SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2015
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER ONE
MILES DAVIS
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
ANTHONY BRAXTON
November 1-7
CECIL TAYLOR
November 8-14
STEVIE WONDER
November 15-21
JIMI HENDRIX
November 22-28
GERI ALLEN
November 29-December 5
HERBIE HANCOCK
December 6-12
SONNY ROLLINS
December 13-19
JANELLE MONÀE
December 20-26
GARY CLARK, JR.
December 27-January 2
NINA SIMONE
January 3-January 9
ORNETTE COLEMAN
January 10-January 16
WAYNE SHORTER
January 17-23
*[Special
bonus feature: A celebration of the centennial year of musician,
composer, orchestra leader, and philosopher SUN RA, 1914-1993]
January 24-30
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2013/08/its-time-to-celebrate-life-and-work-of.html
Sunday, August 25, 2013
It's Time To Celebrate the Life and Work of a GIANT in Our Midst: Today Marks the 80th Birthday of Legendary Musician and Composer Wayne Shorter
WAYNE SHORTER IN 1964
All,
First, full disclosure: I am a flatout Wayne Shorter fanatic and a shamelessly devoted acolyte of him and his glorious music and have been for well over 40 years now. Widely considered by many musicians, composers, fans, and critics throughout the globe as one of the most captivating, significant, and downright inspiring artists of our time, Mr. Shorter has been active professionally for over six decades and has been recording since 1957. An absolutely essential and leading member of two of the most extraordinary ensembles in modern Jazz history Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (of which he was the major composer and musical director from 1959-1964) and Miles Davis's legendary "second great quintet" for which Wayne played and composed from 1964-1970, Shorter not only led and recorded with many outstanding groups of his own but also went on to be the cofounder with pianist/composer Joe Zawinul of the very popular Jazz fusion ensemble Weather Report (1971-1985). Since then Shorter has continued over the past 30 years to display his masterly and virtuosic talents in a wide range of musical styles and genres and has been a mentor and major influence for an entire generation of musicians and composers throughout the world. In loving tribute to this living legend whose music as both multi-instrumentalist and composer alike is as strong or stronger today as it has ever been (please see and hear his stunning critically acclaimed and bestselling 2013 recording "Without A Net" on the famed Blue Note label for the wonderful evidence of that fact), click on, check out and enjoy listening to and watching Wayne and his equally legendary colleagues in the following video links to a wide range of Shorter's music since the early 1960s...LONG LIVE THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC...
First, full disclosure: I am a flatout Wayne Shorter fanatic and a shamelessly devoted acolyte of him and his glorious music and have been for well over 40 years now. Widely considered by many musicians, composers, fans, and critics throughout the globe as one of the most captivating, significant, and downright inspiring artists of our time, Mr. Shorter has been active professionally for over six decades and has been recording since 1957. An absolutely essential and leading member of two of the most extraordinary ensembles in modern Jazz history Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (of which he was the major composer and musical director from 1959-1964) and Miles Davis's legendary "second great quintet" for which Wayne played and composed from 1964-1970, Shorter not only led and recorded with many outstanding groups of his own but also went on to be the cofounder with pianist/composer Joe Zawinul of the very popular Jazz fusion ensemble Weather Report (1971-1985). Since then Shorter has continued over the past 30 years to display his masterly and virtuosic talents in a wide range of musical styles and genres and has been a mentor and major influence for an entire generation of musicians and composers throughout the world. In loving tribute to this living legend whose music as both multi-instrumentalist and composer alike is as strong or stronger today as it has ever been (please see and hear his stunning critically acclaimed and bestselling 2013 recording "Without A Net" on the famed Blue Note label for the wonderful evidence of that fact), click on, check out and enjoy listening to and watching Wayne and his equally legendary colleagues in the following video links to a wide range of Shorter's music since the early 1960s...LONG LIVE THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC...
Kofi
PHOTO: Erin Baiano for The New York Times
The Wayne Shorter Quartet,
with Danilo Pérez on piano, Mr. Shorter on saxophone, John Patitucci on
bass and Brian Blade on drums, performing at Lincoln Center.
Wayne Shorter at a festival in January 2013
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2013/02/wayne-shorter-living-legacy-of-great.html
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on February 9, 2013):
Saturday, February 9, 2013
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on February 9, 2013):
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Wayne Shorter: The Living Legacy of a Great Musician, Composer, and Philosopher
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/arts/music/wayne-shorters-new-album-is-without-a-net.html?ref=arts&_r=0&pagewanted=all
"I knew Wayne Shorter first in Newark where we were both, malevolently, born. He was one of the two "weird" Shorter brothers that people mentioned occasionally, usually as a metaphorical reference, "...as weird as Wayne." --Leroi Jones, "Introducing Wayne Shorter", Jazz Review, 1959
“We have to beware the trapdoors of the self. You think you’re the only one that has a mission, and your mission is so unique, and you expound this missionary process over and over again with something you call a vocabulary, which in itself becomes old and decrepit.”
--Wayne Shorter, 2013
All,
A Great Artist. A Great Musician. A Great Composer. A Great Human Being (And a Bad Muthafucka!). My eternal goal remains to be fortunate enough to become "as weird as Wayne"...
Kofi
PHOTO: Robert Yager for The New York Times.
Wayne Shorter, the saxophonist and composer, is nearly 80 and remains driven and influential.
