RIP, Josef Zawinul

The sad news of Joe Zawinul's death came today. His passing seems premature--though he was 75, perhaps even a bit older than one would have imagined him to be--and is an immeasurable loss for the music community, and our jazz subculture in particular. Sitting here listening to his warm, generous, perfectly constructed ballad "A Remark You Made" (from Weather Report's 1977 album "Heavy Weather"), I'm moved to tears. Even the simple, jubilant and familiar theme to "Birdland" has in recent years been enough to cause deep feeling to well-up to my own emotional surface; there is something about the joy and fullness expressed in that song that taps right in to my heart. And on a head level, there is enough in the classic Weather Report recordings to keep the mind engaged for years. Pick any aspect of the music: voicing, instrumentation, compositional structure, improvised material, the balance between improvisation and written composition, articulation, phrasing, instrumental virtuosity: it's all there, overflowing in its abundance. To me, they are perfect recordings, featuring incandescent compositions which marry the best of everything old and new and in-between in our music.
And Zawinul had significant earlier triumphs, both as player and composer (his work with Cannonball Adderley's group, the song "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," his work with Miles Davis, the song "In a Silent Way," to name just a few), which also contribute mightily to his place in the pantheon. In his music, great simplicity and directness live alongside a restless effort to give voice to an extremely subtle and layered musical sensibility. Joe Zawinul's classic work reveals to us an inimitable musical master, and for me, one of a handful of "reference-point" composers whose works give great lessons for anything one would want to attempt in modern music.