayne Shorter, who was hired in part on Joe’s recommendation. It was the first time the two played together, but certainly not the last.

Joe stayed with Ferguson for eight months, playing on his highly regarded live album, A Night at Birdland, before getting hired by the popular jazz and blues singer Dinah Washington. Joe immersed himself in the blues tradition that was Dinah’s bread and butter, and accompanied her on her biggest hit recording, “What A Diff’rence a Day Makes!” She often traveled with Ray Charles, and sometimes, when the house piano was not in good shape, Joe would play Ray’s Wurlitzer electric piano instead. It was Joe’s first significant exposure to the instrument, and he would put this experience to good use later.

While Joe enjoyed his time with Dinah, accompanying a vocalist was not his ultimate goal, nor was it the reason he took the risk of immigrating to the United States in the first place. His true calling was to be a jazz musician, and he knew that to realize that ambition, he needed to move on. He left Dinah after 19 months and toured briefly with Sweets Edison and Joe Williams. Then, in the fall of 1961, he received the call to join the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, one of the highest profile jazz bands in the world. Joe stayed for nearly 10 years.

With Adderley, Joe got the opportunity to write, and in the fall of 1966 the quintet recorded one of Joe’s most enduring compositions, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” He conceived the tune while working with the gospel singer Esther Marrow. Leading up to the recording session, Joe played it on the acoustic piano, but as they drove to the recording date, he told Adderley that if the studio had an electric piano—the same one he had played with Washington—he would use it and they would have a smash hit.

Sure enough, there was an electric piano, and as Joe predicted, “Mercy” was an instant success, reaching No. 11 on the Billboard pop chart.

Joe’s relationship with Adderley was significant on both a musical and personal level. The band members spent considerable time together, crisscrossing the country by automobile, and became very close. “He was family,” Joe once said. “He was my best man, my witness, when I got married. He bought bicycles for my kids. He was a great friend. He was like a brother to me.”

Years after Adderley died in 1975, he remained a presence in Joe’s life. “I miss him every day,” Joe reflected in 2004. “My wife and I, we talk about him somehow every day.”

Over the next year, Joe recorded with Davis several more times, playing on and providing compositions for the albums Bitches Brew, Big Fun and Live-Evil. At the time, Davis’ regular saxophonist and principal composer was Wayne Shorter, and he and Joe began talking about putting a band together. Joe later said that he knew he would one day have a band with Wayne when he first heard the Miles Davis album Nefertiti a few years earlier at the home of Bill Russell, the famous American basketball player.

In 1970, Joe recorded his third album, the eponymous Zawinul, which DownBeat described as “the work of a complete musician who has transcended categories and is certain to have a profound influence on the direction music will take in the ‘70s.”

Those words soon proved prophetic when Joe and Wayne formed the jazz super group Weather Report at the end of the year. The band’s first album was highly anticipated and released to critical acclaim the next spring. In his lengthy review for DownBeat, Dan Morgenstern wrote, “The music of Weather Report is beyond category… music unlike any other I’ve heard, music that is very contemporary but also very warm, very human, and very beautiful… The forecast, if there is justice, must be clear skies and sunny days for these four creative men and their associates.”

Weather Report became the most popular jazz band of its time, winning the DownBeat readers poll as best jazz band or electric jazz combo every year of its existence. Its rise coincided with the development of the synthesizer. Technological advancements during the sixties helped to move electronic music synthesis from academic and audio laboratories to recording studios. By 1970, synthesizer manufacturers were producing instruments that were small enough and portable enough to be incorporated into recording sessions and live performances.

Joe got his first serious synthesizer in 1971, an Arp 2600, given to him by Arp Instruments in the hopes of raising the company’s profile as it competed with its more entrenched competitor, Moog Music. Joe first used the 2600 on Weather Report’s second album, I Sing the Body Electric. One of the songs is “Unknown Soldier,” an ambitious work that was inspired by Joe’s experiences as a youngster in war-torn Austria. The Arp played a limited role, producing sound effects.

Weather Report’s third album, 1973’s Sweetnighter, marked a turning point. Joe brought in two compositions based on long grooves, and hired a drummer and electric bass player who were well versed in funk. The band was moving in a new direction, which was fully realized in Weather Report’s fourth album, Mysterious Traveller. The addition of bass player Alphonso Johnson cemented the band’s transition to one that combined elements of jazz and rock in a way that was unique and timeless. Joe’s orchestrating talents and mastery of electric keyboards truly came to the fore, and the band broke new ground with each succeeding album.