Major Jazz Eminence, Little Grise
Wayne Shorter’s New Album Is ‘Without a Net’
by NATE CHINEN
January 31, 2013
New York Times
THE STANDARD LINE on Wayne Shorter is that he’s the greatest living composer in jazz, and one of its greatest saxophonists. He would like you to forget all of that. Not the music, or his relationship to it, but rather the whole notion of pre-eminence, with its granite countenance and fixed coordinates. “We have to beware the trapdoors of the self,” he said recently.
“You think you’re the only one that has a mission,” he went on, “and your mission is so unique, and you expound this missionary process over and over again with something you call a vocabulary, which in itself becomes old and decrepit.” He laughed sharply.
Mr. Shorter will turn 80 this year. Decrepitude hasn’t had a chance to catch up to him. Last week he appeared at Carnegie Hall as a featured guest with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which played several of his compositions. On Tuesday “Without a Net,” easily the year’s most anticipated jazz album, will become his first release on Blue Note in more than four decades. And next Saturday he’ll be at the Walt Disney Concert Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the premiere of “Gaia,” which he wrote as a showcase for the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding.
He hasn’t accrued this late-inning momentum alone. The vehicle for most of Mr. Shorter’s recent activity, including the orchestral work, is his superlative quartet with Danilo Pérez on piano, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums. A band of spellbinding intuition, with an absolute commitment to the spirit of discovery, it has had an incalculable influence on the practice of jazz in the 21st century — and not necessarily for the same reasons that established Mr. Shorter’s legend in the 20th.
Since the emergence of the quartet, which released its first album on Verve in 2002, jazz’s aesthetic center has moved perceptibly: away from the hotshot soloist and toward a more collectivist, band-driven ideal. There has also been an unusual amount of dialogue between jazz’s tradition-minded base camp and its expeditionary outposts, where conventions exist to be challenged.
Mr. Shorter’s working band is far from the only one to embody these principles during the past decade, but it has been the most acclaimed and widely heard. Traces of its style can be detected in other groups, including those led by the saxophonist Chris Potter and the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. Its slippery methodology has also taken root in the conservatory, and not just at the Berklee College of Music, where Mr. Pérez is on the faculty, or at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, where Mr. Shorter is a resident guru.
“The students are very familiar with that quartet,” said Doug Weiss, who teaches a popular Wayne Shorter ensemble class at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. “They come in having heard the way that band plays together, and a lot of them have no idea what’s going on, and that’s why they’re there.”
So in addition to Mr. Shorter’s body of work — his terse and insinuative compositions, which have been closely studied by jazz musicians for decades — this newer generation has also had the opportunity to grapple with his elusive philosophy of play.
Once, in an interview, Mr. Shorter was asked to account for his pursuit of music above other art forms. He replied that music has an inherent sense of velocity and mystery. It would be hard to find a more concise distillation of his priorities as a bandleader.
“When we go out onstage we always start from nothing,” said Mr. Patitucci by phone from Mr. Pérez’s native Panama, where the quartet headlined a jazz festival last month. “So anybody can spin the wheels in a certain direction, and then we develop those themes.”
What follows isn’t free jazz, exactly, though it uses some of the same tools. “It’s spontaneous composition,” Mr. Patitucci said, “with counterpoint and harmony and lyricism. All of those values are still there. It’s just being pressurized into milliseconds.”
Mr. Shorter framed the idea as an image: “We don’t count how much water there is in a wave when we see the ocean.” He was on the couch of a hotel suite overlooking Central Park South, during one of his recent visits from Los Angeles, where he lives. That evening he would perform at a gala for the David Lynch Foundation, along with the pianist Herbie Hancock, his former partner in the Miles Davis Quintet. He wore dress loafers and a fleece pullover embroidered with the logo of Soka Gakkai International, the Nichiren Buddhist organization to which he and Mr. Hancock belong.
A scheduled interview began with an unscheduled interruption: Ms. Spalding — who won the Grammy for best new artist in 2011, and was also booked at the gala — dropped by with the Argentine pianist Leo Genovese. For all of her success Ms. Spalding still belongs to the demographic that grew up with the notion of Wayne as sage: she and Mr. Genovese were there simply to give him a hug.
Mr. Shorter is a notoriously elliptical conversationalist, prone to cosmic digression and quick-fire allusion. During a spirited two-hour interview he touched on modern art, social politics and science fiction — among the books he produced for inspection was the dystopian “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline — as well as music and movies, and movie music. “I’m looking at a lot of old silent films now,” he said, “and I listen to the new, hip boy bands. I was checking out some Selena Gomez.” On the subject of jazz, he said pithily, “The word ‘jazz’ to me only means ‘I dare you.’ ”
But he also painted his own jazz narrative in precise strokes, whether it was hearing Charlie Parker at Birdland at the age of 18 — what stuck with him was a quotation of “Petrushka,” the Stravinsky ballet, that Parker sneaked into one solo — or sensing the mortal urgency that burned in John Coltrane, his fellow saxophonist, and in some ways a mentor. And Mr. Shorter made several references to the cryptic wisdom of Miles Davis, slipping each time into an unusually convincing imitation of that trumpeter’s throaty rasp.
Davis’s celebrated quintet of the mid-’60s was one of the most aerodynamically advanced in the history of jazz, and apart from Davis himself Mr. Shorter was its chief in-house designer. One of his signature contributions was “Nefertiti,” a slithery 16-bar tune ambiguously shaded with altered and half-diminished chords.
