Joe Zawinul - Dialects (1986)

Joe Zawinul's 1986 Dialects, the keyboard legend's first solo album after 15 years with Weather Report, is worth revisiting. Featuring essentially only Zawinul on a virtual army of synthesizers (with some occasional contributions from Bobby McFerrin and a three-part vocal choir), Dialects is at once an apt summation of the veteran Austrian keyboardist's career-long affinity for synthesizers and an interesting portent of the world-music direction he would take. Although some of the drum-machine grooves here sound a bit dated now, Dialects is heady stuff, right from CD opener "The Harvest," a journey into 1980s techno-funk oriented more toward sonic effect than lyrical content. Other tracks like "Waiting for the Rain" and "6 A.M./Walking on the Nile" more explicitly evoke the world-music sounds Zawinul was to explore with his own Zawinul Syndicate soon after he recorded this album. On these tracks Zawinul mimics a variety of Brazilian and African indigenous instruments with his synths. Although in some ways Dialects resembles the music Herbie Hancock was making in the 1980's--in particular Hancock's 1984 foray into world music/techno funk, Sound System--it's unmistakably the work of its creator, filled with the kind of soulful synthesizer work Zawinul had been creating with Weather Report since the early 1970s. --Ezra Gale