Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Joe Zawinul dies

Left to right: Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Peter Erskine and Jaco Pastorius.

Keyboard player Joe Zawinul, father of the jazz-rock group Weather Report, died on September 11.
Zawinul was born in Austria in 1932.
He emigrated to the US in 1959, where he played with stars as Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis.
In the 70's he formed Weather Report, a ground breaking group that came to include musicians as Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius.
Zawinul suffered from skin cancer.

You can hear a couple of tracks from his performance at this summer's North Sea Jazz Festival as well as an interview from 2002 on this page thanks to Dutch radio. Click the audio/video link.
And our thanks to Gina over on Mizar 5 who found those links.

The classic Birdland:

And here's a number from July 2007 and a show celebrating Joe's 75 birthday:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very sad news

Nebukadnessar Stephenson and Sigurd Huckle said...

Sad indeed!
I saw Zawinul live in concert ca 1994 or 95. Amazing! He had a very personal style and sound.
/ Siggy