Joe Zawinul, Zawinul

Album of the Week, September 17, 2022.

We last met Austrian keyboard player and composer Joe Zawinul when he arrived, seemingly from nowhere, to explore the unknown realms of in a Silent Way. On this appropriately self-titled album, Zawinul continues the journey, this time as leader and not merely as mystic guide. The album is a journey into outer space; it is also an instructive guide in the different ways to create jazz music.

Zawinul’s approach to this album was less group improvisation and more Gil Evans. The group features both Miroslav Vitouš and Walter Booker on bass, multiple drummers and percussionists (on different tracks, Billy Hart, Joe Chambers, Jack Dejohnette, and David Lee can be heard, usually in combinations of two or three), and a front line including Woody Shaw on trumpet (with Jimmy Owens on one track), George Davis on flute, Earl Turbindon on soprano sax, and Herbie Hancock on the mighty Fender Rhodes, alongside Zawinul on acoustic and electric pianos. One track features Wayne Shorter, Hubert Laws, and Dejohnette in lieu of Turbindon, Davis, and the other drummers. And the whole group performs in through composed suites that are strongly reminiscent of Gil Evans’ style, though still keeping room for solos.

Doctor Honoris Causa” opens the album in a demonstration of this approach. The melody, written in honor of Herbie Hancock’s honorary doctorate from Grinnell University, is cut from the same cloth as “In a Silent Way,” with a slow chromatic drift of chords from the keyboards and the horns yielding to an insistent bass line supported by a steady backbeat. The front line then enters, with Turbindon, Shaw, and Davis playing the melody line with one voice as it circles the tonic before climbing up to a diminished sixth. There is a short break of around four measures before the second part of the melody returns, again in unison. Following the same arrangement pattern as some of Miles’ work on Nefertiti, the melody returns over and over again, with longer solos between. Shaw takes the first extended solo, his trumpet climbing over strong support from the Fender and Zawinul’s organ. Turbindon takes the next one, with his soprano sax exploring minor modes around the tonic and drifting away, with the Echoplexed Fender Rhodes of Herbie Hancock taking the next solo, reverberating through the cosmos. Zawinul takes the final solo, steering the group’s improvisations through turbulent air before gently bringing them to a landing. The work may celebrate Hancock’s accomplishments in title, but in execution it’s an evocation of flight.

In a Silent Way” returns to Zawinul’s iconic composition that lent its title to Miles’ pioneering fusion album. Here we hear the work in its full extended form. In doing so, he gives us an insight into Miles’ compositional methods. The original arrangement heard here takes us through an extended introduction in multiple modal chord changes before bringing us to the famous melody. In doing so, the work takes on a very different character from Miles’ wide-eyed, searching rendition. At the last Tanglewood weekend of this summer, I heard WCRB commentator Bryan McCreath point out that much of the power of the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony comes from the open fourths and fifths that constitute the opening theme, because of their harmonic ambiguity. Minus a third in the progression, they could either fall to a major or minor key. The same is true of the Miles version of “In a Silent Way,” which keeps its progressions open for as long as possible before finally revealing its mode. Zawinul’s original extended introduction, which pivots from major to minor with richer harmonies throughout, is more fully voiced, but the ambiguity is lost. It’s still a stunning performance, evoking the Swiss Alps of Zawinul’s youth, albeit with less mystery and more sentimentality.

His Last Journey” is a different animal altogether, a tone poem for bass, piano, chimes, and trumpet. The melody is played in the uppermost ranges of the arco bass over the second bass and a descending piano line, with the trumpet sketching an alternate melody around the edges. It’s a brief dream of a composition that is over all too soon.

Double Image” is the outlier here. Recorded in a different session in late August 1970 with Shorter and Laws, the work is more of a group improvisation than anything else on the record, with the two keyboardists and two bassists alternately working together and improvising separately, with the extended bass arco solo at the beginning exploring the outer reaches. (I’ve gotten pretty good at telling the players apart on these albums, but am not sure whether we’re hearing Vitouš or Booker there.) Zawinul takes the other solo on the track, with the horns and flute providing the echo of the melody in between. The energy level and level of abstraction comes closer here to the more frenetic tunes on Super Nova and Bitches Brew than anything else on the record; unsurprisingly, this is the one composition from this period that would later be recorded by Miles’ electric group on Live-Evil.

Arrival in New York” closes the album with something else again: a sound collage, with taped segments of bowed bass, organ, and percussion manipulated to evoke the cacophony of the New York streets, subways, and harbor as Zawinul remembered them from his arrival in the United States in 1959. As a composition it’s an island unto itself, but it would not be the last time Zawinul would embrace different studio techniques to discover new soundscapes.

