The Zawinul Syndicate
World Tour

For a while, I've been contemplating diving into the review of an album to which I could slap a nice 2, or worse, a 3. I thought with dismay of a Tortoise of the poor kind. It takes dedication to review a "3," neither pain nor ecstasy, just stringing words together to describe a musical experience that gave us an average emotion.

In the middle of such considerations, my favorite web radio spits out familiar aggregations of notes, the kind that makes you say: "But I know this one!" and you get a rush until the piece in question comes back to mind. After a few seconds of bewilderment, a wild voice enters to my rescue. The mystery is revealed, it's "Sunday Evening" that I'm listening to, the average emotions once again give way to the reviewer's urgency of a masterpiece.

Josef Zawinul, Joe to his friends, has always sparked my immense curiosity. An Austrian little man with a mustache of a grappa-addicted, who passed through the Vienna Conservatory and migrated to the Promised Land to converse with the best, armed with a cumbersome and unusual keyboard-laden vessel. And it seems he does great things, some say he was the only European to mean something decisive to jazz as a whole (who did Miles Davis want to play with synths when he decided to revolutionize the system with "Bitches Brew"?). There seems to be something bizarre and brilliant about Zawinul, a cornucopia that for half a century has been gifting sounds of passion, damnably inspired, joyfully exposed to any kind of contamination.
An ART-isan, a poet, a proletarian, a subversive. Those contests with Jaco to see who could drink the most without collapsing, it seems Josef was unbeatable, his devotion to that bed of black and white keys, his absolute fluidity in conversing with the most illustrious and avant-garde voices of black jazz, him, with that alpine mustache, I would have liked to meet Josef, really, or at least see him play up close.

Joe Zawinul was 65, with behind him all that we know, when he embarked on a tour with the lineup he himself defined as the best he'd created since the Weather Report times. "World Tour", nomen omen, is primarily a melting pot, an assembly of flesh and bone from everywhere. Victor Bailey and Manolo Badrena are two trusted knights of Zawinul, around the sublime groove of their bass & drum, Joe's Ark unfolds, including the eclectic New Yorker Gary Poulson on guitar, Richard Bona from Cameroon, a refined additional bass, and Paco Sery, Ivorian, a sensational vocalist and furious skin percussionist, the revelation.
And then the Viennese to officiate. The album aggregates three performances in the land of Teutonia, restoring the intimate nature of Joe Zawinul's concert episodes, notoriously recognized as one of the most incendiary jazz live performers. This is music here, cosmopolitan and polymorphous, visceral music, gurgling in the stomach before being vomited in the form of sound waves.

It is rude and overpowering music, de-generated and unruly. The polypercussion dominates far and wide, invades the scene, and bans pleasantries: the sounds go straight to the stomach, bypassing rationality. Those spelunking bass lines know something about it too, inspecting and rummaging within to find depth, the true sound, as in the intoxicating "Two Lines". In this way, Bailey's skill shines in all its glory, the complicity with the Austrian's daring peregrinations makes one want to toast to jazz as a concept. And here comes to mind "Slivovitz Trail", a luminous track, where the trio Bailey-Badrena-Zawinul recovers the most inspired Weather Report feeling to unleash a hubbub onto which Sery's impetus is grafted.
A primal voice, like a Kubrickian monkey, strictly unconventional, naked, stripped of evolution. The compositional rigor of Zawinul is wonderfully generous in granting musicians the vital space necessary to unload their impulses, so that "World Tour" turns out to be a nomadic architecture, a joyful caravan that travels the world, a sneer at inertia and depression.

"World Tour" is there to tell us how to tour the world, the inner world. Tour as in going around, tour as in changing. The key is in improvisation, the only real mode of knowledge, and in viscerality, the only real mode of expression. But that's what seems to be suggested to me by a little man with a mustache of dubious morality, can I trust him?