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Brian
Glasser In
A Silent Way - A portrait of Joe Zawinul
We
want to thank Mr. Chris Bradford of Sanctuary
Publishing,
who has sent us a promotional copy of "In A Silent Way" and
permitted us to publish some extracts of the book. We
publish the parts that are focused principally on the
Weather Report era: The
genesis of Weather Report Joe
Zawinul: The
next step was to find a name for the new entity. "We thought
The Wayne Shorter-Joe Zawinul Quintet sounded ridiculous, so
we were in my apartment in New York - Miroslav, Wayne and I
- trying to find a name which would say something,
especially what people had in their minds all the time. So
we were thinking about Daily News, but that didn't sound
good. Thousands of names - Audience, Triumvirate, all kinds.
Suddenly, Wayne popped out Weather Report, and we all said,
'That's it!' That's the fun thing". Comments
about the Tale Spinnin' album
Joe
Zawinul remembers his first meeting with
Jaco... "We
played in Miami - not a good concert, there was the
situation. I wrote pieces that took two drummers, like
'Nubian Sundance'. The beat was so difficult. One drummer
couldn't stand that because we played long, ten to twelve
minutes, in very fast tempo for the drummer. The piece
itself wasn't fast, but the rhythm was in double time and
needed two drummers, so I was looking for a drummer who
could possibly do that. Slide Hampton told me ahout a
drummer who has played with him, I won't say his name, and I
- you have to imagine, we were in Miami - flew him in from
Europe to Miami just for auditioning, and that was this
night when we played in this theatre in Miami, sold out. Alex
Acuna talks about "Heavy Weather" When
Weather Report made that album, the tunes we had were
sometimes complete, sometimes incomplete, so we'd find the
other pieces of the puzzle to put it together; to make the
song work, to make it joyful, contemporary, without being
ashamed of it being contemporary, also. Omar
Hakim remembers his first conversation with Joe
Zawinul "I
knew he was going to call because the first time he rang my
mother got the message for me and she didn't know who he
was. That was the funniest thing. The message from her was
something like, 'You got a call from Los Angeles, from a guy
with a really strange name that starts with a Z, and he said
something about a weather report…'. I immediately knew,
and i called him back. We had a chat, and he was telling me
what was happening with Peter, and i was aware, of course,
because i was a fan of the band before i joined. And we
talked about plans, his intentions. That was about six weeks
before anything happened. The idea was to record an album
and do a tour. Would i be interested in coming out and
joining the band? I said, 'Sure, i'd love to'." Omar
Hakim about Sportin' Life
More
info about the book IN
A SILENT WAY: JOE ZAWINUL Pub
date: February 2001 Format:
Hardback, Royal For
more info please contact: Thanks
to:
Clicca qui per la
versione italiana di questa pagina
"In
A Silent Way"
The
first Joe Zawinul biography
"In
A Silent Way", by Brian Glasser, is the first complete (and
official) biography of Joe Zawinul. The release of this
book, planned for the February 23 of 2001, is an important
event for all the Zawinul and Weather Report supporters.
Finally, we have an organic collection of informations about
our musical hero!
Brian Glasser, who had the opportunity to interview Joe
Zawinul extensively over the years and to explore directly
his personality, based his work principally on personal
declarations of the musicians who have been involved in the
Zawinul's career, from the Austrian childhood to the Zawinul
Syndicate period, by passing through his first jazz
experiences with the Austrian All Stars, his moving to the
United States and his collaborations with jazz stars like
Dinah Washington, Ben Webster and finally his long staying
in the Cannonball Adderley quintet.
And, of course, the Weather Report period, that is the more
documented one. And it can be a lovely surprise for many of
long-time Weather Report fans to discover a lot of
intriguing and unedited particulars about the band and its
music.
If you like Joe Zawinul's music, you MUST have this
book!!
"We decided that we were going to need some fantastic
management, because the quality of the music was very high,
so we got Sid Bernstein, who brought The Beatles to America.
Then I immediately went to Clive Davis [president of
CBS] and got a super contract. Not a big one, but good
for that time." Apparently, Davis didn't even listen to the
demo tape.
