Joe Zawinul: a fallen giant. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
When Django Bates, the indomitably freespirited British pianist and composer, played Joe Zawinul's soul-jazz classic Mercy Mercy Mercy (with Miles Davis' equally iconic Milestones wrapped inside it) on an unaccompanied piano show last September, it was intended only as a spontaneous tribute to a fallen giant. Zawinul, co-founder of the great Weather Report fusion band, had unexpectedly died a week or so previously.
Talk at the bar of the Soho Pizza Express on that night was of what was going to fill the gaping hole Zawinul's demise had left in this month's London Jazz Festival programme. But the message from the stage seemed to be furnishing the answer. Bates' inspired set segued hymnal Abdullah Ibrahim-like chordal thunders, whimsical vocals, casual whistling, surreal anecdotes, jazzy tenor horn breaks, and prepared-piano episodes that released banjo-like sounds. It was nothing like Zawinul's music, but it was a lot like his attitude in its bounding energy and pleasure in music-making, deceptively relaxed virtuosity, devotion to spontaneity, and profound cross-genre erudition. "He'd be perfect for a Joe tribute show," someone said.
The word got around, because the London Jazz Festival has announced that's exactly what's happening. Bates takes Zawinul's piano chair with the BBC Big Band at the Barbican on Sunday November 25, with the Zawinul Syndicate's star electric bassist Victor Bailey partnering him. The programme is Brown Street, the Austrian giant's own retrospective tracking his childhood musical experiences, episodes with Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis and Weather Report, and the vivacious life of his late-career Syndicate, maybe the best world-jazz ensemble on the planet.
Vince Mendoza's big-band arrangements, cornerstones of the Brown Street album, will play the same role on this gig - but Django Bates won't mimic Zawinul, knowing that such a course would be both impossible, and a betrayal of everything he stood for. Zawinul was the kind of musician who inspired his fellow-artists to listen to their own heartbeats. Bates, a major influence on European jazz and new music, has done just the same. The show will close the 2007 London Jazz Festival on a sadder note than the programmers originally envisaged, but Joe Zawinul's legacy will be in exactly the right hands on November 25.