On record, as the title track to a 1968 album, the song features Davis and Mr. Shorter tracing and retracing its melody while the rhythm section improvises in the background, with all the supple intrigue of a shadow creeping across the landscape. It’s a useful precedent for Mr. Shorter’s current band, which derives much of its dynamism from rhythm-section cohesion within the loosest possible framework.
Another precedent, less obvious, is the transitional band that Davis led before his swerve into jazz-funk, a quintet with Mr. Shorter, the pianist Chick Corea, the bassist Dave Holland and the drummer Jack DeJohnette. A boxed set released last week on Columbia/Legacy, “Live in Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2,” illuminates just how much liberty that group took with its materials, even to the point of feverish abstraction. It never sounds freer than on a concert in Stockholm, attacking three of Mr. Shorter’s compositions: “Paraphernalia,” “Nefertiti” and “Masqualero.”
Two of those have surfaced on Mr. Shorter’s recent albums with the quartet, along with other pieces from a broad swath of his career. “Without a Net,” a compilation of live recordings from 2011, opens with “Orbits,” a theme from the Davis quintet era. It also includes a majestic take on “Plaza Real,” from the songbook of Weather Report, the epochal ’70s fusion band that Mr. Shorter led with Joe Zawinul.
But the provenance of the music takes a back seat to its process, which Mr. Shorter said was meant to herald an ideal of self-actualized communal leadership. “This kind of stuff I’m talking about is a challenge to play onstage,” he allowed, and chuckled. “When Miles would hear someone talking about something philosophical, he would say” — here came the rasp — “ ‘Well, why don’t you go out there and play that?’ One thing we talk about is that to ‘play that’ we have to maybe play music that doesn’t sound like music.”
If that sounds like a Zen riddle, comfort yourself with the knowledge that even Mr. Shorter’s band mates have had to warm to the uncertainty. “It was scary, to be honest,” Mr. Pérez said of his early experience in the quartet. “It was a shock to put myself into a situation where I had no idea what was happening. Even when I listened back, I felt like an outsider: ‘What is that? What key are we in?’ ” He gradually made adjustments, including one to his practice regimen: for two or three hours at a stretch he would watch Tom and Jerry cartoons with the sound muted, making up a score.
The band hasn’t relaxed its pursuit of revelation, which expresses itself in myriad ways: Mr. Pérez’s on-the-fly cadenzas, the unexpected thunderclap of Mr. Blade’s crash cymbal, the dartlike insistence of Mr. Shorter’s improvisational flights. All this remains true even as Mr. Shorter steps up his output as a composer. “He’ll bring in this 10-page piece of music, and it’s gorgeous,” Mr. Patitucci said. “And he’ll say, ‘Just this 16 bars.’ He’s not even attached to what he wrote.”
The center of gravity on “Without a Net” is “Pegasus,” designed to feature Imani Winds, a classical wind ensemble. Through much of that track’s 23 minutes, the woodwinds deftly frame the dramatic fluctuations of Mr. Shorter’s band; at times the two factions achieve a compelling synthesis, advancing a dramatic theme.
It’s horizon-scanning music, but it also features glimpses of the past, like the fanfare from “Witch Hunt,” which led off Mr. Shorter’s landmark 1965 Blue Note album “Speak No Evil.” During his solo in “Pegasus” Mr. Shorter also nods to the old Sonny Rollins tune “Oleo.” Elsewhere on the new album he drops a quotation of the Afro-Cuban bebop standard “Manteca,” and leads the band through a cubist recasting of “Flying Down to Rio,” a movie theme originally sung by Fred Astaire.
“To me there’s no such thing as beginning or end,” Mr. Shorter said. “I always say don’t discard the past completely because you have to bring with you the most valuable elements of experience, to be sort of like a flashlight. A flashlight into the unknown.”
Posted by Kofi Natambu at 2:50 AM
Labels: African American music, Improvisation, Jazz composition, Jazz history, social philosophy, Wayne Shorter
http://www.wayneshorter.com/
Since convening a new quartet for the 2001 tour that resulted in Footprints Live! (Verve, 2002), soon-to-be-octogenarian saxophonist Wayne Shorter has found himself in the company of a group that's not just turned out to be, hands-down, his most exciting and exploratory acoustic ensemble in a career well into its sixth decade, but now, a dozen years later, his longest-running one as well. Weather Report, the fusion supergroup that Shorter co-founded with keyboardist Joe Zawinul, did, indeed, last longer, from the early 1970s through the mid-'80s, but with almost constant changes in personnel from album to album. Shorter's stable lineup may not release albums on a regular basis—it's been eight long years since the superb, also-live Beyond the Sound Barrier (Verve, 2005)—but the quartet continues to tour, almost every year. Without a Net captures performances from the quartet's 2011 European tour, as well as an extended piece from a live show in collaboration with the renowned Imani Winds.
Beyond being special because of the lengthy recording absence since Beyond, Shorter's return to Blue Note—on which he released a string of eleven exceptional, often groundbreaking albums beginning with Night Dreamer (1964) and ending with Odyssey of Iska (1970)—is another milestone, though it shouldn't be misconstrued as anything remotely nostalgic. If anything, Without a Net—a succinctly accurate description of this group's modus operandi—is even more uncompromising and unpredictable, reflecting the quartet's ever-growing empathic interrelationship on a set that, with the exception of one tune dating back to his days with trumpeter Miles Davis in the 1960s, one completely re-imagined Weather Report tune from 1983 and one rarely recorded song from the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio (actors/dancers/singers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' first film together), is comprised of half a dozen new Shorter compositions.
