Joe Zawinul

Joe Zawinul is perhaps the best-known and most influential keyboardist in jazz. He pioneered the use of electric keyboards and synths, and at 70 he's still at the peak of his powers.

Joe Zawinul is many different men rolled into one. Austrian and American. Black and white. Old and young. Amiable and arrogant. Amusing and abrasive. Keyboardist and rhythm guru. Groomed in European classical music, yet a trailblazer of jazz, African, rock and fusion music. And despite having an almost Luddite approach to technology, he's been an electronic music pioneer since the 1960s.

This lengthy list of seeming and real contradictions takes some explaining. To begin with, there's his age. Zawinul turned 70 on July 7, 2002, yet according to sources close to him, he's got more energy than men half his age — apparently he still goes boxing three times a week. Last year he released a wholly contemporary-sounding album with The Zawinul Syndicate, Faces & Places, and embarked on a lengthy world tour. His band has been called "the hottest band in jazz today" and specialises in boiling, uptempo grooves that would wear out people half his age. And is he thinking of retiring? No way. "I can play another 20 years, man," he declared with a grin.

The lure of his music is illustrated by the impressive sales of and critical acclaim for albums in which he had a hand (or two), by Weather Report, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, Santana, Salif Keüta, and of course, his many solo and semi-solo recordings (the latter with The Zawinul Syndicate). By contrast, Zawinul's abrasive side is exemplified by a croaky voice that can be cutting, impatient and intimidating, accentuated by his broken English. One senses that he has a very short fuse. The Austrian-American has a fearsome reputation as a tough man and an extremely demanding bandleader, not afraid to put anyone in his place, regardless of reputation or status. He also has a penchant for self-promotion sometimes bordering on the grandiose — he has, for instance, professed to have begun the entire world music movement.

In addition, during our transatlantic phone conversation Zawinul took credit for inventing the hip-hop beat. "Oh, yeah," Zawinul asserted, "if you listen to the drum beat on '125th Street Congress' [from Weather Report's 1973 album Sweetnighter], that beat is the original hip-hop beat. I played that years before it was recorded. That particular beat has since been used by at least 55 or 60 rap groups, even until now. I did get credit and paid for that, which is a good thing. That was the first time the hip-hop beat was recorded, but I didn't call it that. Peter Erskine [one of Weather Report's drummers] used to call it the Zawa beat."

Weather With You

Joe Zawinul has gone so deeply into African-American music, and has had such a big impact on it, that he has been called the "greatest white black musician alive" in the US. He's also been voted the best keyboard player in jazz 21 times in the American jazz magazine Downbeat. Given that his main roots are in Europe and classical music, it makes his achievements both impressive and mystifying, and one wonders where the roots of his skills and artistry, especially in black music and rhythm, come from.

Some of the answers go back as far as 1932, when Josef Zawinul was born in Vienna. The extremely gifted kid was enlisted in the Vienna Conservatory in 1939 as a classical piano student, but as a child of poor parents, the war years soon became hard and hungry for Zawinul, shaping much of his outlook on life.

The influx of American culture immediately after the war proved another crucial stepping stone. The American dance music and jazz that radio stations broadcast provided Zawinul with a profound sense of direction: "I saw what I wanted to do with my life: to play with black musicians." Following this, he embarked on a successful career in the Austrian jazz scene. After a few years he found this too limiting and a successful application for a scholarship at the Berklee School of Jazz in Boston provided a way out.

When Zawinul moved to the USA in early 1959 he hit the ground running, being enlisted within three weeks of his arrival by well-known jazz trumpeter and bandleader Maynard Ferguson. Half a year later he was sacked, allegedly for trying to take over the band, but within weeks he was hired again, this time by jazz singer Dinah Washington. Two years later Zawinul joined the R&B jazz band of the legendary saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and stayed there until the end of 1970. In 1965, Zawinul wrote Cannonball's band's greatest hit, 'Mercy, Mercy, Mercy'. Two Zawinul solo albums soon followed: Money In The Pocket (1966) and The Rise And Fall Of The Third Stream (1967).

