Zawinul Online

By Curt Bianchi

When I started this web site in 1999, I had no illusions of ever meeting Joe Zawinul. My goals were really quite modest. I started it mostly as a way to organize links to other Zawinul-related material on the web. I figured that sooner or later Joe would have an official site, but in the meantime mine might do some good.

Then in July of 2003, the day before Joe’s 71st birthday, I received an email from Brian DiGenti, the editor of a relatively new journal called Wax Poetics. He had seen my web site and wondered if I would be interested in writing an article about Joe’s early experiences with electric keyboards. He suggested that I start with what I already had and that he would set up an interview with Joe.

Amazingly, I told him no.

Let’s all say it together: “Curt, what where you thinking?!” To be fair, I had never heard of Wax Poetics, and I’d already written my fair share of magazine articles. So in a way, that was old hat. Plus, my work commitments made taking on a feature article–with its attendant deadlines and stress–a challenge. Nevertheless, Brian persisted, sending me some copies of the magazine and asking me to think it over. When I got them, I was impressed. (And I highly recommend that you check out Wax Poetics for yourself.) So I agreed to do the article. It was the start of my personal journey to Joe Zawinul.

It took a while to get things lined up, but in September I called Joe and arranged to visit him at his home in Malibu. I’d read a lot of Zawinul interviews, and while he could be quite expansive, he could also cut things short when the interviewer failed to measure up. The day before I was scheduled to see him, I met with Jim Swanson, Joe’s keyboard tech during the later Weather Report years. He emphasized that the best way to get off to a good start with Joe would be to talk about his current activities. Joe doesn’t like to dwell on the past, Jim warned me. Indeed, Joe once said in an interview, “History bores the shit out me.” The only problem was, my article was all about the past.

I stayed up late that night working on my list of questions and rehearsing in my mind how the interview might go. How would I get Joe to talk about the old days–the entire point of my article–without offending him? I thought I could cleverly segue into the Cannonball days by mentioning the tune “The Spirit of Julian ‘C’ Adderley” on the new Faces and Places album, and from there get into the Wurlitzer and Fender-Rhodes electric pianos.

I was supposed to arrive at Joe’s house at 9:00 a.m., but traffic was horrendous. When I finally made it onto the Santa Monica freeway just after 9:00, I knew I would have to call Joe and let him know that I would be very late. I was already nervous about meeting him, and I dreaded making that call. But unbeknownst to me, Jim had put in a good word for me with Joe the night before. So when I let Joe know where I was, he was as gracious as could be. That was my first sign that this might go well.

When I arrived at his house high on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Joe greeted me in the courtyard and led me into his office–a large, oblong room connected to the main house. It had the untidiness of a room that is used, where work gets done. On the wall just inside the entrance hung gold records for Mercy, Mercy, Mercy and Heavy Weather, as well as several Grammy nominations, most of them a tad crooked. There were also several framed Downbeat Readers Poll certificates. I pointed out that he could have put up many more. “Yeah, 29 of them,” he replied. “I don’t know where the old ones are.”

While Joe fetched me a bottle of water, I looked around the room. At the far end sat Joe’s grand piano and a set of shelves along the wall. The upper shelves housed a collection of statues depicting musicians. Below them were a half dozen old accordions. When Joe returned, I asked him if they were the accordions that he played in his youth. Unfortunately, I don’t remember for sure if any of them were actually his own, or just ones that he had collected later. But my question prompted him to start telling me of his childhood in Austria.

We stood by the accordions while he talked, and I kept thinking that I should get my recorder out, but I didn’t want to be rude. Finally, though, I interrupted him, saying that I had better start the recorder if he was going to keep telling me these wonderful stories. “We always do that when we record, you know?”, he said. “Just turn it on and get everything on there.”

We moved to the center of the room and sat down across an old wooden chest that served as a kind of coffee table. Underneath it was an oriental rug that appeared to be the same one pictured in the 1984 Keyboard magazine article. Joe sat opposite me on a stool, I turned the recorder on, and off we went.

