Zawinul Online

Anil Prasad, the journalist behind the superb Innerviews website, has brought back his 1997 Zawinul interview after being absent from the site for a few years. It’s one of the best Zawinul interviews you’ll find anywhere. A wide-ranging conversation, it touches on Joe’s relationship with Jaco and Cannonball, among other things. You can read it here.

Anil also provides a bit of behind-the-scenes story about the interview:

A true touchstone of my music journalism career is back on the Web in an extended “director’s cut” edition: My extensive Joe Zawinul interview. It’s from 1997 and is one of the most extensive interviews Joe ever gave. It’s the first interview in which I felt I was able to truly hold my own against an incredibly powerful personality. I asked some tough questions and didn’t waver, as you’ll see. Joe is my favorite musician of all time, so this was quite an occasion. Funny story: Joe and I did a number of interviews which were compiled into this piece. During one of them, he said some of the most outrageous stuff imaginable, cutting down musicians and music industry people in the most incredibly brutal way. It was amazing stuff. I noticed while he was going off, that he was looking at the recorder. He actually picked it up, looked at it, and smirked at me several times as he was engaged in this verbal assault. I left going “Oh my God, I got Joe Zawinul on tape saying all this incredibly controversial stuff!” I went home. The tape recorder wasn’t running. The tape was blank. Joe knew it all along and said all this stuff he knew I would have no record of. For the record, ever since this event, I run two recorders for every interview I do. :-) Miss you Joe….

The Syndicate has a couple of performances scheduled for next month in France and Switzerland. In July, they will celebrate Joe’s birthday on the seventh at Porgy & Bess in Vienna with special guest, accordionist Klaus Paier. They are also booked at the North Sea Jazz Festival. I’ve updated the Tour Dates page. It looks like the lineup has changed a bit, with only Paco Séry and Allegre Correa remaining from the the Zawinul Syndicate. The full lineup is Emile Parisien (saxophone), Correa (guitar), Thierry Eliez (keyboard), Munir Hossn (bass), Séry (drums), and Arnold Moueza (percussion).

Speaking of Paco Séry, I failed to note earlier the release of his album The Real Life. The label describes it as a mix of “Africa, Funk, Jazz, Hip hop, R&B,” and I’d say that’s about right. It’s kind of like seriously grooving world music. (How could it not groove with Paco behind the drum kit?) If you liked his first album, Voyages, you’ll like this one, too.

As I write on my Weather Report site, Peter Erskine has published a great new ebook that’s part autobiography, part Weather Report memoir. A must read for Zawinul fans, as well as anyone interested in Peter’s life story, Weather Report, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorious, or the many musicians Peter has worked with throughout his career. I’ve written a brief review over at the annotated discography.

radio.string.quartet.vienna has released their new album, Posting Joe, Celebrating the Music of Weather Report-Live. It’s a collection of Zawinul/Weather Report tunes, uniquely interpreted by r.s.q.v. I’ve posted more information at my Weather Report site.

I have written a new article exploring Joe’s relationship with Willie Tee and other musicians from the Crescent City. If you ever wondered about the Willie Tee who wrote the song “Can It Be Done?” on Domino Theory, or who some of the seemingly unknown musicians on Joe’s 1970 album Zawinul were, then this article will help to answer those questions.

After years of procrastination, I am happy to unveil the new, improved Weather Report Annotated Discography. It’s been in need of a facelift for quite a while. The font has gotten smaller and smaller as display resolution improved, and worse, it no longer formatted correctly in modern browser.

In addition to the improved appearance, there have been some content updates sprinkled throughout. Head on over and have a look.

Since Joe’s passing in 2007, The Syndicate has been at the forefront of keeping his music alive. It is essentially a continuation of Joe’s last band, The Zawinul Syndicate, which at the time was fielding arguably its strongest lineup in its 20-year history. Four members of that group decided to carry on: Drummer Paco Sery, percussionist/vocalist Aziz Sahmaoui, percussionist Jorge Bezerra, and guitarist Alegre Corrêa, who has since been replaced by Munir Hossn. They were joined by Aloune Wade on bass, Emile Parisien on sax, and Thierry Eliez on keyboards. Sabine Kabongo, vocalist in The Zawinul Syndicate, frequently performs with the band as well.

They originally retained the name The Zawinul Syndicate, reflecting their intent to continue playing the music they performed with Joe, but the Zawinul estate asked them to drop “Zawinul” from their name; hence, The Syndicate. (The estate put together The Zawinul Legacy Band, featuring Weather Report alumni Alphonso Johnson, Chester Thompson, and Bobby Thomas, as well as Scott Kinsey and Bobby Malach. The Legacy Band performed a couple of concerts in Europe this past summer.)