A feature of 'Mercy, Mercy, Mercy' that attracted widespread attention was Zawinul's use of the Wurlitzer electric piano, to which he had been introduced in 1959 by Ray Charles. Soon after 'Mercy, Mercy, Mercy' Zawinul featured as a guest electric keyboardist on a variety of recordings with the likes of King Curtis (with Jimi Hendrix in the band) and Aretha Franklin. 'Mercy, Mercy, Mercy' also inspired Miles Davis to introduce the electric piano into his music in December 1967.

"It was the whole kick-off to that electronic thinking," Zawinul recalled. "That was so hip, the electric piano I was playing with Cannonball crossed over to the rock & roll kids. In 1967-68 [pianist] Victor Feldman, a great, great musician and friend, introduced me to Harold Rhodes of the Fender Rhodes electric piano. Rhodes sometimes travelled with me on tour. We were very close. I suggested improvements to the instrument, such as in the attack, that when you get higher the notes don't get thinner. And then they did something so that it didn't detune as fast. Little things."

Between November 1968 and February 1970 Zawinul recorded regularly with Miles Davis, becoming an important catalyst for the trumpeter's foray into jazz-rock. Davis used several of Zawinul's compositions during these sessions, most famously 'In A Silent Way', which became the title track for Davis's pioneering ambient jazz-rock album, and 'Pharaoh's Dance' on Bitches Brew.

Having first released another solo album with a more traditional, European flavour, called simply Zawinul (1971), the keyboardist went on to co-found definitive jazz-rock band Weather Report with saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who had also played extensively with Davis. Their self-titled 1971 debut album took the jazz world by storm. By the time of the band's demise in 1986, 14 studio albums, two live albums, and several dozen musicians had come out of and through Shorter and Zawinul's magic pressure cooker. Last Autumn, Sony/Columbia released another demonstration of Weather Report's creative prowess, the double CD Live And Unreleased, with live out-takes from 1975 to 83. Rather then sequenced in chronological order, the tracks are mixed, sequenced, and crossfaded to resemble one continuous live concert. The sound is first-class, the playing exceptional, and many of the tracks sound amazingly contemporary.

Accordions In The Forest

Zawinul did not stop at the Wurlitzer and Fender Rhodes electric pianos he used in the 1960s. By the late 1960s he was extending his sonic palette with effects like phase shifters, Echoplexes, wah-wahs and ring modulators, and when synthesizers came on the market he was among the first to buy one (the EMS Putney). The list of synthesizers he has used since then — among them the ARP 2600, Rhodes Chroma, Oberheim Four-voice and Eight-voice, ARP Quadra, Sequential Prophet 5 and Prophet T8, Korg Trident, Oberheim Xpander, Korg VC10 vocoder, Emu Emulator, Casio CZ101, Korg DW8000, DSS1, DSM1 and M1 — reads like a synth museum's treasure list.

Joe Zawinul's keyboard rig, set up as for live use: from left, Korg M1 workstation, Clavia Nord Lead synth (underneath M1); Korg Prophecy monosynth and Sequential Circuits Prophet T8 synth; Korg Triton workstation.

"The EMS Putney was my first synthesizer," Zawinul commented. "I bought one together with a friend of mine who lived in the same building in New York. The Putney only had one oscillator. It was like a wooden board with a bunch of little holes in it where you put these toothpicks with wires, and you could create one oscillation. It created little radio-type sounds.

"The ARP was great. I still play it today. It was the first keyboard that could be inverted, in other words, when your hands go up, you're sounding down. It's a mirror system where C remains C, D flat becomes B, D becomes B flat, and so on. When you play chords with this, you have to have a good brain. What's good about it is that you get different ideas. Weather Report's 'Black Market' was played on an inverted keyboard. Check it out."

Zawinul traces his passion for synthesizers back to his Austrian childhood. "Creating my own sounds is what the whole ballgame is about," said Zawinul. "I did it since I was seven years old, when I played the accordion, which has different sound registers. I always liked that. I grew up in the forest, my friend, and in the forest it is quiet, and you can hear everything, the wind blowing through."

