I had the chance to spend an hour and a half talking with the late great keyboardist Joe Zawinul in June for Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio, not knowing that he had a rare form of skin cancer that would kill him in early September. When I arrived at his study for the interview, he informed me that his wife was in intensive care. Embarrassed to be intruding on the family at such a sad time, I asked if he wanted to cancel the interview. He stoically brushed me off, saying "We must cope."
And he proceeded to give an amazing interview, ranging from his pre-war conservatory training as a child prodigy, to his life as a poor "street kid" in post-Nazi Austria, to his gospel-tinged soul jazz contributions to Cannonball Adderley to his co-leadership of the seminal rock-influenced jazz group Weather Report in the 1970s, and his most recent group the Zawinul Syndicate.
While I only met him that one time, his death saddened me because he shared a quality with his one-time boss Miles Davis that is all too rare in jazz and other forms of music today: a refusal to repeat what he’s already done, and insistence on trying to re-invent himself stylistically as he moved through life. I mentioned a quip that the jazz critic Gary Giddins made in his brilliant book Visions of Jazz about the stale repertory of contemporary jazz singing– that even in the 1990s, singers were still mining the songbook of 1938. Zawinul’s response was emphatic: "It cannot be. It can not be!"
So whether you like what he was doing with the Zawinul Syndicate later in his career (I certainly do, although others in my household remain unconvinced), which might be described as synth-heavy groove-based songs with elements drawn from African and Latin American musics, you can’t help but admire his fearless refusal to keep trying to develop new sounds and styles, that restive relationship with tradition that has kept jazz fresh.
Even his final album, a reimagining of his Weather Report output as performed by the WDR Big Band of Cologne, is less of a retrospective than it might first appear. Why? Because it reminds us that in spite of a lot of negative critical ballast, Weather Report, with its complex, interwoven musical lines, was kind of like a little big band, that replaced the traditional brass and woodwind sections with keyboards, a single, incomparable saxophone player, and the various brilliant rhythm sections. It was like a big band, as played by a rock band.
Not all experiments work, but it’s only when artists take risks that the music can continue to be interesting. That’s why he scorned the bebop imitations that predominate on the jazz radio format today. It’s not that such players are incompetent, it’s just that what the possibilities of their style have been so thoroughly explored, over the past sixty years. Let’s hope the musically-gifted jazz players out there will take heart from his example, rather than from the mimics, or those certain someones inhabiting the third circle of Hell known as smooth jazz.
Anyhow, if you’re interested in hearing the radio documentary that we did with the interview and his October 2006 concert at Lincoln Center, you can click here: http://www.jalc.org/jazzcast/program.asp?programNumber=257
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