Early this June, the Wolkenturm in Grafenegg witnessed the spectacular concert Joe Zawinul’s Music Odyssey. It featured the Zawinul All Star Big Band, the radio.string.quartet augmented by players from the inn.wien ensemble and elsewhere to form a string orchestra, and the Zawinul Legacy Band 3.0. The concert’s grand finale was arranged and led by mdw faculty member Markus Geiselhart. Both the Zawinul All Star Band and the string orchestra included numerous mdw students.
Three days prior to this musical highlight, the Zawinul Legacy Band 3.0 and Tony Zawinul (Joe Zawinul’s eldest son) had given a workshop at ipop – the Department of Popular Music. The membership of the Zawinul Legacy Band 3.0 is drawn from the crème de la crème of the American jazz and fusion scenes: percussionist Bobby Thomas Jr. joined Joe Zawinul’s legendary formation Weather Report all the way back in 1980, bassist Gerald Veasley was the first bassist of The Zawinul Syndicate in 1988, the pianist and keyboarder Rachel Z has worked with figures including Wayne Shorter, Marcus Miller, and Peter Gabriel, and the saxophonist Bob Franceschini has toured with Chaka Kahn and is a member in Mike Stern’s quartet.
And drummer Omar Hakim, last but not least, joined Weather Report in 1982 and has played with almost everyone who’s anyone in the jazz and pop scene over the past 40 years from Miles Davis, David Bowie, Sting, and Madonna to Daft Punk.
The workshop was kicked off by Tony Zawinul’s lecture “How to Survive as an Indie Artist”. Zawinul’s focus was on the basic and necessary soft skills, general prerequisites, and overall attitudes needed by musicians in order to develop their artistic careers. Organising his remarks among the headings and themes “Be original”, “Find your own way and path”, “Believe in your thing”, “Constant development”, and “Manage your time, manage your money”, he sketched out an up-to-date set of criteria aimed at combining high substantive aspirations, the ability to concentrate, and self-management skills with a successful work-life balance.
In a subsequent Q&A session, he encouraged the numerous students in attendance to forge maximally individual paths in terms of their artistic and economic development.
Following Zawinul’s lecture, the Zawinul Legacy Band began with their part of the workshop. The band members opened with a performance of Joe Zawinul’s music in which they demonstrated not only their impressive musicality and virtuosity but above all their understanding of this repertoire.
This was also the exact thrust that they took in coaching the participating students. Saxophonist Bob Franceschini clapped overlapping binary and ternary rhythms with the attendees in the auditorium, highlighting the proximity between South American musics and both jazz and fusion.
And it was with this collectively felt and established sense for a “swinging” manner of playing that he also described the optimal music-making attitude for Zawinul’s musical cosmos—in which rhythm and dynamics ultimately need to be accorded more importance than melodies and harmonies. Zawinul’s music, he explained, needs to be understood as a “teeming tapestry” and has less to do with traditional sequences of themes and improvisations or with assigning instruments specific functions.
It was shown just how much of a central role and significance are accorded to ensemble playing and to attentiveness on the part of all band members.
Drummer Omar Hakim made this clear when he described his initial collaboration with Weather Report: only a little time was devoted to actual musical rehearsals; Joe Zawinul, said Hakim, focused more on creating an atmosphere of togetherness through drinking coffee, chatting, and fun in order to cultivate a collective understanding and trust among the musicians as a basis for high-quality artistic exchange and onstage encounters.
Afterwards, the band members gave individual instrumental workshops with the students from their own instrumental groups. All of the participating students found this one-hour workshop segment immensely enriching, and the group of percussionists coached by Bobby Thomas Jr. also included players who study with David Panzl at the Leonard Bernstein Department of Wind and Percussion Instruments. Electric bassist Gerald Veasley, in his instrumental workshop, did a great deal of playing for his students and succeeded in rendering his understanding of music comprehensible in a way that was as concise as it was wordless.
Veasley took his own emotional states as a starting point for varied and exciting improvisations, demonstrating how differently he plays when how he feels inside changes. This, he said, results in stories woven from music that catalyse the emergence of a personal language in the world of the individual musician.
Veasley also recommended practicing exclusively with the left hand. The improvements that this leads to in terms of exactitude, timing, and sound when playing with two hands, he explained, are enormous. To Veasley’s mind, the way to lay a foundation for further musical development is to work on jazz standards and learn melodies. Tips for developing speed and for paring down grooves in order to practice them and improve one’s timing rounded out this successful, inspiring, and collegial time together.
A final workshop segment saw a student band put together for a band coaching session. For the members of the Zawinul Legacy Band, ipop students Stefan Eitzenberger (Saxophone, Popular Music – IGP), Giuliano Sannicandro (Guitar, Popular Music – IGP), Alexander Vounelakos (Keyboard Instruments, Popular Music – IGP), Valentin Ak (Bass, Popular Music – IGP), Robin Weber (MA in Drums/Percussion, Popular Music – IGP), and Johannes Gungl (Drums/Percussion, Popular Music – IGP) played several Zawinul compositions that they’d worked on over the past few years as part of the Zawinul 90 trilogy with the big.mdw.band.
The Legacy Band, in turn, gave the students valuable tips for playing together and also provided them with exercises for further individual improvement.
Read also Zawinul 90: A Trilogy at the Department of Popular Music