Is he implying that he is always looking for textural, environmental sounds? "Exactly. The piano alone is a boring kind of thing." And so the development of music technology must have been a Godsend? "Yes, it is. As a young kid I played harmonium in a small orchestra, and later I played a Hammond organ. For me in my head I had already invented the synthesizer, the whole thing. I was always taking about, why can't somebody invent such a thing?"

The Mastermind

Zawinul's use of synthesizers, and eventually samplers and drum machines, expanded gradually. However, it wasn't until Weather Report folded that he embarked on his most radical exploration of technology to date, with Di-a-lects (1986), recently remastered and re-released by Columbia. The album still sounds astonishing 17 years later. In contrast to the bombastic or gimmicky nature of many synth and drum machine-based recordings of the era, much of the album bubbles organically and swings irresistibly.

"I played all the parts, man," Zawinul elaborated. "I think if one person can play everything, then you have a more unique and more organic way of playing music. In all honesty, it's my favourite way to play. Not on stage, because on stage it's tricky. Unless people can see what you're doing, they don't believe it. I performed the stuff from Di-a-lects live and people saw me sitting behind all those boxes and said that I didn't play everything and just mixed the sound, shit like that. But I really played all these things, because I'm really co-ordinated with all this [multi-keyboard] stuff. Of course, I used a rhythm machine for live performance, but I played the bass lines mixed with comping with the left hand, and played melody and other comping parts with the right hand."

Commenting on how he avoided that stereotypical '80s Linn-driven sound, Zawinul said, "You know what, man, I can't even do that. It's no big deal. I can play with a drum machine, and I can make a drum machine sound like a real drummer because of how I play around it. It's an art. You cannot be a slave of something like that. You have to be the mastermind, and you can make this static thing flexible and moveable. That's what I do. I slalom around what the drum machine does in such a way that it's not about what it plays, it's about what I play.

"It's an art to play to sequencers or drum machines, and even some of the really famous guys can't do it. People trying to keep up with it, to keep time with it, and that shit is going to sound stiff. You have to free yourself from that stuff. On 'Carnavalito' [on Di-a-lects] I used a drum machine, it may have been a Linn, but I shook the rhythm up with my playing. That version is the best version of that song I've ever played. I presented the music like I did it on Di-a-lects to Weather Report, with drum and bass parts, so they could feel what the music was going to be like. I needed their imagination, but only to a small degree. But on this particular solo record it was my particular personality playing everything, and for me that was more organic. It's still like that today. With Faces & Places, the way I presented it to the band, it really sounded better than on the record."

So if the things he does alone sound superior, why use other musicians at all? "Because I like to have a band with me on the road," Zawinul retorted. "It's so much work doing it alone. Also, I use a lot of different programs that I've programmed myself that only go by touch, so I can play an entire solo with two notes. For instance on the Chroma Expander I can have micro scales and quarter-tone scales, and scales where the octave on the keyboard is only a tritone, so I can play in such small increments that you can hardly hear the notes, but you can hear the motion. On Di-a-lects I did some of this stuff on an ARP Quadra."

When asked what keyboards and drum machines he used live and on that record, Zawinul became elusive, as if divulging engineering-type knowledge would soil his reputation as an artiste. "I don't know, man. All I know is that I still have some of them now. All f**king instruments are dead, my friend, unless someone plays it. There is no living instrument in the whole world. They don't play by themselves. You can write that in big letters, because people don't seem to understand this. What the f**k is a Stradivarius? You can play it badly and it's a catastrophe. Or a piano, or a synthesizer. Synthesizers especially!"