Without a Net kicks off with "Orbits," also the opener to Miles Davis' Miles Smiles (Columbia, 1966), but completely revised, its theme becoming a foundational ostinato first introduced with pianist Danilo Perez's left hand, then joined by bassist John Patitucci. It's a method of compositional reduction that Shorter has employed on previous albums with this quartet, turning the tune into an even freer opportunity for Shorter and Pérez to indeed orbit around each other's extemporizations, occasionally conjoining in marvelous synchronicity, all driven by drummer Brian Blade's explosive approach. Shorter's "S.S. Golden Mean," too, is revised from the version on Beyond the Sound Barrier, its repetitive chord pattern a foundation for Shorter's soaring, searing soprano and Blade, who moves from full kit to hand percussion in the blink of an eye, completely altering the song's complexion.
But it's the 23-minute "Pegasus," from Shorter's Los Angeles performance where the quartet was expanded to a nonet with the five-piece Imani Winds, that is the album's centerpiece—and highlight. Not since Alegria (Verve, 2003), his most recent studio recording, has Shorter worked with a larger ensemble, and while that album was plenty ambitious, "Pegasus" trumps it in concept and execution, its powerful blend of form and freedom inspiring such powerful extrapolations from Shorter (again on soprano) that Blade can be heard, in the background, saying "Oh my god!"
Shorter also demonstrates a hitherto unknown talent, whistling at the start of Vincent Youmans' title song to the film Flying to Rio before switching back to soprano and, as Pérez and Patitucci slowly coalesce around another repetitive but continually expanding pattern, stepping back to let the pianist and bassist enter into an exchange as demonstrative of their growing chemistry as any on record. This is no by-rote arrangement of a classic song; instead, while ensuring its core melody is honored, this is another example of the kind of unfettered, uncompromising and freewheeling approach this quartet has taken since inception, but which has only strengthened and become more profound in the ensuing twelve years. Shorter also whistles at the beginning of his own "Zero Gravity," a tune that renders clear the saxophonist's multifaceted interests, with hints of Pérez's impossible to deny Latin leanings blending into harmonic and, at times, contrapuntal sophistication while nevertheless leaving huge, gaping holes for the quartet to spontaneously fill.
Shorter may be turning 80 in August, 2013, but rather than resting on his considerable laurels and resorting to replicating past successes, the saxophonist is as imaginative and conceptually forward-thinking as he's ever been—perhaps even more so. He's also playing at the absolute top of his game, his combination of head and heart never stronger. With this now-longstanding quartet he's truly capable of going anywhere he chooses—and, thanks to the individual and collective improvisational élan of Pérez, Patitucci and Blade, plenty of unexpected places he doesn't—whether it's in the context of detailed structure, absolute, composite freedom...or both. With each record only getting better, Without a Net is not just a new high watermark for Shorter and his stellar quartet, it's a truly masterful masterpiece to add to a discography already brimming with classic recordings that will further cement Shorter's inscription—and, as it evolves, his quartet's as well—in the rarefied upper echelon of jazz history.
Track Listing: Orbits; Starry Night; S.S. Golden Mean; Plaza Real; Myrrh; Pegasus; Flying Down to Rio; Zero Gravity; UFO.
Personnel: Wayne Shorter: soprano and tenor saxophones, whistling (7, 8); Danilo Pérez: piano; John Patitucci: bass; Brian Blade: drums; Valerie Coleman: flute (6); Toyin Spellman-Diaz: oboe (6); Mariam Adam: clarinet (6); Jeff Scott: French horn (6); Monica Ellis: bassoon (6).
Record Label: Blue Note Records
Style: Straight-ahead/Mainstream
by NATE CHINEN
January 31, 2013
New York Times
THE STANDARD LINE on Wayne Shorter is that he’s the greatest living composer in jazz, and one of its greatest saxophonists. He would like you to forget all of that. Not the music, or his relationship to it, but rather the whole notion of pre-eminence, with its granite countenance and fixed coordinates. “We have to beware the trapdoors of the self,” he said recently.
“You think you’re the only one that has a mission,” he went on, “and your mission is so unique, and you expound this missionary process over and over again with something you call a vocabulary, which in itself becomes old and decrepit.” He laughed sharply.
Mr. Shorter will turn 80 this year. Decrepitude hasn’t had a chance to catch up to him. Last week he appeared at Carnegie Hall as a featured guest with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which played several of his compositions. On Tuesday “Without a Net,” easily the year’s most anticipated jazz album, will become his first release on Blue Note in more than four decades. And next Saturday he’ll be at the Walt Disney Concert Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the premiere of “Gaia,” which he wrote as a showcase for the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding.
He hasn’t accrued this late-inning momentum alone. The vehicle for most of Mr. Shorter’s recent activity, including the orchestral work, is his superlative quartet with Danilo Pérez on piano, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums. A band of spellbinding intuition, with an absolute commitment to the spirit of discovery, it has had an incalculable influence on the practice of jazz in the 21st century — and not necessarily for the same reasons that established Mr. Shorter’s legend in the 20th.