Enabled by new technology, Joe recorded his improvisations at home on a cassette deck (and later with MIDI in his home studio he and Maxine dubbed “the Music Room”), and then either used them directly as the tune’s base (as with “Nubian Sundance” and “Jungle Book” on Mysterious Traveller), or transcribed them note-for-note so that the band could play them as Joe originally conceived them. It was a method he used throughout his life. “It is all improvisation,” he said of his composing style. “All my tunes are improvisations. I’m a formal improviser. Even my symphony I improvised.”

For 1976’s Black Market, Joe recruited the electric bass phenom Jaco Pastorius, who introduced himself to Joe as “the world’s greatest bass player.” Pastorius lived up to his own billing, and is now regarded as the greatest innovator of his instrument. With Pastorius in the fold, Weather Report recorded its most successful album, Heavy Weather, which included Joe’s breakout hit, “Birdland.” The album reached No. 30 on the Billboard pop album chart, selling over half a million copies. In his January 2001 DownBeat retrospective on the band, journalist Josef Woodard said, “In 2000, Heavy Weather still sounds like a milestone in the cultural unconscious of jazz history. By some accounts, the album is the crowning achievement of the band’s recorded output, and therefore, by extension, a towering landmark of fusion.”

By the time Zawinul and Shorter brought Weather Report to a close in 1985, the band produced 15 albums, including the Grammy award winning 1979 live double-album, 8:30. Weather Report was a perennial winner of awards in music publications around the world. The band left behind a legacy that noted jazz critic Stuart Nicholson once described as “one of the most significant bodies of work in post-1960s jazz.”

Tossed into the fusion or jazz-rock category by writers and critics, the truth is Weather Report was a genre all its own. As Joe once put it, “Weather Report is the leader in a field of one.”

After Weather Report, Joe concentrated on some oft-delayed personal projects. He recorded the first album under his own name in 15 years. Dialects was a tour de force in the use of synthesizers and drum machines, augmented by the human voice, most notably Bobby McFerrin. Joe also teamed up with the great classical pianist Friedrich Gulda—a fellow Austrian and long-time friend—for a series of duo performances, and likewise toured with the Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu.

In the early 1990s, Joe crossed over to the classical realm, composing the symphony Stories of the Danube, which was commissioned by the Brucknerhaus for the opening of the 1993 Bruckner Festival in Linz, Austria. It was later recorded by Phillips Classics and released on CD in 1996.

After Amen, the personnel of the Syndicate took on a decidedly international flavor, which was highlighted on Joe’s 1996 Grammy-nominated album, My People. Several years in the making, My People demonstrated Joe’s remarkable ability to fuse his own unique musical sensibilities with those from other cultures. It was a high point in the Zawinul discography, and marked the recording debut of a new edition of the Syndicate powered by the incomparable drummer Paco Sery from the Ivory Coast, who seemed born to play Joe’s music. When Richard Bona took over the bass chair in 1997, the Syndicate raised the level of intensity yet another notch, the results of which were preserved on the Grammy-nominated two-disc set World Tour, a triumphant album that captured the visceral energy of the band’s live performances.

In his later years, Joe continued to pursue special projects in addition to his activities with the Syndicate. In 1998, he was commissioned to compose a musical memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, which he performed at the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp on the poignant 60^th anniversary of its construction near Linz, Austria.

In 2004, Joe realized a long-held dream by opening his own jazz club, Joe Zawinul’s Birdland, in his hometown of Vienna. And in 2006, he collaborated with Vince Mendoza and the WDR Big Band on a series of performances that revisited classics from Joe’s Weather Report catalog, resulting in the live double-CD Brown Street.

Joe’s final album, 75, was recorded live in July 2007 with the Syndicate on his 75th birthday at Lugano, Switzerland. By then, Joe was suffering from the effects of terminal cancer. His wife, Maxine, was also critically ill and passed away later that month. Yet, the performance was filled with the raw energy and creativity that were the hallmarks of Joe’s music.

Later in his life Joe was sometimes asked why he was still on the road. He seemed almost incredulous at the question, responding with words to the effect that as a musician, music was life. Being on the road, performing with the band, that was Joe’s life. And he did it right to the end. He died in Vienna on September 11, 2007.

“My dad raised the bar in the music world as a true artist to his profession. As a bandleader, he was able to pull out performances from his bandmates and take them to heights they never knew existed,” 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.”