Given
that Zawinul's last three solo albums had been recorded at
Atlantic with Joel Dorn, that label might have seemed a more
obvious choice, but Dorn has surprisingly few regrets about
the switch, and certainly no complaints: "While we were
working on Zawinul, Joe told me about Weather Report and
going to Columbia. It was and it wasn't a disappointment for
Atlantic. To be honest, we knew Joe was a great jazz artist,
and that Zawinul was an important record, but you don't
always know where someone's heading, so while I would have
liked to have continued making records with Joe, he was
headed someplace else, and that's the way it goes. Atlantic
were never in the bidding to sign Weather Report - I think
Joe wanted to go to Columbia probably because they'd had
Miles. And around that time, there were certain artists that
I signed that I was very close to, personally - Rahsaan,
Yusef, Les McCann, Fathead, Hank Crawford - and Joe and I
didn't have as much of a personal relationship. I knew he
was a supremely talented musician, and I wanted to work with
him, but it wasn't as if we were blood brothers or anything.
We had a nice relationship. We made three albums together,
and he was headed where he wanted to".
Zawinul's
approach to the recording model that he'd learned from Miles
on Bitches Brew came closer on this record than on any
other. Conceived and produced in the absence of a settled,
working live band, it's unsurprising that Tale Spinnin' was
the most studio-orientated of the group's albums to date.
Some sections were recorded at the studio of synth wizards
Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, who had masterminded
Stevie Wonder's technology on his ground-breaking hit albums
of the early '70s. As Zawinul himself said about this
period, "I'm a constructor; too. If you make a record, you
make a record. If you go out on tour, that's another
thing."
The art was in building something sizeable and complex
without sacrificing spontaneity. As Ndugu describes it,
"There wasn't a lot of dialogue about what they were trying
to do musically. We would go in and just start playing, and
they would roll the tape, or they would give me a sketch of
a tune, which would be eight bars or something. They
reminded me a lot of playing with Miles and Herbie and Alice
Coltrane, because in those situations there was not a lot of
dialogue, either. In comparison, Santana was much more
tightly controlled. There were only a couple of spots in
Santana's show where we could do spontaneous composition - a
couple of spots in two hours! With Weather Report, you just
kind of played off of each other, and that was the whole
thing about that record."
Johnson supports this description: "There was a lot of
freedom in how it was put together. That was part of what
made the music so special. Ir was very reminiscent of how I
imagine Miles used to record. They would just start rolling
tape and the song would start immediately from the first
note. Then later Joe and Wayne would go back and splice the
tape. So what may have been the middle of what we did would
all of a sudden become the introduction, so it would start
at a high point.
"Whatever themes they wrote would become edited as well. Joe
might have thought, 'This might be great in this part,' and
then later he would decide, 'No, I think I want it over
here.' That's the way they worked. It's a great way to work,
actually! I talked to Billy [Cobham] a lot about how
[The Mahavishnu Orchestrai recorded, and I think it was
kind of unique to Weather Report. They went in, rolled tape
and allowed things to happen. They didn't try to force
anything."
Not that there weren't distinctions within Weather Report
itself.
"But I was very angry because, although the drummer was an
African, I discovered when he already was in the plane that
he had been living in Switzerland for already 15 years. When
I realised that an African was living in Switzerland for 15
years, I knew that he wouldn't be able to play our music.
That's nothing against Switzerland, but there are certain
elements in life; when someone adapts himself to them,
that's the way you become. He came, and at the first
rehearsal, when he heard us playing, he was so nervous. He
was so trembling that the drumsticks dropped out of his
hands. We spent a lot of money to fly him in, and of course
we paid him. After the concert, I went out and helped out.
We had a big truck for the instruments, and there was kind
of alleyway, kind of backstage way, and I helped our truck
to drive out.
"So
I stood there with two ladies - one was a writer for The
Miami Herald and the other woman made the promotion. I stood
there, angry about the situation, not having a drummer, not
having two drummers for the next show, and suddenly there
came this strange-looking guy, stooped, totally strange, and
said to me, 'Mr Zawinul, I really like your music and my
father was a great fan of Cannonball, and I'm a great fan of
Cannonball.' And I was not in the mood. I replied, 'Really?
What else?' 'Oh yes, by the way, my name Is John Francis
Pastorius III, and I'm the greatest bass player in the
world.' And I don't want to say this thing, but I said, 'Get
the fuck out of here!' You know, I was really mad, and I
didn't want to hear any idiot coming to me and telling me
all these things, you know? Normally, when I say this to
somebody, he would just leave, but he stayed there and
looked at me, and I had to laugh because he was looking with
such sad eyes, you know. And the newspaper lady elbowed me
and said, 'Listen, he is a little nuts but he's a genius
bass player.' I said, 'Listen, come to the hotel tomorrow
and we'll talk. Bring a tape or whatever.'
