This is, indeed, a blue day for music.
Joe Zawinul is one the reasons I became a professional musician. In the middle of my 1968-69 school year I was allowed to attend two days of workshops at the local college. The event was to culminate in a concert with the Cannonball Adderly Quintet as the main act.
In those two days Joe Zawinul introduced my classically trained ears to altered scales and Indian Ragas for the first time. The sound of his melodic lines, harmonies and rhythms forever changed my consciousness.
He not only demonstrated scales and melodies of a nature I had never before experienced he also demonstrated various poly-rhythms with the drummer and the bass player; each layering different time signatures and patterns while explaining how to count and feel each one.
My violin teacher knew I was interested in jazz and made the necessary arrangements with the local college that was hosting the Quintet for me to play for Cannonball Adderly. Adderly watched as I pulled my violin out of my case and then said, "Son we play jazz, why don't you just sit and watch."
I could have been crushed but Joe immediately spoke up and asked me to play a scale for him and then asked if I knew what a chord change was. At the time I didn't know anything about "horn" keys so when he started the riff for the Nat Adderly tune, "Work Song." Joe started the tune in C# minor and told me to take a lead after he played the head. It was not until much later that I realized he did that to make a point with Adderly.
I was so enthralled with Joe I did not think to be nervous and just put my soul into every note I played (very non-Be-Bop I might add).
Nat picked up his cornet and said, "lets trade fours," and we then played several choruses until Cannonball waved his hands to stop us and said, "Okay boys, you made your point."
When it was all said and done that day changed my life. I put myself through college playing as many styles of music possible while in pursuit of my composition and performance degrees.
A few years later while I was in grad school I was in Boston during the summer and I had the opportunity to meet Joe Zawinul again. I thanked him for that day many years before. He laughed and said, "I was told to never play "The Work Song" in that key again." Proving to me that his reputation for having a phenomenal memory extended to people as well as music.
He thought for a minute, then asked what I was doing in Boston, since hadn't I met him in Washington State several years before. I explained that I was studying music getting a grad degree in composition and performance on the violin. His response was, "good, I remember you played music that day, when you could have just played to impress somebody."
I never saw him in person after that day but I felt like a circle had been completed and I knew I was on the right path with my life.
That he died on 9/11 is to me another irony. Joe Zawinul is one of the very few people that I have ever heard play 9 against 11 and make it groove.
D Robert Burroughs