For the next hour he told me of growing up under the Nazi regime during World War II; of life at the camp where he was sent in 1944 after a particularly heavy bombing of Vienna; of the first time he heard jazz on the piano; of seeing a photograph of the Duke Ellington Orchestra for the first time; of having nothing to eat but jars of mustard as the war wound down; of stealing a horse out from under sleeping Russian soldiers so his family could eat; of burying dead soldiers at the end of the war, barefoot and without gloves; of being thrown out of school after the war for fighting–”I was a fuck up in many ways,” he said; of playing accordion in a “Hillbilly band” (as in American hillbilly music); of his first gigs after the war.

I was mesmerized. Joe leaned into me as he talked, his eyes boring into mine with great intensity. I still remember the way his voice trailed off after he finished describing life at the camp, where he was forced to endure a regiment of war training and musical studies. “Man, that was rough…”, he said, his eyes gazing elsewhere as he replayed the memories in his mind.

All the while I realized that none of this had anything to do with the article I was supposed write, but I couldn’t stop him. The few times that I tried to gently move to other topics, he told me no, that he hadn’t finished the story yet! “This all connects very nicely,” he said, as though he was improvising a long composition. I grew concerned that at any moment he would declare the interview complete, and I would be dismissed without a single germane quote for my article. Sure enough, he wrapped things up, saying, “I think you’ve got enough for an article, don’t you?” I protested mildly that there were a few questions that I really needed to ask. So we continued.

Joe showed me some framed photographs, including perhaps his favorite, the one in which Joe is hunched over the piano, head down in concentration, playing “Come Sunday” for its composer, Duke Ellington. I knew the story, so I asked, “And what did Duke have to say about your playing on that tune?” To which a childlike expression came across Joe’s face as he replied, “Duke said I played it better than he did!”

After a while Joe invited me over to his computer because he wanted to show me how he improvised his pieces. He played some material that he said would be for a future album. Joe’s laboratory for these improvisations was a laptop computer running a MIDI sequencer–Cakewalk, I think–connected to a little portable keyboard–the kind with two or three octaves of small, toy-like keys. He played several pieces for me. Some of them were just single tracks played through a piano sample. Others were further along, with percussion tracks and so on. All of them bore the unmistakable stamp of Joe’s rhythm and phrasing. As he played them he got animated and commented on the phrasing. “That’s not something you can write. You can’t write this kind of phrasing!”

We sat down for one more session across the chest, veering from one topic to another. Joe talked about preparing to go on tour and how difficult it was to secure the necessary visas and arrangements required by the various countries the band would be visiting. We even got around to “The Spirit of Julian ‘C’ Adderley.” At about 12:30 I finally turned off the recorder and we walked outside to the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean. He nonchalantly mentioned how he had had to kill a couple of rattlesnakes in the yard recently because he didn’t want his grandchildren to encounter them. He took me into his state-of-the-art studio, “The Music Room,” where his son Ivan was setting up the keyboard rig, as Joe had recently returned from Paris. Ivan showed me around the studio like a proud parent, having designed it and installed the equipment himself.

Three and a half hours after I had arrived, I bid Joe and Ivan goodbye. It was a great day.

I didn’t complete the article until early the next spring. I sent Joe a draft, per his request, wondering how he would like it. He replied that he would have a few corrections, but I never heard back and we went to press. A few months later I caught the Syndicate at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz. Still not knowing how he liked the article, I went backstage after the show to say hello. Joe greeted me like a long lost friend, and we had a nice chat. I worked up the nerve to ask him the big question: Were we good on the article? “You wrote a hell of an article, man!” There would be no corrections.

Joe and I continued to correspond via email, sometimes by telephone. We did a few more interviews. I never wanted to come off as a fawning fan, so I was careful not to take advantage of our relationship. Initially, I never called him unless he agreed via email first. But later, he would ask me to call him because he had something he wanted to tell me for the web site.

