Joe Zawinul

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Cannonball Adderley Quintet – Legends Live: Stuttgart, 1969 (2012) - Julian "Cannonball" Adderley is the undisputed leader on this date — the big-hearted, soul-lifting center of every song. Read More

Joe Zawinul Biography

source: WikiPedia

This entry is from Wikipedia, the user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. If you find the biography content factually incorrect, defamatory or highly offensive you can edit this article at Wikipedia.

Josef Erich "Joe" Zawinul (July 7, 1932 – September 11, 2007) was an Austrian-American jazz keyboardist and composer. First coming to prominence with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, Zawinul went on to play with trumpeter Miles Davis, and to become one of the creators of jazz fusion, an innovative musical genre that combined jazz with elements of rock and world music. Later, Zawinul co-founded the groups Weather Report and the world fusion music-oriented Zawinul Syndicate. Additionally, he made pioneering use of electric piano and synthesizers. Zawinul was named "Best Electric Keyboardist" 28 times by the readers of Down Beat magazine. A number of prominent musical artists have honored Zawinul with compositions, notably Brian Eno's instrumental "Zawinul/Lava", John McLaughlin's instrumental "Jozy", Warren Cuccurullo's "Hey Zawinul", Bob Baldwin's "Joe Zawinul", Chucho Valdés's "Zawinul's Mambo", Biréli Lagrène's instrumental "Josef" and Toninho Horta's instrumental "Balada para Zawinul". Zawinul's playing style was often dominated by quirky melodic improvisations — traversing bebop, ethnic and pop styles — combined with sparse but rhythmic playing of big-band sounding chords or bass lines. In Weather Report, he often employed a vocoder as well as pre-recorded sounds played (i.e. filtered and transposed) through a synthesizer, creating a very distinctive synthesis of jazz harmonics and "noise" ("using all the sounds the world generates").

Wikipedia This entry is from Wikipedia, the user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. If you find the biography content factually incorrect, defamatory or highly offensive you can edit this article at Wikipedia.