A Musical Portrait
JOE ZAWINUL
(Arthaus Musik)

Titanic keyboard pioneer Joe Zawinul, who died last year at age 75, is featured in this up-close documentary that intersperses interviews (that capture his salty personality) and biography with a scintillating performance by his band The Zawinul Syndicate, an ensemble that successfully integrated music from the Diaspora into the highly improvisatory jazz format. Zawinul's most important band, '70s fusion flag-bearers Weather Report, gets extremely short shrift in this Musical Portrait — director Mark Kidel apparently felt more attention was due Zawinul's '60s work with Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley. He is wrong. But the Syndicate stuff, shot on a soundstage, shows that while Zawinul's profile had fallen off post-Weather Report, his music did not. 3.5 stars

This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...