Josef Zawinul
| Joe Zawinul | |
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Joe Zawinul with the Zawinul Syndicate (Freiburg, Germany, 2007)
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Josef Erich Zawinul |
| Born |
July 7, 1932 Vienna, Austria |
| Died | September 11, 2007 (aged 75) Vienna |
| Genres | Jazz, jazz fusion, world |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments | keyboards, percussion, drums, guitar |
| Years active | 1949–2007 |
| Labels | Columbia, ESC |
| Associated acts | Cannonball Adderley, Nat Adderley, Miles Davis, Weather Report, Zawinul Syndicate |
| Website | www |
Josef Erich "Joe" Zawinul (July 7, 1932 – September 11, 2007) was an Austrian 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, he co-founded the groups Weather Report and the Zawinul Syndicate. He pioneered the use of electric piano and synthesizer, and was named "Best Electric Keyboardist" twenty-eight times by the readers of Down Beat magazine. 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, a method or technique called sampling, creating a very distinctive synthesis of jazz harmonies and "noise" ("using all the sounds the world generates").
A number of prominent musical artists have honored Zawinul with compositions, including 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".
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