Goodbye Joe Zawinul

     Composer and keyboardist Josef Zawinul passed away the other day. He was 75. My intro to Joe was with his composition "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" during the sixties. Two of the bands I perform with, The Buzz Clifford Quartet and The Skipp Pearson Quintet, play it regularly. I got to know his work better in the seventies when his group Weather Report featured some of my favorite Jazz musicians such as Wayne Shorter, Alphonso Johnson, Miroslav Vitous, and Jaco Pastorius. Their albums Mysterious Traveller, Black Market and Heavy Weather were never far from my stereo system in those days. Taking the lessons of Classic Jazz and fusing them with Funk, Joe then added innovative chord structures, polyrhythmic time signatures and instrumentation that in later decades would be termed "World Music". The result was a truly unique form of Jazz unlike anything that had come before. Beyond Fusion, beyond Progressive, it occupies it's own nexus in the pantology of the Jazz art form.

     Joe hated convention. "If you've heard it before, throw it out!" he used to say when composing with other musicians. He once told an auditioning drummer, "If I ever hear you do a sixteenth note run down the tom-toms, I'm gonna hit you with my keyboard!" The drummer responded by physically rearranging his drums so that, as he played from left to right, the sizes were out of sequence instead of the typical arrangement of progressively small to large. Joe was delighted. "You're hired," he laughed.

     We're gonna miss you, Joe.