Joe Zawinul's much-used Korg O1R/W workstation synth, with his vintage Rhodes Chroma Polaris and ARP Quadra analogue synths. But surely a good quality instrument helps... Zawinul interrupted before the question was finished: "I disagree with that. Who it is that plays the instrument is more important. Miles didn't sound like a trumpet player. Nobody plays as good saxophone as Wayne Shorter. It's a concept that's inside a person. No instrument is better than any other instrument to make you sound good. It's about sound. And synthesizers are even more difficult, because there's a greater menu. It's much easier to choose the best dish out of five dishes on the menu in a restaurant, than out of 400."

Although there's an impressive array of keyboards and modules in The Music Room, Zawinul's live rig is relatively modest in size: "For live I'm using a couple of rackmounted modules like the Triton, which is really nice, and the Wavestation and M1/R rack units. I only have four actual keyboards on stage, the Prophecy, the M1, the Triton keyboard and the Sequential Circuits T8. In my studio I use the Peavey 9000 as a sampler, and I still have all my old keyboards. I also have the Korg Pepe as a rack unit."

The Pepe (Zawinul's nickname when he was a kid) is an instrument custom-made for Zawinul by Korg in the mid-1980s, exemplifying the fact that the Austrian is a high-profile endorsee of the company. ("They are very good people, who have been relentless in supporting me, more than 30 years now. They're like family to me.") The Pepe is a MIDI wind controller with a melodica mouthpiece and buttons that resemble an accordion. Apparently the 13 buttons came from a Korg DDD1 drum machine. Zawinul does not seem to use it much any more, in contrast to the vocoder, which remains one of his favourite tools.

Rotating Beats

Vocoders, keyboards, sounds and samples aside, there's one topic Zawinul keeps coming back to: rhythm. "I always call it 'rotation," he elaborated suddenly. "The rotation is everything. Rotation is the pulse, and if you have the pulse and the rotation of the pulse, there is something about that. It's very tricky. Most people, most drummers, are not really rhythmically that good. They can play in time, but that's not rhythm. Rhythm is something else than time. To have a rhythmic talent, to take things out of the time, and be more of the time without being in that structure, you know, this has to do with the rotation. You cannot, I don't think correctly explain that. It's something in the feeling."

Any mention of rhythm instantly sparked lengthy discourses, such as in the case of the hip-hop beat, when he hummed a bass and snare rhythm, and explained, "You see? The secret of that beat is the distance between the bass drum and the snare drum. The backbeat I had originally on '125th Street Congress,' if it is not hit correctly it will never groove. There is a longer distance than in a real two and four [the beats the snare normally accents]. That little 'pop' gives that uplift. It's like that little snap in boxing or in sports. You can not really learn or teach that. Ninety-nine out of 100 drummers don't have the correct distance. Most of the guys, and they are famous guys sometimes, they cannot play it. Most normal backbeats sound bad, they sound stiff. In general I don't like music with backbeats. It's boring because it closes everything up tremendously. And therefore 99 percent of the music in the world doesn't groove."

And of course, by implication, most or all of the beats Zawinul creates and/or plays, do groove. Is it a grandiose claim, or a case of a man with great talent and utter self-belief telling it like it is? The answer lies in his music. Most of it does, indeed, swing. In fact, much of it positively sizzles. Take just some more recent albums such as Faces & Places, My People (1996) and the live double CD World Tour (1998). They contain orgies of rhythm, often fast-paced, intricate, complex, and heavily influenced by world music. On these three albums Zawinul employs some of the world's best rhythm players, among them drummer Paco Sery, percussionists Triluk Gurtu, Alex Acuna and Zakir Hussain, and bassists Victor Bailey, Etienne Mbappe and Richard Bona. Yet Zawinul insists that whatever the talents of his musicians, it's him that comes up with the rhythms. "I put every rhythm exactly together beforehand. And then I let them play that and I'll ask them to use their imaginations. The fundamental musical idea is connected with everything that's in the music, including the drums. The rhythms must work. So all the bass lines and all the rhythms are prepared by me.

