"People are beautiful everywhere," says Josef Zawinul. "I think a real open person, I don't care what music he is playing, is going to be saying something.

"We listen to how people talk and walk. Living is life. That's what you have got to handle: living, not music, or nothing else. If you got that together, all the other things are right behind that. After a while, they'll be on a same level.

"Everything affects you. Jazz is universal, the greatest language of the world, and it came right from our own country. It is a "true American art form."

Pianist Zawinul and saxophonist Wayne Shorter constitute the nucleus of Weather Report, playing at Hammersmith Odeon on July 27th, 28th and 29th. Their paths have led them through creative periods with Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and many others. But Zawinul is quick to point out, "I think the music was always simple. We have learned from living and playing to simplify ourselves, to find the common denominator for expression. It's an actual development, not done from an intellectual point of view. I feel that I have been a very simple muscian always. Wayne is his own way also. We don't want to be in a hurry. We wanted to say. 'Hey, OK. We have a band, and wherever we are going it is going to be different.' It is an accumulation of all our experiences."

He was born in Vienna, a bastion of traditional musics, yet Zawinul says he was never a classical musician.

"It was pretty to me, but I was always playing something else. I took piano lessons and was formally trained to some degree, but I always wanted to be a musician that played for people. I never used to go to classical concerts, I even went around putting down people like Schubert. I grew up in the country and city streets, and played for money since I was very young.

"I used to play weddings when I was ten years old. Listening to people who said, 'Play this tune,' you find your thing and you improvise. You entertain. And I was doing this before I was exposed to jazz."

Zawinul's introduction to jazz came via the inevitable cultural assimiliation that followed the war.

"I met this one guy in 1944. He played on the piano some Teddy Wilson stuff and I said 'what is this? This is beautiful.' And he calls it jazz, and I was turned on. We played together, and this other dude brought his Capitol record by Miles Davis around 1948. It just blew us away. The American soldiers had a radio network and they played nice music on it, Benny Goodman and Charlie Christian. I used to run home from school so that I would never miss the programme.

"I used to think that I was the baddest thing around in Europe. I played them all: clubs, gigs, jazz trios, etc.

"I could play all the George Shearing tunes and Miles tunes from the albums. I transcribed them straight from the record, and I could play them well. I had piano teachers, but this was the real education."

Predestined to be a musician, then?
"I think that whatever you got, you are born with. When I was six years old, my grandfather bought a violin for me and also a little accordion, I heard other people play, and found myself always gravitating to where the music was. I see the people playing and I'd say, 'Hey man, I can play that too.' That's what happened from the first day on. In the winter the family would all congregate together and sing. There might not be any food but there was always lots of singing. The folk music was in three-quarter time, and I said, ' that's not all there is in life'."

In 1959 Zawinul emigrated to the United States, where he spent a number of years paying the obligatory dues. By the end of the Sixties an idea had crystallized in his mind, and, along with Wayne Shorter, Weather Report came into being.