Since the emergence of the quartet, which released its first album on Verve in 2002, jazz’s aesthetic center has moved perceptibly: away from the hotshot soloist and toward a more collectivist, band-driven ideal. There has also been an unusual amount of dialogue between jazz’s tradition-minded base camp and its expeditionary outposts, where conventions exist to be challenged.
Mr. Shorter’s working band is far from the only one to embody these principles during the past decade, but it has been the most acclaimed and widely heard. Traces of its style can be detected in other groups, including those led by the saxophonist Chris Potter and the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. Its slippery methodology has also taken root in the conservatory, and not just at the Berklee College of Music, where Mr. Pérez is on the faculty, or at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, where Mr. Shorter is a resident guru.
“The students are very familiar with that quartet,” said Doug Weiss, who teaches a popular Wayne Shorter ensemble class at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. “They come in having heard the way that band plays together, and a lot of them have no idea what’s going on, and that’s why they’re there.”
So in addition to Mr. Shorter’s body of work — his terse and insinuative compositions, which have been closely studied by jazz musicians for decades — this newer generation has also had the opportunity to grapple with his elusive philosophy of play.
Once, in an interview, Mr. Shorter was asked to account for his pursuit of music above other art forms. He replied that music has an inherent sense of velocity and mystery. It would be hard to find a more concise distillation of his priorities as a bandleader.
“When we go out onstage we always start from nothing,” said Mr. Patitucci by phone from Mr. Pérez’s native Panama, where the quartet headlined a jazz festival last month. “So anybody can spin the wheels in a certain direction, and then we develop those themes.”
What follows isn’t free jazz, exactly, though it uses some of the same tools. “It’s spontaneous composition,” Mr. Patitucci said, “with counterpoint and harmony and lyricism. All of those values are still there. It’s just being pressurized into milliseconds.”
Mr. Shorter framed the idea as an image: “We don’t count how much water there is in a wave when we see the ocean.” He was on the couch of a hotel suite overlooking Central Park South, during one of his recent visits from Los Angeles, where he lives. That evening he would perform at a gala for the David Lynch Foundation, along with the pianist Herbie Hancock, his former partner in the Miles Davis Quintet. He wore dress loafers and a fleece pullover embroidered with the logo of Soka Gakkai International, the Nichiren Buddhist organization to which he and Mr. Hancock belong.
A scheduled interview began with an unscheduled interruption: Ms. Spalding — who won the Grammy for best new artist in 2011, and was also booked at the gala — dropped by with the Argentine pianist Leo Genovese. For all of her success Ms. Spalding still belongs to the demographic that grew up with the notion of Wayne as sage: she and Mr. Genovese were there simply to give him a hug.
Mr. Shorter is a notoriously elliptical conversationalist, prone to cosmic digression and quick-fire allusion. During a spirited two-hour interview he touched on modern art, social politics and science fiction — among the books he produced for inspection was the dystopian “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline — as well as music and movies, and movie music. “I’m looking at a lot of old silent films now,” he said, “and I listen to the new, hip boy bands. I was checking out some Selena Gomez.” On the subject of jazz, he said pithily, “The word ‘jazz’ to me only means ‘I dare you.’ ”
But he also painted his own jazz narrative in precise strokes, whether it was hearing Charlie Parker at Birdland at the age of 18 — what stuck with him was a quotation of “Petrushka,” the Stravinsky ballet, that Parker sneaked into one solo — or sensing the mortal urgency that burned in John Coltrane, his fellow saxophonist, and in some ways a mentor. And Mr. Shorter made several references to the cryptic wisdom of Miles Davis, slipping each time into an unusually convincing imitation of that trumpeter’s throaty rasp.
Davis’s celebrated quintet of the mid-’60s was one of the most aerodynamically advanced in the history of jazz, and apart from Davis himself Mr. Shorter was its chief in-house designer. One of his signature contributions was “Nefertiti,” a slithery 16-bar tune ambiguously shaded with altered and half-diminished chords.
On record, as the title track to a 1968 album, the song features Davis and Mr. Shorter tracing and retracing its melody while the rhythm section improvises in the background, with all the supple intrigue of a shadow creeping across the landscape. It’s a useful precedent for Mr. Shorter’s current band, which derives much of its dynamism from rhythm-section cohesion within the loosest possible framework.
Another precedent, less obvious, is the transitional band that Davis led before his swerve into jazz-funk, a quintet with Mr. Shorter, the pianist Chick Corea, the bassist Dave Holland and the drummer Jack DeJohnette. A boxed set released last week on Columbia/Legacy, “Live in Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2,” illuminates just how much liberty that group took with its materials, even to the point of feverish abstraction. It never sounds freer than on a concert in Stockholm, attacking three of Mr. Shorter’s compositions: “Paraphernalia,” “Nefertiti” and “Masqualero.”
Two of those have surfaced on Mr. Shorter’s recent albums with the quartet, along with other pieces from a broad swath of his career. “Without a Net,” a compilation of live recordings from 2011, opens with “Orbits,” a theme from the Davis quintet era. It also includes a majestic take on “Plaza Real,” from the songbook of Weather Report, the epochal ’70s fusion band that Mr. Shorter led with Joe Zawinul.
But the provenance of the music takes a back seat to its process, which Mr. Shorter said was meant to herald an ideal of self-actualized communal leadership. “This kind of stuff I’m talking about is a challenge to play onstage,” he allowed, and chuckled. “When Miles would hear someone talking about something philosophical, he would say” — here came the rasp — “ ‘Well, why don’t you go out there and play that?’ One thing we talk about is that to ‘play that’ we have to maybe play music that doesn’t sound like music.”
