Joe Zawinul/Brazil 1994

Joe Zawinul, a true genius recognized by Miles Davis, collaborated with Amit Chatterjee, who was selected as a member of the Zawinul Syndicate, Brazil’s leading drummer Ze Eduardo, Turkey’s treasure Burhan Ocar, and the great German conductor Kaspar Richter and orchestra in the highest quality sound for the first time! It is no exaggeration to say that this was the catalyst for the creation of Joe Zawinul’s masterpiece “My People,” and the most important live performance that determined Zawinul’s future has finally been released! From around 1995, Zawinul began to strongly appeal to the elements of world music that he had been actively incorporating into his own band, the Syndicate. This performance was the starting point of that. This was the highlight performance of the Sao Paulo Winter Festival held in Sao Paulo, Brazil on July 21st, 1994, starring Joe Zawinul, with an orchestra conducted by the great German composer/conductor Kaspar Richter, who was born in 1944 and whom Zawinul also respects, and who founded the Hamburg Chamber Opera to perform contemporary music while at the Hamburg University of Music, and who has made great achievements in the genres of modern and contemporary music and opera, as well as African guitar/vocalist Amit Chatterjee, who was selected for the syndicate by Zawinul the previous year, and the great gypsy musician Burhan Ocar, who was a leader in Turkish music at the time and released a debut album that year that is considered one of the greatest in world music, and this performance features the pinnacle of Brazilian avant-garde jazz rock! This is a must-listen album for all mankind, recorded in its entirety on a high-quality stereo soundboard with the label’s own careful mastering of the once-in-a-lifetime dream feast that Zawinul dreamed of, featuring Grupo Un’s superb drummer Ze Eduardo! At the opening, an orchestra conducted by Richter appears and plays contemporary Zawinul music, and Amit, Eduardo, Ocar, and Zawinul appear to perform a unique and stateless music that is unlike anything else. The divine voice of Ocar, the pinnacle of gypsy music, as he plucks the udō, is particularly impressive. Amit’s African guitar with its unique polyrhythms and Eduardo’s drums and percussion, the king of rhythm in Brazil, are raging, the orchestra roars, and at the end, Zawinul sings joyfully with the vocoder. But just by adding Zawinul’s synthesizers and keyboards, everything becomes Zawinul music! Zawinul’s overwhelming presence is as expected!