Joe Zawinul - Zawinul (1981 Japanese Atlantic Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: EX
Obi: VG+

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Joe Zawinul - Zawinul | Vinyl LP - 1981 Japanese Atlantic Reissue (P-11037A, Warner-Pioneer Corporation)

Joe Zawinul arrived in New York from Vienna in 1959, speaking almost no English. By August 1970, when he recorded this album, he had spent a decade with Cannonball Adderley (writing "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy"), contributed "In a Silent Way" and "Pharaoh's Dance" to Miles Davis's two most important electric records, and was preparing to launch Weather Report with Wayne Shorter and Miroslav Vitous. This album, released the same month as Weather Report's debut, sits between those two careers and carries material from both.

Zawinul and Herbie Hancock sit at two electric pianos throughout, their instruments layered so closely in the mix that the two voices merge and separate without clear boundaries. Vitous and Booker play contrabass. Three percussionists rotate. The horn players change track by track: Woody Shaw on trumpet for four of the five pieces, Jimmy Owens replacing him on "His Last Journey" (which also features DeJohnette on melodica). Wayne Shorter appears on "Double Image" only, alongside Hubert Laws and DeJohnette on percussion, making it the de facto first document of the Zawinul/Shorter/Vitous axis that became Weather Report.

"In a Silent Way" is four and a half minutes of the piece Zawinul had originally written as a longer composition. When Miles Davis and Teo Macero recorded it in February 1969, they edited it down to a two-minute statement and used it as a bookend. Here Zawinul restores the full introduction and plays it as he intended it: impressions of his childhood as a shepherd boy in Austria, the electric piano sustained over a slow drone. "His Last Journey" is a tone poem for his grandfather's funeral in an Austrian mountain village. "Arrival in New York" closes the album at two minutes: his first impression of the city when he arrived on a ship from France as a young man.

This is the 1981 Japanese Atlantic reissue (P-11037A), manufactured by Warner-Pioneer Corporation.