In September 2006, the band played at Yoshi’s in Oakland for four nights. I met with Joe for about an hour backstage between the Sunday matinee and evening shows. He waved me into the dressing room as he was finishing a call to his wife, Maxine. I’ll never forget the heartfelt way in which he told her that he loved her. Man, I thought, I sure hope I am that much in love with my wife after I’ve been married for 40 years. I didn’t pull out the recorder. Instead, we just talked. Joe had some ideas for a new web site and we talked about that. I wondered if he intended to replace his official web site, but he said no, just make another one. I explained that he should really have just one official web site, but if he did make a new one, it would need a name. “Let’s see, my club is Birdland, my label is BirdJAM, how about bird…” As he paused, “birdshit” immediately crossed my mind, but not my lips. Not an instant later he exclaimed, “Birdshit! Call it that!” We had a laugh. I never told him that birdshit.com was already taken.

The last time I saw Joe was in February 2007. He and Ivan invited me to the house to gather information for the proposed 20 Years of the Zawinul Syndicate liner notes. Although I was aware that Maxine had been ill, it wasn’t until I arrived that I learned that she was in the intensive care unit at the hospital. I wondered if I should leave, but Ivan encouraged me to stay and I spent a couple of days with the two of them. We listened to the many tracks that Ivan was working on, Joe giving him occasional instructions for overdubs and the like, and interjecting comments for my benefit.

We ate lunch overlooking the Pacific and Joe told me the history of the Zawinul Syndicate. He loved many of those musicians like they were his own children. The mere mention of their names would illicit an “Ohhhh…” followed by a comment of praise. Gary Poulson: “His rhythm was absolutely devastating .” Victor Bailey: “Oh man, Victor is baddd!.” Gerald Veasley: “We knew he was the guy within two tunes.” Paco Sery: “His beat is so deadly. A musican who plays the drums, not a drummer.” Linley Marthe: “Just a phenomenon.” Sabine Kabongo: “A total original.”

I asked about Ivan, who had been Joe’s right hand man for something like 17 years, but had recently stopped accompanying the band in Europe. “He’s a great musician,” Joe said. “He’s not a player, he didn’t study music, but he’s actually a great musician. Sometimes when he tunes up my instruments he plays some shit that blows my mind. For me, he was the most important member of the band. He created so many sound effects. “Introduction to a Mighty Theme”–that’s his, referring to the sampled vocal arrangement. I played the chords, but it is really his composition as well. I miss him very much because now he only works with me in America and Japan. I miss him so tremendously.”

Over the years, whenever he was asked, Joe tended to say that his current band was his favorite, but I do think the last version of the Syndicate was in fact his very favorite. They had been together for three years–Sabine, Linley, Aziz Sahmaoui, Alegre Corréa, Jorge Bezerra, Jr. and either Nathaniel Townsley or Paco Sery on drums–and he described them all in loving terms. And what a band it was. You could hear it–and see it–in their performances. The level of energy they brought to the bandstand was just astonishing.

When I saw Joe that last time, I remember thinking that he seemed tired. I assumed it was the strain of tending to Maxine; he was spending a lot of time at the hospital and taking naps during the day. Ivan confided his concern that Joe wasn’t playing his keyboards, something that wasn’t like him. I didn’t know that Joe had cancer. When it was time to leave, for some reason I was compelled to walk up to him and give him a hug. I don’t know if he was a “hugger” or not, but I’m glad I did.

In April I got one of Joe’s typically terse emails: “I need immediately a short biography of ‘20 Years of the Zawinul Syndicate’ for the summer tour promotion.” Okay, but how short (or long) of a bio did he want, I wondered. I started writing. “Joe, I’ve got one page so far. Should I just keep going?,” I asked him the next day. His response: “Keep on writing.” So I ignored the word count and just kept going. At about 3,500 words, it was the length of a Down Beat feature article. A little long for a promotional bio, I thought, but after he read the first draft he asked me to put in more details, making it even longer.

Joe and I talked a few more times after that. He wanted me to come down so that he could tell me the stories behind the songs that would be on the 20 Years set. But that got delayed because the exact set of tunes was still in flux, and he said we should wait until he returned from Europe. He didn’t come back.

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, performing was life. Being on the road, performing with the band–that was Joe’s life. And he did it right to the end.

I treasure the times I was able to spend with Joe. I miss him, but I also feel lucky to have gotten to know him on a personal level. He led an incredible life. His spirit and music will stay with me forever.