If that sounds like a Zen riddle, comfort yourself with the knowledge that even Mr. Shorter’s band mates have had to warm to the uncertainty. “It was scary, to be honest,” Mr. Pérez said of his early experience in the quartet. “It was a shock to put myself into a situation where I had no idea what was happening. Even when I listened back, I felt like an outsider: ‘What is that? What key are we in?’ ” He gradually made adjustments, including one to his practice regimen: for two or three hours at a stretch he would watch Tom and Jerry cartoons with the sound muted, making up a score.
The band hasn’t relaxed its pursuit of revelation, which expresses itself in myriad ways: Mr. Pérez’s on-the-fly cadenzas, the unexpected thunderclap of Mr. Blade’s crash cymbal, the dartlike insistence of Mr. Shorter’s improvisational flights. All this remains true even as Mr. Shorter steps up his output as a composer. “He’ll bring in this 10-page piece of music, and it’s gorgeous,” Mr. Patitucci said. “And he’ll say, ‘Just this 16 bars.’ He’s not even attached to what he wrote.”
The center of gravity on “Without a Net” is “Pegasus,” designed to feature Imani Winds, a classical wind ensemble. Through much of that track’s 23 minutes, the woodwinds deftly frame the dramatic fluctuations of Mr. Shorter’s band; at times the two factions achieve a compelling synthesis, advancing a dramatic theme.
It’s horizon-scanning music, but it also features glimpses of the past, like the fanfare from “Witch Hunt,” which led off Mr. Shorter’s landmark 1965 Blue Note album “Speak No Evil.” During his solo in “Pegasus” Mr. Shorter also nods to the old Sonny Rollins tune “Oleo.” Elsewhere on the new album he drops a quotation of the Afro-Cuban bebop standard “Manteca,” and leads the band through a cubist recasting of “Flying Down to Rio,” a movie theme originally sung by Fred Astaire.
“To me there’s no such thing as beginning or end,” Mr. Shorter said. “I always say don’t discard the past completely because you have to bring with you the most valuable elements of experience, to be sort of like a flashlight. A flashlight into the unknown.”
Posted by Kofi Natambu at 2:50 AM
Labels: African American music, Improvisation, Jazz composition, Jazz history, social philosophy, Wayne Shorter
http://www.wayneshorter.com/
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365071197/
Wayne Shorter Quartet: Without a Net
Music Review
Since convening a new quartet for the 2001 tour that resulted in Footprints Live! (Verve, 2002), soon-to-be-octogenarian saxophonist Wayne Shorter has found himself in the company of a group that's not just turned out to be, hands-down, his most exciting and exploratory acoustic ensemble in a career well into its sixth decade, but now, a dozen years later, his longest-running one as well. Weather Report, the fusion supergroup that Shorter co-founded with keyboardist Joe Zawinul, did, indeed, last longer, from the early 1970s through the mid-'80s, but with almost constant changes in personnel from album to album. Shorter's stable lineup may not release albums on a regular basis—it's been eight long years since the superb, also-live Beyond the Sound Barrier (Verve, 2005)—but the quartet continues to tour, almost every year. Without a Net captures performances from the quartet's 2011 European tour, as well as an extended piece from a live show in collaboration with the renowned Imani Winds.
Beyond being special because of the lengthy recording absence since Beyond, Shorter's return to Blue Note—on which he released a string of eleven exceptional, often groundbreaking albums beginning with Night Dreamer (1964) and ending with Odyssey of Iska (1970)—is another milestone, though it shouldn't be misconstrued as anything remotely nostalgic. If anything, Without a Net—a succinctly accurate description of this group's modus operandi—is even more uncompromising and unpredictable, reflecting the quartet's ever-growing empathic interrelationship on a set that, with the exception of one tune dating back to his days with trumpeter Miles Davis in the 1960s, one completely re-imagined Weather Report tune from 1983 and one rarely recorded song from the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio (actors/dancers/singers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' first film together), is comprised of half a dozen new Shorter compositions.
Without a Net kicks off with "Orbits," also the opener to Miles Davis' Miles Smiles (Columbia, 1966), but completely revised, its theme becoming a foundational ostinato first introduced with pianist Danilo Perez's left hand, then joined by bassist John Patitucci. It's a method of compositional reduction that Shorter has employed on previous albums with this quartet, turning the tune into an even freer opportunity for Shorter and Pérez to indeed orbit around each other's extemporizations, occasionally conjoining in marvelous synchronicity, all driven by drummer Brian Blade's explosive approach. Shorter's "S.S. Golden Mean," too, is revised from the version on Beyond the Sound Barrier, its repetitive chord pattern a foundation for Shorter's soaring, searing soprano and Blade, who moves from full kit to hand percussion in the blink of an eye, completely altering the song's complexion.
But it's the 23-minute "Pegasus," from Shorter's Los Angeles performance where the quartet was expanded to a nonet with the five-piece Imani Winds, that is the album's centerpiece—and highlight. Not since Alegria (Verve, 2003), his most recent studio recording, has Shorter worked with a larger ensemble, and while that album was plenty ambitious, "Pegasus" trumps it in concept and execution, its powerful blend of form and freedom inspiring such powerful extrapolations from Shorter (again on soprano) that Blade can be heard, in the background, saying "Oh my god!"
