Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Brown Street
2. In A Silent Way
3. Fast City
4. Badia/Boogie Woogie Waltz
5. Black Market

Disc 2:

1. March Of The Lost Children
2. Remark You Made
3. Night Passage
4. Procession
5. Carnavalito

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3294 in Music
• Released on: 2006-11-27
• Number of discs: 2

Amazon.co.uk Review
Recorded in Vienna, the city of Joe Zawinul's birth, this 2005 concert adapts many of his most celebrated compositions for the expanded presence of the WDR Big Band. After the triumphant opening of the propulsive eleven-minute title track, the gentle "In a Silent Way" revisits the evocative memories of Zawinul's childhood that inspired him to write the piece over forty years ago. While this hour and a half of music draws from Zawinul's past, it is never dependent upon nostalgia. Rather, the bold new settings show how vibrant the writing remains. Zawinul's core quartet (with percussionist Alex Acuna, bassist Victor Bailey, and drummer Nathaniel Townsley) can be as ferocious and supple as any of Weather Report's line-ups. Everything from the atmospheric quietude of a piece like "A Remark You Made" to the world funk of "Black Market" is given its full due by this sprawling yet controlled 19-piece ensemble. --David Greenberger

The Observer Music Monthly, (Stuart Nicholson), December 2006
(5 stars) The jazz survivor is a genius. And this live, groove-heavy Viennese whirl shows exactly why.

Evening Standard, (Jack Massarik), December 1, 2006
(4 stars) Trumpeter John Marshall and altoist Karolina Strassmayer sparkle in beefed-up arrangements of Weather Report classics.

Customer Reviews

outstanding!
I've been a fan of Joe Zawinul for many years, like a lot of people through Weather Report, and then finding his collaborations with Miles Davis (Silent Way etc) Its always an event when Mr Zawinul issues a new release, some of them lately have been great. BUT THIS! this is wonderful. Kicking off with Brown Street that really swings, a beautiful reading of In a Silent Way, and a brilliant version of Fast City. Each track gets better and better until Carnavalito. After hearing Jaco's Big Band releases I've often wondered what a big band treatment of Joe Zawinuls music would be like. Now we know. Brilliant.

Sweet Thunder
If you haven't yet heard this album, hold onto your seat. It is a blistering recreation of the power and spirit of Weather Report, presided over by Zawinul, but realised by a great big band. The arrangements are by Vince Mendoza, who also deserves massive credit: Mendoza is also a guiding light on another of the all-time great jazz albums, John Abercrombie's Animato. Along with power, there is great lyricism and subtlety, particularly in a moving account of A Remark You Made.

Well, I don't want to be greedy, but if I could have a wish, it would be for a second volume of this stuff, to include, say, Canonball, Birdland, Madagascar. Weather Report was a wonderful, creative partnership between Zawinul and Shorter, but Zawinul was the guiding spirit. Awesome.

Streets Ahead!
Joe Zawinul is one of the mercurial geniuses of 20th century music. His sonic conception is pan-continental, marrying the rhythmic complexities of Africa and South America with the European sensibility for yearning melody and the American capacity for groove and funk. In other's hands this would be an ungainly melting pot, but in Zawinul's it works quite beautifully. Weather Report (WR), which he co-founded with Wayne Shorter, was one of those bands whose seemingly effortless capability masked extraordinary complexity, talent and sophistication. Zawinul's post-Weather Report offerings, whilst usually a cut above, have also at times seemed less spacious and distinctive; excitingly rhythmic but lacking some of the richly vibrant colouration that made WR so memorably enjoyable.

Now a youthful 74, Austrian-born Zawinul and the marvellous WDR Big Band from Cologne have brought Weather Report's legacy into the 21st Century courtesy of some marvellous Vince Mendoza arrangements. If you thought that WR were just too electric to work with traditional acoustic brass, and just too tight and polyrhythmic to work with a Big Band, then Brown Street will prove you wrong. In fact the blend of brass and Zawinul's ringing synthesiser sounds is a wonderful blend, and it is often hard to hear which is which. Zawinul's chosen rhythm section of Victor Bailey, Nathaniel Townsley and Alex Acuna drive things forward at a cracking pace whilst the 14 piece WDR brass cohort bring a shouting acoustic freshness to familiar themes. The result is some marvellously fresh treatments for some long-familiar pieces including, `In A Silent Way', Jaco Pastorius's achingly gorgeous `A Remark You Made' and the grooving `Boogie Woogie Waltz'. Recorded live at "Joe Zawinul's Birdland" in Vienna in front of an appreciative audience, Brown Street is a delight that could only be bettered by the inclusion of Zawinul's trademark `Birdland', if only to put Maynard Ferguson and Buddy Rich's Big Band versions to rest. Now who said jazz was purely an American art?

Paul Kelly