Joe Zawinul died two days ago. His band, Weather Report provided the sound track of my college days. "Birdland," however overplayed it may have become, is a joyous piece (you can hear it at the NPR site here), as was "Teentown" (which you can hear here – scroll down. I do not know if he ever read or thought about Taoism, but he had a Taoist sensibility about him. He crossed lines, blurred boundaries, mixed up rock and jazz in ways that frustrated purists but which created and extended new and marvelous sounds. He just followed the tunes wherever they took him, regardless of preconceived categories. And he wandered across social barriers as well:
In the 1960s, playing in Cannonball Adderley’s band, Zawinul penned
his first hit: "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." Pianist Herbie Hancock became
friends with Zawinul right around the time Adderley’s quintet recorded
that tune. He says the composition surprised him."For
a white Viennese boy to write a tune that’s that black is pretty
remarkable," Hancock says. "He just captured the essence of the
African-American heritage, just the statement of melody and feeling of
that song. Clearly, in some past life, Joe must’ve been black."
Clearly. But I think he also was attuned to the music of Heaven, as Chuang Tzu has it:
Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone – who could make such music? (18)
Joe Zawinul and Weather Report could.
The Useless Tree 
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