Shorter also demonstrates a hitherto unknown talent, whistling at the start of Vincent Youmans' title song to the film Flying to Rio before switching back to soprano and, as Pérez and Patitucci slowly coalesce around another repetitive but continually expanding pattern, stepping back to let the pianist and bassist enter into an exchange as demonstrative of their growing chemistry as any on record. This is no by-rote arrangement of a classic song; instead, while ensuring its core melody is honored, this is another example of the kind of unfettered, uncompromising and freewheeling approach this quartet has taken since inception, but which has only strengthened and become more profound in the ensuing twelve years. Shorter also whistles at the beginning of his own "Zero Gravity," a tune that renders clear the saxophonist's multifaceted interests, with hints of Pérez's impossible to deny Latin leanings blending into harmonic and, at times, contrapuntal sophistication while nevertheless leaving huge, gaping holes for the quartet to spontaneously fill.
Shorter may be turning 80 in August, 2013, but rather than resting on his considerable laurels and resorting to replicating past successes, the saxophonist is as imaginative and conceptually forward-thinking as he's ever been—perhaps even more so. He's also playing at the absolute top of his game, his combination of head and heart never stronger. With this now-longstanding quartet he's truly capable of going anywhere he chooses—and, thanks to the individual and collective improvisational élan of Pérez, Patitucci and Blade, plenty of unexpected places he doesn't—whether it's in the context of detailed structure, absolute, composite freedom...or both. With each record only getting better, Without a Net is not just a new high watermark for Shorter and his stellar quartet, it's a truly masterful masterpiece to add to a discography already brimming with classic recordings that will further cement Shorter's inscription—and, as it evolves, his quartet's as well—in the rarefied upper echelon of jazz history.
Personnel: Wayne Shorter: soprano and tenor saxophones, whistling (7, 8); Danilo Pérez: piano; John Patitucci: bass; Brian Blade: drums; Valerie Coleman: flute (6); Toyin Spellman-Diaz: oboe (6); Mariam Adam: clarinet (6); Jeff Scott: French horn (6); Monica Ellis: bassoon (6).
Record Label: Blue Note Records
Style: Straight-ahead/Mainstream
Sunday, August 25, 2013
INTERVIEW WITH THE GREAT WAYNE SHORTER FROM 2002
http://www.jazz.com/features-and-interviews/2008/3/21/in-conversation-with-wayne-shorter
TODAY IS THE 80TH BIRTHDAY OF ONE OF THE GREATEST MUSICIANS AND COMPOSERS ON THIS PLANET: WAYNE SHORTER, b. August 25, 1933
THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW FROM 2002 WAS CONDUCTED BY BOSTON-BASED JAZZ CRITIC AND HISTORIAN BOB BLUMENTHAL
TODAY IS THE 80TH BIRTHDAY OF ONE OF THE GREATEST MUSICIANS AND COMPOSERS ON THIS PLANET: WAYNE SHORTER, b. August 25, 1933
THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW FROM 2002 WAS CONDUCTED BY BOSTON-BASED JAZZ CRITIC AND HISTORIAN BOB BLUMENTHAL
IN CONVERSATION WITH WAYNE SHORTER
by Bob Blumenthal
Of the many interviews that I have conducted in Burlington, Vermont at the city's Discover Jazz festival, none has proven more memorable than my conversation with Wayne Shorter in 2002. As is the case with a handful of artists (Ornette Coleman and the late Andrew Hill come to mind), Shorter is a thinker of substance who speaks in images all his own, images that can sometimes be tricky to follow. In addition, I had seen interviews by others where a focus on historic and technical specifics evoked terse responses from Shorter, at best.
As you will see, Shorter was relaxed, loquacious and humorous, often slipping into voices or following his own stream-of-consciousness leads, but always addressing the issue at hand. The only moment of discomfort occurred in the section of audience questions, when someone asked what needed to be done to save jazz; but even then, after scowling, Shorter made his point. Ive tried to retain as much of the flow and the flavor of the conversation as possible, and want to thank Shorter for his permission to publish our exchange.
A lot of musicians are identified with their home towns, and you often hear talk of all the greats from Philadelphia, Detroit. You come from a place that I suspect was also a hotbed of music, Newark, New Jersey. What was the music scene like growing up in Newark?
WS: I didn't pay any attention to what was going on, because I was not into music until about the age of 15. I had been drawing, majoring in Fine Arts. Knowing about music only meant, to me, what I heard in film scores, but we didnt use those words. We called it a soundtrack, or background. I had heard about the background stuff that the organ player played in the Twenties, behind silent films. My mother would tell me about how people sat in the theaters, listening, and would say, Uh oh, the organ player's drunk! They could really tell when they were doing that Follow the bouncing ball stuff. So my parents generation was really glad when sound came in (in films). But thats the earliest recollection of something staying inside of me. Id go to the Capitol Theatre and see Captive Wild Woman with John Carradine and the guy who played Doc on Gunsmoke
Milburn Stone?
WS: Yes, that guy. He was the lion tamer, and the actresss name was Aquanita. She only had one name, like Burgess Merediths wife, Margo. Those are the things I was noticing people with one name, and the music behind Bela Lugosi when he played Igor in Frankenstein [WS pronounces it Frankensteen], the Son of Frankenstein. Then The Wolf Man. Now The Wolf Man was the start of something, the first time we went to the movies at night. When you were eight years old, going with your parents at night was a big thing. And they had two films, The Wolf Man and a movie with Olivia De Haviland called To Each His Own. It was a soap opera, but she was good in it. But as kids, we were waiting for The Wolf Man.