"And so next day he stopped by, wearing glasses, totally
nice and very well mannered, together with his brother,
Gregory, who Is a great artist too, and he played for me
what he brought with him, and somehow it impressed me. But
we had a super bassist, Alphonso Johnson, so there was no
reason for me to make changes. However, every week he sent a
letter to me, written as if It was printed - this person had
a handwriting which was phenomenal.
"We
rehearsed before going into the studio, and every time we'd
rehearse we'd try something different. Sometimes we'd play
one tune for about an hour, non-stop, and in that hour I'd
play maybe ten different beats. You're always looking for
the one that really feels real good, so that the music is
flowing comfortably. It might come from any of the
musicians, but on 'Birdland' those are my beats. And
actually - I'm gonna be very honest - for me, 'Birdland's
the worst tune on the album! For me, personally, of course,
because I'm not into rock; I'm not into backbeats. For me,
that's always been simple music. I think my favourite is
'Havona'. That, for me, is how I always want to play, that
kind of a conversation. When I hear that tune, I still get
the chills. Everything was improvised in that moment - it's
almost no overdubs. And it's just a quartet - Manolo was in
the studio, but he didn't play on that song. That's the best
kind of music I could hope to play. So i love 'Birdland' -
it's an incredible symphony, and I know a lot of great
musicians like to feel the backbeat - but for me, because
I'm a rhythm player, it was really boring. Makes repetitive
hi-hat sound. That's boring. But it became one of the
greatest songs of those times!"
Zawinul himself tacitly sympathises: "I wanted to play
'Birdland' in a shuffle, but it was not in there, it didn't
happen. So we did it this way. What can you say about it? It
was one of the biggest hits in history."
Regardless
of the musical merits or otherwise of Sportin' Life, Weather
Report were no longer receiving the level of attention that
they had been in the Jaco years. Hakim, for one, was
disappointed, and attributed it to the changing culture of
the music business in the 80's: "I would say that Sportin'
Life was probably the best musically packaged album that was
done while i was there. Had the climate been different, it
could have been another Heavy Weather in terms of the
commercial appeal, because it did have some funky grooves
and some singable melodies. I think the only thing that
affected that was the music climate then. I don't think it
was a question of the public, more the record companies, as
to what was selling and what they were playing attention at
the time. I think that in the '80s we were looking at a
massive growth of sales of pop music. They were fusing
lifestyle, fashion and music into a very nice and neat and
sellable commodity for the public. The attention wasn't onto
the musicianship any more; musicianship and sense of
artistry just wasn't a big thing any more. In the '70s, even
the pop artists were very good musicians. We still had some
of that going in the '80s, but record companies were wanting
to move these slabs of vinyl and photos on cardboard covers.
The idea was, 'Let's move what's selling.' And, of course,
the Weather Report audience that had been following and
maturing, maybe their attention shifted; maybe that
experimental time period between the albums 8:30 and
Procession threw them off, because really, Heavy Weather was
on of those records that was the perfect sum of everything
they had been working on up to that point. You could see
with Black Market it was really starting to gel. And then,
boom! Here comes Heavy Weather: melody, groove, sing-along
tunes, memorable ideas. It was an incredible moment for the
band. 8:30 kind of kept that going a little bit, but then
we're back into experimental mode again, we're back into
exploring again, and all of the people they had picked up
during Black Market, Heavy Weather and 8:30 were starting to
drift off. So by the time i get there, in America the
attention had totally shifted, but for some reason there was
a big interest in Europe, in the UK and in Japan. I noticed
that the touring and the majority of what we were doing was
really based there. There was interest in America, and there
were diehard fans that knew about me and Victor and were
interested in the fact that 'Wow! Omar is in the Weather
Report. What's going on?'. But it was no longer mass appeal.
And by the time Sportin' Life came along, when the
transition is nearly over, we're finding it now, but by then
it was too late. The interest had gone."
Brian Glasser
ISBN: 1 86074 246 7
UK Price: £15
US Price: $22
Photos: 16 pg b/w photo section Dimensions: 210 x 148mm/8.2"
x 5.9"
Extent: 350pp
Rights: World, all language
AI last updated: 22/8/00
Chris Bradford
Sales & Marketing
Sanctuary Publishing
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8749 9171
email: chris.bradford@sanctuarygroup.com
Chris Bradford (Sanctuary
Publishing)