Joe Zawinul changed my life.

I was fourteen years old when I first found out about Weather Report, from a copy of Down Beat in the high school library. Based on what was written about Zawinul and the group in that magazine, I knew I had to get my hands on an album somewhere.

As luck would have it, I found one in the cassette rack at Walgreen's a few weeks later, and I begged my mom to get it for me. She did.

Turns out, it wasn't even an actual Weather Report album; just a cheaply put-together bootleg compilation of tracks with Zawinul's picture on the cover.

Didn't matter though. I popped in that cassette, pressed play (the first track was Black Market), and in an instant my world changed. I stood there in a daze with my jaw on the floor, totally unable to believe what the fuck I was hearing.

Of course I was impressed by Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter and Miroslav Vitous; those guys are all legends in their own right. But what really blew me away were Zawinul's compositions and organic style synth playing, because they were totally unlike anything I'd ever heard before. The early 80's was filled with sterile synth playing, but with Zawinul it was as if some wonderfully organic piece of music-making technology had dropped out of the sky or something. That's a poor description, but even after all these years, I'm still basically speechless at what I hear when I listen to his tracks.

Near the end of the song Black Market, Zawinul is grooving on the synth behind the bass riffs; he's not playing a lot of notes, but what he's doing is fucking cool: it's funky, cool, badasss, and organic all wrapped in one transcendent package.

I guess that's how I'd ultimately describe Joe Zawinul. He was all those things, and he knew it.

Joe Zawinul changed my life.

I wish I could have had the opportunity to thank him for that...