Joe Zawinul started on the accordion at six, playing with his family in Vienna, then moved into classical piano, violin, and clarinet at the Vienna Conservatory. He was still a teenager working the Austrian jazz scene by the early 1950s, playing with saxophonist Hans Koller from 1952 and later fronting his own groups alongside high-profile Austrian bands including the Fatty George band and the Austrian All Stars.

In 1958 he won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston. He left Vienna on January 2, 1959, crossed the Atlantic by ship, and arrived in New York with his scholarship letter and $800 in savings. He lasted one week at Berklee before leaving to join bandleader Maynard Ferguson's touring band. From there he worked behind vocalist Dinah Washington before Cannonball Adderley hired him as his quintet's pianist in 1961.

Zawinul spent nine years with Adderley, and it was there that he wrote the song that changed his career. "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," recorded live at a Los Angeles club in October 1966, became a surprise hit the following February: No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 2 on the Soul chart. A jazz combo playing a jazz composer's tune on pop radio, years before "crossover" was a genre label anyone used on purpose.

Miles Davis took notice. In the winter of 1968 into 1969, Davis brought Zawinul into the sessions for "In a Silent Way," and Zawinul wrote the title track himself. Davis called on him again for "Bitches Brew," where Zawinul's composition "Pharaoh's Dance" opens the album. Both records are usually credited with inventing jazz fusion outright, and Zawinul was one of the writers in the room, not just a hired hand at the keyboard.

He co-founded Weather Report with Wayne Shorter and bassist Miroslav Vitous in November 1970. As the band's lineup rotated through the decade, Zawinul became its primary composer and creative director, and an increasingly serious student of electronic sound: he was among the first jazz musicians to adopt the electric piano, then moved to the Fender Rhodes with a wah-wah pedal, and by 1971 had become one of the most committed users of the ARP 2600 synthesizer in any genre. "I hear the Moog, it's immediately the Moog," he once said of his preference. "With the Arp I can do things that will fool the heck out of you... to me it's a much more natural sound." That instrument carried Weather Report's sound through "Mysterious Traveller," "Tale Spinnin'," "Black Market," and 1977's "Heavy Weather," whose "Birdland" reached No. 30 on the Billboard pop chart, went on to sell over a million copies, and earned Zawinul a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Composition. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2010.

Weather Report dissolved in 1986 after Zawinul and Shorter parted ways. Zawinul toured solo, then formed the short-lived Weather Update before settling into the Zawinul Syndicate in 1988, a band that leaned further into African and Latin rhythm through bassists Gerald Veasley and later Richard Bona. Grammy nominations followed again for "My People" (1996) and the live double album "World Tour" (1998). Down Beat's readers voted him Best Electric Keyboardist 28 times over his career, and named him Electric Keyboardist of the Year in 2005; the magazine's critics inducted him into its Hall of Fame posthumously in 2008. Austria recognized him with two Amadeus Austrian Music Awards and the Hans Koller Prize for lifetime achievement in 2001, and named him the country's official goodwill ambassador to 17 African nations.

Zawinul passed away in his native Vienna on September 11, 2007, at 75, after a rare form of skin cancer caught up with him not long after he finished a five-week European tour. He was still on the road right up to the end, a keyboardist who spent nearly five decades making the case, one hit at a time, that electric jazz could still be jazz.

Zawinul's playing drew on the world and ethnic rhythms he absorbed across a career that ran from Vienna's postwar jazz clubs to African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern collaborators in the Zawinul Syndicate era. He was a sound-effects hunter as much as a melodist, constantly chasing new timbres rather than settling into one electric-keyboard voice: Wurlitzer, then Fender Rhodes with a wah-wah pedal and Mutron phaser, then dual ARP 2600 synthesizers toured nightly through Weather Report's mid-1970s run. Critics and peers place him at the center of jazz fusion's origin point precisely because his writing (on "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," "In a Silent Way," "Pharaoh's Dance," and "Birdland") kept melody and hook at the front even as the instrumentation got more radical, the exact trait that let his music cross over to pop radio without losing its jazz identity.