The Beginning is an illuminating collection, in tinny but acceptable sound, which documents Joe Zawinul’s straightahead piano-playing some eight months after his arrival in America from Vienna. His amalgam of Bud Powell, Wynton Kelly and others is not outstanding, but it’s interesting, in the light of the quite different work which made his name in the seventies, to hear him so authentically immersed in the music of another era. A musically unremarkable but historically valuable issue, appearing here for the first time on CD. The eponymous Zawinul reiterates the mystery of its author’s late blooming. Recorded when he was nearly 40, it presents a complete departure from his work of 1959 or even 1969, when he was still with the Cannonball Adderley group. The music – revelling in the electronic and stylistic freedoms of the period – was of course a reflection of the creative ferment of the day, but the mystery is that the middle-aged Zawinul, after an unexceptional decade as a straightahead player, should not only be able fully to embrace the new music but also to become out of the handful of players who determined its direction.
The record’s sound and aesthetic will be familiar to those who know Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way and the first two Weather Report albums. Indeed the first piece is a moderated, more leisurely reading of a track heard in live form on Weather Report’s debut album and the second track is Zawinul’s In A Silent Way before Miles excised what he considered excess harmony and used it as the title track of his first fully fledged fusion date. The music thus ranges between two different but related modes, one in which archaic, folky horn lines float above vaguely uneasy, dreamlike textures conjured by electric piano, bass and percussion (His Last Journey) and another in which the rhythm firms up and something approaching conventional jazz soloing ensues (Miroslav Vitous and the pianists on Double Image).
There are times when the music’s tendency to be perpetually ‘coming into being’ is unfulfillng, but this is some long way from the platitude expressed recently in one Sunday supplement that jazz suffered a near-fatal crisis of confidence in the late sixties and early seventies. Rather, this novel concoction suggests that this was one of the music’s most buoyant and adventurous periods.
The Beginning – discography
I Should Care; Easy Living; Please Send Me Someone To Love; It Might As Well Be Spring; Love For Sale; Squeeze Me; Greensleeves; My One And Only Love; It Might As Well Be Spring; Love For Sale; Masquerade Is Over; Sweet And Lovely (34.18)
Zawinul (p); George Tucker (b); Frankie Dunlop (d); Ray Barretto (cga). NYC, September 1959.
(Fresh Sound FSR-CD 142)
Zawinul – discography
Doctor Honoris Causa; In A Silent Way; His Last Journey; Double Image; Arrival In New York (35.42)
Zawinu! and Herbie Hancock (elp); George Davis, Hubert Laws (f); Woody Shaw, Jimmy Owens (t); Earl Turbinton, Wayne Shorter (ss); Miroslav Vitous, Walter Booker (b); Joe Chambers, Billy Hart, David Lee (pc); Jack DeJohnette {pc, mel). New York, 1971.
(Atlantic 7567-81375-2)
