Bunch of Nonsense
Music, Books and Life in the SpiritArchive for September, 2007
remembering Joe Zawinul
This last week, on 9/11 to be exact, keyboardist Joe Zawinul died. He was 75 years old and died of cancer in his home in Vienna Austria. This might not be big news, but the music of Joe Zawinul and the band he founded, Weather Report (1970-1985), had (and continues to have) a huge impact on my life. IMHO I believe they were the greatest jazz band/artist of the 1970s. Their music is permanently ingrained in my head and I’m afraid is something I will take with me to my grave. They have been called The Beatles of jazz which is kind of an odd thing to say, but I think I know what it means for they TOWERED over their contemporaries in the 1970s. The Headhunters and the Mahavishnu Orchestra each had their moments and of course Miles Davis was re-writing a lot of books during that time, but Weather Report were truly unique. There was no one like them, now or then. The unlikely pairing of Zawinul and saxophonists Wayne Shorter could only have been dreamed up by someone like Miles. I believe their run of seven albums from their debut in 1971 to Heavy Weather in 1977 is as great a run of anyone I know. Each record was better than the one before. The list of greats who played with them is astounding: bass players: Miroslav Vitous, (the unrated and seemingly forgotten) Alphonso Johnson, (the one and only) Jaco Pastorius, and Victor Bailey; drummers: Alphonse Mouzon, Eric Gravatt, Ishmael Wilburn, Ndugu Chancler, Narada Michael Walden, Chester Thompson, Alex Acuna, Peter Erskine and Omar Hakim; and percussionists: Airto Moreira, Dom Um Romao, Manolo Badrena, Robert Thomas Jr., Jose Rossy and Mino Cinelu.
Weather Report’s music was a glorious mash-up of the world music, funk, swing, bop, electronics, big band, rock and occasionally some of the most intense AND LOUD atonal bombastic white noise you have ever heard. I saw them three times. Each show was glorious and all three would be on my list of the top ten shows. First was the show at the Santa Monica Civic in 1977 with the Heavy Weather line-up with the brilliant Alex Acuna behind the drum kit. And then in 1979 at the Long Beach Auditorium (maybe the greatest concert ever). That show was recorded and is apart of their live “8:30″ album. And finally again in 1981 or so at the Wiltern in which they played almost entirely new material from an album which hadn’t even come out yet. The speed and intensity of their version of Badia that night would have left Black Flag or Metallica green with evny. Where almost all of jazz-rock of the 1970s has been pretty much forgotten (anyone remember The Yellowjackets?), the music of Weather Report lives on. Part of the reason for this, was that these were great jazz artists who moved into the fusion (not the other way round). Zawinul played with Miles, Dinah Washington and most importantly Caonnonball Adderley (writing the classic “Mercy Mercy Mercy”) while Shorter played with Coltrane, Maynard Ferguson and Miles Davis. To be fair I was always drawn to Shorter and Jaco, but Weather Report really was Zawinul’s band and so many of their greatest songs were written by him. My top ten Joe Zawinul songs:
1. Birdland
2. A Remark You Made
3. Black Market
4. Badia
5. Boogie Woogie Waltz
6. Man In The Green Shirt
7. Night Passage
8. Unknown Solider
9. Cannon Ball
10. Nubian Sundance
Joe Zawinul (RIP)
I had a dream
Saturday night I had a dream. A nightmare actually. It was one of those dreams that seems so real at the time that you are convinced that its real and not a dream at all. I am not a person that EVER thinks about God giving me a dream or anything like that (re: somewhat uptight chapter & verse over analytical non-charismatic evangelical), but this one has me thinking…
Anyway the dream was this: Tam and I had had a divorce. She lived in her own house. Strangely it was just down the street. She lived on one end of the street and I lived on the other. There didn’t seemed to be any other streets leading in or out of our street. I seemed to spend my time going from my house to her house. I remember walking along and feeling such a HUGE sense of loss, I can’t describe it. At times I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t go on and just stopped in the street and couldn’t move. It was as if EVERYTHING I had ever done in my life was gone, wasted and could not be retrieved. My children were somehow apart of this, but in a way that I can’t quite explain. Believe it or not, the dream got worse when I reached Tam’s house. The sense of Tam even having a house made me feel even worse than before. She wasn’t home. I was shocked by the sight of her things, her furniture. They wasn’t anything unusual about them, it was just that they weren’t ours! Though I didn’t see anyone, I sensed that people were there, people that I didn’t know, and didn’t know me. I didn’t want to meet them. I wanted to leave and I wanted to go back and change whatever made all this happen. I wanted it all to just go away, but somehow I just knew it was all horribly too late. My life seemed like a shell, somehow only black and white and that only faintly, everything was covered in a gray, drab, sense of dread and loss. Then I woke up.
The dream was so strong that for a few minutes it still seemed (kind of) real. I just laid there, slowly feeling relived. It was just a dream. (I should mention that Tam is in Kentucky and wasn’t home).
So what does it mean? Well it obviously might have something to do with the fact that several of our close friends are going through, or have gone through, divorces. I think it might be that God was letting me understand (even if only slightly and momentarily) the depth of pain that is divorce. Also, I realized again that I hopelessly and unabashedly love my wife. Our marriage is not perfect, we have our share of struggles, but after almost 24 years, we are deeply intertwined, with experiences, pain, memories, laughter, tears, love, children, all of it further knitting the two of us into one. For me, life without Tam is simply an unimaginable horror.