Among the highlights this past year, The Syndicate performed at Joe Zawinul Day in Vienna, a grand celebration of Joe’s music; and at the Blue Note in Tokyo on the occasion of Joe’s 80th birthday. In May, The Syndicate released its first album, File Under Zawinul, which consists of all Zawinul compositions. For those of us in the states, it can be ordered from Pierre Tassone’s Music By Mail. Remarkably, it hit number one on the Hungarian pop chart. Those Hungarians have good taste!

The band has three performances coming next month in Munich, Vienna and Klagenfurt (Austria.) They’re also booked in France and Zurich in May, with more to come.

I don’t know who is the driving force behind keeping The Syndicate together, but I suspect that a large share of the credit goes to Risa Zincke, Joe’s long-time manager. Regardless, we’re lucky to have them. The Syndicate’s official website is www.no1syndicate.com. Basitours is the European booking agent, and a good place to look for upcoming concerts.

If you’re not familiar with Anil Prasad’s website, Innerviews, you should be. Anil created it in 1994 as a home for his in-depth interviews of musicians who span an amazingly diverse range of styles. He says it is the web’s “first and longest-running music magazine,” which I don’t doubt. After all, 1994 was the year that Netscape Navigator–the first popular Internet browser–was introduced to the public. Very few websites of any kind go back as far as Innerviews.

Anil’s interview style lends itself to revealing portraits of his subjects. It starts with superb preparation and research; Anil is incredibly informed about his subjects, and I’m sure this goes a long way toward establishing a basis of mutual respect between interviewer and interviewee. But that’s just a starting point. Anil asks probing, open-ended questions that give his subjects plenty of room to express themselves in intimate and candid ways. The website format frees him from the word count constraints typical of print publications, making for expansive conversations. And because Anil’s interviews are not driven by the marketing needs of record companies, the conversations get to the heart of what is important to the musicians themselves.

I’ve read and collected a tremendous number of Zawinul interviews and articles over the years, and when I read Anil’s 1998 interview with Joe, it immediately stood out as one of the best, if not the best. That interview and 23 others are now collected in the book Innerviews, Music Without Borders. In addition to Joe, artists featured in the book include Jon Anderson, Björk, Bill Bruford, Martin Carthy, Stanley Clarke, Chuck D, Ani DiFranco, Béla Fleck, Michael Hedges, Jonas Hellborg, Zakir Hussain, Leo Kottke, Bill Laswell, John McLaughlin, Noa, David Sylvian, Tangerine Dream, David Torn, Ralph Towner, McCoy Tyner, Eberhard Weber, Chris Whitley, and Victor Wooten.

Some of the evocative topics explored include:

• Björk on the chaos of her creative process
• Stanley Clarke on saying no to Miles Davis
• Béla Fleck on journeying to Africa to discover the roots of the banjo
• Bill Laswell on the drama of producing difficult artists
• John McLaughlin on turning the tables on the jazz police
• McCoy Tyner on the deification of John Coltrane
• Tangerine Dream on electronica transcending technology
• Zawinul on the creation of the hip-hop beat.

A few of these interviews originally appeared on the website, but most are new for the book. It is not an overstatement to say that Anil’s book is a significant contribution to music journalism. I highly recommend it.

According to recent press releases, producer Joachim Becker–known to Zawinul fans as the producer of most of Joe’s post-Columbia Records output–has teamed up with the MiG Music to form “Art of Groove,” a new addition to the MiG family.

Among its first releases will be a Weather Report DVD/CD combo, Live In Berlin 1975. The press release describes it as, “the first part of the long-awaited Weather Report live-trilogy will be published as a DVD with bonus CD at the same time. The 40th anniversary of the founding of Weather Report is in 2011. In commemoration, the Zawinul estate and ‘Art of Groove’ are pleased to publish the original tape-recording of the super-band’s performance at the Berliner Jazztage 1975 for the first time.”

I don’t know what the rest of the “long-awaited Weather Report live-trilogy” is, although before his passing Joe did tell me that he had acquired the rights to the 1984 concert video “Domino Theory,” which was originally published in Japan.

Meanwhile, Live In Berlin 1975 is listed on various European sites such as Amazon UK.

I have updated the Tour Dates page to list The Syndicate concert dates that have come to my attention. Of particular note is the July 6 performance in Vienna as part Zawinul Music Days. I don’t know what Zawinul Music Days entails, but if I find out I’ll pass it along.