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Music for
Grown-Ups Newsletter
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21/01/2004 Joe Zawinul, Van Morrison and jazz performance
In interviews promoting What's Wrong With This Picture?, his first album on Blue Note, Van Morrison has, naturally, emphasised the jazz-tinged side of his music. But alert concertgoers have long appreciated Morrison's clear links to jazz, especially in the live shows prior to the Linda Gail Lewis era. I outlined the links I saw in a review of a show in November 1999:
"Warm-up" was trumpeter Mark Isham and his three piece band. Best known among Morrison fans for his excellent work on VTM albums such as Beautiful Vision and Common One, Isham played his Silent Way project, interpreting the revolutionary Miles Davis album of the same name, the record which launched the entire jazz-rock fusion movement (and my favourite jazz album of all.) Deeply moving. Great gig. Main attraction was Joe Zawinul, the man who actually wrote In a Silent Way, and played on it (and several other Miles discs). After branching off into Weather Report in the early 1970s, Zawinul started exploring the outer reaches of innovative music and is now deep in a very satisfying fusion-meets-worldbeat groove. He's still one of the biggest names in the world of jazz. Very engaging gig, if rather more cerebral than Isham's opener. But what's all this got to do with Van the Man? Well, seeing such great musicians at work, after having seen nearly twenty Van concerts this year, stimulated some reflections: mainly that Van's gigs are now jazz, in form if not content. OK, few of the tunes he plays are jazz, but the format and style is pure jazz: the array of instruments; the free-form structure, where players know in advance the message, and the language, but not the actual vocabulary they will use; and, perhaps most of all, the democratic style Van brings to the stage - he's in charge, but he makes sure all the musicians (well, all except the drummer, normally) get plenty of time in the limelight, showing their chops, and he visibly exults in their performance. Seeing how Van's onstage role is eerily similar to that of the great Joe Zawinul was remarkable.
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