Results for "Joe Zawinul"

Joe Zawinul

It may be a word overused but there isn't truly a more appropriate way to describe keyboardist/composer Joe Zawinul.

Austrian born, Joe Zawinul emigrated to the US in 1959 where he played with Maynard Ferguson and the great Dinah Washington before joining alto saxophonist great Cannonball Adderley in 1961 for nine years. With Adderley, Zawinul wrote several important songs, primarily the slow and funky hit "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" which reached the top on the Billboard magazine Pop Charts in 1967.

Zawinul then moved on to a brief but fateful encounter and collaboration with Miles Davis, just at the time Miles was moving into the electric arena. It was Zawinul’s tune "In a Silent Way", in fact, which served as the title track of Miles’ first electric foray, and Zawinul had a potent impact on Bitches Brew, as well.

Rez Abbasi: On balancing picture with music and shifting into Django mode

By FRIEDRICH KUNZMANN

To really distinguish oneself in today's vast universe of guitarists, even within the confines of jazz, more and more resembles a Sisyphus task. When so much has been said and done, a specific tone or distinctive vocabulary alone no longer suffice to set an artist apart from the crowd. It is only through the sum of ...

Rez Abbasi: Django-shift

By FRIEDRICH KUNZMANN

Talking about shifting. American guitarist Rez Abbasi seems capable of shifting shape and changing form from one project to the next like a creature from a J.R.R. Tolkien adventure—almost beyond recognition. If it weren't for the guitarist's inspired fret fingerings and rushed scale runs giving him his utterly unique spark. Between much praised quintet ...

Samuel Hällkvist: Epik Didaktik Pastoral

By CHRIS MAY

Swedish guitarist Samuel Hällkvist's rifftastic electric trio plays an exhilarating mixture of jazz, prog rock and minimalist music. Riffs aside, the key ingredients are cross rhythms, rhythmic displacement and lavish servings of MIDI-enabled keyboards and tuned percussion. The result is heavy on the tension and light on the release. A close comparator is Swiss keyboard player ...

Atlantic Records: More Giant Steps: An Alternative Top 20 Albums

By CHRIS MAY

Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun's Atlantic Records differs in one key respect from Prestige, Riverside, Impulse!, Strata-East and Flying Dutchman, the most prominent labels covered so far in this Building A Jazz Library series. Those labels' discographies consist almost exclusively of jazz. Atlantic had parallel interests in soul and rhythm-and-blues and, later, rock. This had consequences, as ...

Denys Baptiste: Pathfinder For The New London Jazz

By CHRIS MAY

Bandleader, composer and educator Denys Baptiste is among the generation of musicians, many of them of Caribbean or African heritage, who pointed the way for the younger players who have emerged on the London jazz scene since around 2015. Baptiste's contemporaries include saxophonists Jason Yarde, Soweto Kinch, Steve Williamson and Courtney Pine, and trumpeter Byron Wallen, ...

Prestige Records: An Alternative Top 20 Albums

By CHRIS MAY

Along with Alfred Lion's Blue Note and Orrin Keepnews' Riverside, Bob Weinstock's Prestige was at the top table of independent New York City-based jazz labels from the early 1950s until the mid 1960s. Like those other two labels, Prestige built up a profuse catalogue packed with enduring treasures. Originally a record retailer, Weinstock ...

Yuri Honing: Sounds And Vision

By IAN PATTERSON

Strange that such a gruesome tale, drowning in blood, could have inspired so much great art. So it goes with Bluebeard, the seventeenth century French folktale, which continues to inspire artists to this day. Dutch saxophonist/composer Yuri Honing's Bluebeard (2020)-- his fourth album on Challenge Records with his acoustic quartet--is not just a highly personal take ...

Ted Moore Trio: The Natural Order of Things

By JACK BOWERS

A piano trio led by a drummer? While that may not always be The Natural Order of Things, it is here. The drummer is the veteran Ted Moore, his teammates the talented pianist Phil Markowitz and rock-solid bassist Kai Eckhardt. Moore composed and arranged (almost) all of the music, which enlivens themes from Brazil and Spain, ...