Recorded on 1 June 2024 at the Wolkenturm Grafenegg open air arena in Austria, this captures the Zawinul Legacy Band 3.0 in concert as part of Joe Zawinul’s Music Odyssey, a wider retrospective project directed by Zawinul’s eldest son Tony Zawinul with Gang of Four Films. The original event also featured the Zawinul All-Star Big Band and the premiere of Zawinul’s previously unreleased orchestral work ‘Mediterranean Suite,’ with a concert documentary planned as part of the project.
The Legacy Band brings together musicians with strong connections to Zawinul’s music, including former Weather Report and Zawinul Syndicate players Omar Hakim on drums, Gerald Veasley on bass and Robert ‘Bobby’ Thomas Jr on percussion, alongside Rachel Z on keyboards and Bob Franceschini on saxophones. The six selections are all Zawinul compositions, moving through Weather Report staples including ‘Man In the Green Shirt’, ‘Black Market’ and ‘Elegant People’, alongside ‘Corner Pocket’, ‘The Juggler’ and ‘Db Waltz’. At just under 36 minutes, it is a concise set rather than an attempt to document the entire Grafenegg event.
There is inevitably a particular charge to hearing these pieces played by musicians so closely connected with the original Zawinul universe. But the interest here is not simply genealogical. Zawinul’s music has always depended on the relationship between strong melodic hooks, dense rhythmic layering and a certain electronic sense of space, and the Legacy Band understands that language without needing to overstate it.
‘Man In the Green Shirt’ remains wonderfully economical: a tune that seems to arrive fully formed, its clipped melody riding the rhythm rather than sitting on top of it. ‘Black Market’ has more room to stretch, while ‘Elegant People’ retains the slightly elusive quality that made Zawinul’s writing so different from straightforward fusion. ‘The Juggler’ and ‘Db Waltz’ are less obvious choices, and that helps the set. They remind you that Zawinul’s contribution to Weather Report went well beyond the handful of pieces that have become part of the jazz canon.
Hakim has the authority to dominate the music but generally doesn’t, and the rhythmic detail from Gerald Veasley and Bobby Thomas Jr keeps the pieces moving from within. Rachel Z gives the keyboards the necessary Zawinul colour without turning the exercise into a pastiche, while Franceschini is an assured presence on the saxophone. There is plenty of virtuosity here, but it is mostly in service of the compositions.
The recording itself is somewhat muted, with a lived-in quality to the sound rather than the bright, highly separated presentation often associated with contemporary live jazz releases.
I haven’t seen this band live. But I saw Bob Franceschini in Sligo in 2013 with Victor Wooten and Mike Stern, while my own encounter with Zawinul goes back to seeing the Zawinul Syndicate in Camden in the 1990s. I later interviewed Zawinul in a Bloomsbury hotel, where he proved exceptionally affable and communicative over a beer. The Weather Report connection runs further back still: I remember Omar Hakim from the remarkable 1991 Istanbul concert line-up with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Stanley Clarke. Shorter was another interview subject, around the release of AlegrÃa in 2003, when much of our conversation, rather wonderfully, turned to cinema rather than music. He liked Michael Moore’s epic documentary about industrial decline in Michigan called Michael and Me and he waxed lyrical about 1940s classic The Red Shoes!
Zawinul’s compositions remain remarkably sturdy. There is enough harmonic, rhythmic and melodic substance in them to withstand different generations of players without becoming exercises in nostalgia.
The album also arrives in an interesting year for Weather Report admirers, alongside Kurt Elling and the Yellowjackets’ Play Weather Report: Alive in Europe which is probably an even better way of looking at the legacy although this live album under review is closer to the source. The two projects approach the repertoire differently, but both demonstrate how much life remains in music written several decades ago.
Live At Grafenegg is a well played, intelligently assembled reminder that some compositions simply are built to last. With musicians of this calibre inside them, Zawinul’s tunes continue to breathe.
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