"I have a serious drum setup on my multi-keyboards where each note truly represents another instrument of the drum family. I usually start with making up a drum part, improvising, playing everything by hand. I play the drums like I would play a melody. I just record myself playing everything into Hybrid Arts in my Atari. For me everything is a damn solo. I've had my old Atari computer for 15-16 years now, and I love it. I'm so at home with it. What I do is, I just fool around with sounds, and the moment I have a good sound I start the click track and play into my Atari. I may play the drums with my right hand and the bass with my left. So I start an improvisation which may last seven or eight minutes, or maybe 20. And then I add the next layer. With two keyboards I add the melody and the whole comp. It's a very easy process for me. But in general I play all the drums by hand, and hardly ever program them. Otherwise, why I am a musician, man?"

Shooting The Film

The writing process is so easy, apparently, that Zawinul had 700 songs to choose from for Faces & Places alone, which he edited down to about 35. "It's no big deal. Perhaps it sounds arrogant, and then it shall be, but I do have the talent to do that — the talent to play some damn music. I get so many tunes, it's unbelievable. I don't do much thinking at all, it's just what's coming out. What the hell. When I improvise there's no mind. I'm just there. I fiddled around. It's like a painter would do, just fantasise a little bit. I'm not thinking about this shit, it's just something I do. Mind messes everything up. When inspiration starts, rational thinking stops."

It is safe to assume that Zawinul's adage also works in reverse: when rational thinking starts, inspiration stops. This is probably one of the reasons behind his reluctance to get drawn into detailed discussions about music technology. When asked, for instance, how he programs his sounds, his reply was: "pure instinct. There's nothing to say about that. When I hear a sound which I like to play with, the way the key feels, the way the sounds feels, then I modulate that sound to the point where it really rings like it is my voice, like it is my language. If I can do that, I know I can make some music. I couldn't play with sounds that are not my sound."

The Austrian was a little more forthcoming when requested to divulge more details about how Faces & Places was put together. He suddenly remembered that he hadn't actually written the material for his latest album on his trusted Atari. "In fact it was improvised on a small laptop, the Compaq Presario 1675, and a tiny three-octave Yamaha pocket keyboard, I don't remember the model number. The Presario has a very good music program on it. I don't remember what it's called, but it is a MIDI recorder. All the music on this record was written on the road. After the gigs I was in my hotel room and fooling around and improvising. Some of these tunes, my friend, were 25 minutes long. Really long and very good."

On returning to his Music Room studio at his home in Malibu, Zawinul — with help from his son Ivan, who co-produced the album — loaded his MIDI files into his Atari, and started the process of listening, editing and arranging the music. After this, guest musicians came to the studio, where they would "play pretty much exactly what I played. I had them embellish my bass lines with their personality. Only [drummer] Paco Sery and I improvised 'Barefoot Beauty' together, and on 'All About Simon' I wanted to play the arrangement live with Paco in the studio to get a better feel, and a totally different feel came out of it. This improvisation was played by me without MIDI, which meant that I had to write the arrangement down, rather than just edit it in Hybrid Arts and print it out, as I normally do.

"On a track like 'East 12th Street Band' I had Bobby Malach, the saxophone player, learn my solo. The great [bassist] Richard Bona played on two tracks. He played with my bass lines three or four times, no earphones, just with the sound coming out of the speakers, that kind of naturalness. And then I left my bass line out and let him do it. So he totally had the original feeling, but he also used his imagination to make the stuff that was there sound like him, and then we have an interpretation. It's like a movie. The closer you come to the screenplay, the better it's going to be."

So is Zawinul getting closer to the screenplay? He certainly appears to be at the peak of his powers, with his rhythms and his music more exciting than ever before.

"Well, you're hearing the future, man," Zawinul commented with typical modesty. "I'm in a totally different place already. But I'm grateful, man. That's all I am. When you're born with talent and you're healthy, all you can do is try to be a decent person, and give back."

What a guy. Here's hoping that we'll indeed be able to enjoy another 20 years of Zawinul 'giving back.'

www.zawinulonline.org

Brian Glasser's informative book In A Silent Way: A Portrait Of Joe Zawinul (Sanctuary Publishing, 2001) was helpful in the research for this article.