So Zawinul points toward a different way to embody Miles’ searching while taking some of the great trumpeter’s collaborators in a different direction. He would continue working with Shorter and Vitouš; we will hear that collaboration next week.

You can hear the album here:

Wayne Shorter, Super Nova

Album of the Week, September 3, 2022.

We’ve tipped over the edge of the world with today’s Album of the Week. Super Nova is our first post-Bitches Brew album, the first Wayne Shorter solo album to feature him on the soprano sax, the first album to tip from post-bop to free jazz that we’ve featured. It’s by turns intoxicating and disorienting. When I bought it in college, I had no idea what to make of it, and I’m still learning my way through it. It’s a ferocious album from an extraordinary group of musicians, deployed in a most unusual way.

For this session, recorded beginning eight days after the last session for Miles’ fusion masterpiece Bitches Brew, Wayne assembled an all-star cast of early fusion players. Guitarist John McLaughlin returned from Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way, playing guitar; he was joined on drums and vibes by Chick Corea (!!). Chick brought Miroslav Vitouš, a young Czech bassist who had played on several of his recent recordings and done sessions with Herbie Mann and Roy Ayers. From Miles’ Bitches Brew band, Jack DeJohnette was the primary drummer for the sessions and also played the kalimba; he was joined on percussion by Airto, the mononymous percussionist that was starting to appear with regularity on jazz fusion albums. Rounding out the band were avant-garde electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock and Niels Jakobsen on claves. And Walter and Maria Booker would memorably appear on one track together as well, on acoustic guitar and vocals.

The title track opens the album in full free jazz mode. Part of the dislocation of the album is immediately apparent in the instrumentation. With no keyboard instrument to center the chords, the soprano sax is the focus of the tonal energy, serene above a swarm of guitar and bass. What sound like screams reveal themselves to be interjections from Sonny Sharrock’s electric guitar. The whole thing might be as close as Shorter gets to the energy of some of Coltrane’s post-A Love Supreme recordings.

Swee-Pea” opens more peacefully, with the vibes, chimes and guitars creating a bed for Shorter’s tranquil soprano sax melody. We’ve heard this tune before, as “Sweet Pea,” on the Miles compilation album Water Babies. Here, Shorter’s threnody for Billy Strayhorn subtracts much of the lushness of the arrangement of the earlier recording, revealing a melody simultaneously more powerful and more fragile on the soprano sax.

Dindi” is a completely different thing again. The opening gives us chaos, in the form of percussion and guitars underpinning the single note solo on the soprano saxophone, all riding over the ostinato bass note that pulses a relentless rhythm. Then everything falls away except for the acoustic guitar of Walter Booker, accompanying the plaintive Portuguese vocals of his wife Maria. Overcome as she begins the second chorus, Maria’s solo ends in a choked sob, and the chaos returns. This was the track that made me put the album down for several years when I heard it as a college student; I just wasn’t ready for the naked emotions at play here.

Water Babies” is sonically worlds away from the version recorded by Miles a few years earlier. And then again: many of the bones are there, only reconfigured. The pulsed base note of Miroslav Vitouš grounds us in waltz time, and the melody, here are in the soprano sax, retains some of its plaintiveness. But the performance is freer. And the ringing chords in the guitar, while continuing to locate the tone in the same minor mode as the prior performance, here leave more possibilities for the other players to explore.

Capricorn” seems destined to be another exploration into chaos, with the intensely powerful opening by bass, electric guitar and drums. Indeed, Jack DeJohnette‘s drums continue throughout the song to roll chaos in the deep. But Wayne Shorter and John McLaughlin are up to something else. Shorter’s solo, by turns serene and fiercely impassioned, takes us to the emotional center of the album, and McLaughlin’s chords support the melody, turning it almost into a second conversation within the cacophony of the rhythm section. It’s a powerful contrast and a stunning performance.

More Than Human” closes the album, with Shorter’s melody seemingly having completely committed to the sonic world created by DeJohnette, Airto and Sharrock. The soprano melody descends chromatically as though landing on the surface of an alien world, buffeted by gusts from Sharrock’s guitar and Airto’s percussive attack. At the end, Shorter steps away from the microphone, still playing, as though exploring the new vista unfolding before him.

The final track’s title gives a clue to a thematic impulse behind the album. More Than Human, the Theodore Sturgeon novel that was published in 1953, is about the gestalt, humans who can pool their minds and abilities together into a whole that is far more than the sum of its parts. It’s a good description for what Shorter’s band accomplishes on this unusual outing. It also explains the album cover, which feels a bit like a pulp science fiction novel itself.

You can listen to the album here.