I always identified your piece Children of the Night with Bela Lugosi and Dracula.
Yes, but then Children of the Night became astronauts, going out into the darkness of the unknown. But that film music, the backgrounds when Lon Chaney was changing into a werewolf, or The Mummy. It seemed like those composers had carte blanche. No one was leaning over their shoulder saying, We want a hit. Lets get my cousin to write a hit song. That kind of writing in those films got me interested about sound, and I just got curious and more curious.
Then I heard a lot of stuff on the radio, and I got really interested when I heard Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Max Roach and all those guys. I remember one evening, just when I was turning sixteen, some of the guys saying You ever heard of Charles Christopher Parker? These three or four guys, they were hip. We were the only ones in the school who were paying attention to Charlie Parker. We went to this theater around the corner from school, the Adams Theatre, they would have a movie and a show there, and they had all the bands there: Stan Kenton, Woody Herman. I saw Jimmie Luncefords band there, and of course Dizzy Gillespie, Illinois Jacquet, his brother Russell Jacquet, Andy Kirk. And comedians like Timmie Rogers. He used to say Oh yeah! all the time, and wed say Oh no! So all of that, sight and sound, was getting to me.
I played hooky a lot my third year of high school, going to that theatre. They caught me because I wrote a bunch of notes falsifying my mothers signature. This was the first high school to have an intercom and an elevator; when they called you down on the intercom, the whole school heard it. Miisster Shhhorter [imitates a bad intercom], report to the Viice Prrincipalls offfice immediately." To me, the whole school stopped, because I was supposed to be one of the nice guys. He played hooky? See, I would skip one class to hear the band at the Adams, go back for another class, and then skip again later in the day when the band would come back on. I had 56 absences in a short period of time. So they called my parents in and the Vice Principal asked, Where do you go when you play hooky?
The Adams Theatre.
Oh, do you like movies?
Yes, but also the bands there.
Oh, do you like music?
So they called in the music teacher, Achilles DAmico and told me, Were going to put you in a music class, so you can study music from the ground up. But this is primarily disciplinary, because Mr. DAmico is a disciplinarian. And the first day I was in his class and this is the hook; this is the hit he stood up after we had listened to Mozarts G minor 40[th Symphony] and said, Musics going to go in three directions. Then he held up The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, another record that I had been hearing by Yma Sumac, Xtabay, and a third record, which was Charlie Parker. That was the stuff on the radio.
So I remember what Charlie Parker was doing, and I remember the bunny hop at the prom. The band would play the bunny hop, but I wasnt in the band. They have to play the bunny hop, and wear band uniforms? Get out of here, man.Then at 15 or 16, I started taking clarinet lessons, but I was checking out the college guys. They had the brown and white bucks, the seersucker jackets and suits. Some had cars, and some of the other guys, with the leather jackets, had motorcycles. This was around the time that The Wild One came out, with Brando. Our schoolyard had a whole section for motorcycles, and another for cars. They guys who didnt have cars or motorcycles walked home. I was walking home, carrying my saxophone and a bag of books, thinking The guys getting rich are the guys making hits; but this stuff bebop, progressive music, because I was interested in all modern music.
I used to listen to a program every Saturday afternoon, New Ideas in Music, about the evolution of classical music into contemporary and onward. Anyway, I knew that this was going to be a long, long struggle, a long road. Because everybody I knew, at the parties and the dances, if you brought a modern record and put it onThey wanted the slow drag stuff, so the guys could dance with the girls, hook up and make time. But put something interesting on and shhhhhhhh [imitates a needle dragged over vinyl], Take that off! My brother and myself and another guy, Pete Lonesome, made it a point to keep going straight ahead. At the universities, they [Alan Shorter and Pete] would crash the fraternity parties to get new ideas from the records they were playing there.
Thats the only way that I can talk about music. Playing music, to me, reflects whats happening and whats not happening. And what some people wish could happen. Sometimes you get in a fantasy place all by yourself, you can be self-contained. Get a little cash flow, just do music for yourself while not being selfish. Dont record, just make music at home and little videos, like that. An interviewer asked me what I would do if I didnt do music, and I said it didnt make any difference because everything is connected. But the way things are going now - what is considered top-drawer, what a lot of young people consider great in music, books and films, towering this and that.
Two thumbs up?
Yeah. I dont see a lot of people in the science fiction section of bookstores. The imagination thing. You dont have to be a bad person to use your imagination, but if you have an imagination you can be 10,000 steps ahead of a lot of bad people. And this country is the greatest country for having this open-door policy, open-end for thinking and ideas. Everything stopped with classical, modern contemporary, with Gershwin and Copland and Leonard Bernstein. Weve got to keep going, but now guys are writing for movies: John Willians, Goldsmith, James Horner. But we need more than that from Hollywood, with its closed-door policy. If its racism, to hell with racism. Weve got to keep moving. As far as the imagination, there are a lot of people slipping through the cracks who could be inspiration for the salvation of the whole planet. A lot of us will say, Oh, I wont do it, I cant do it. But go back into your little dream box that you were in as a kid, and hey.
I'm ready to kick ass. I'm going to be 70 in August 2004, and it feels like [in conspiratorial voice] theres a red door down there, waiting for me. But before I go through that door, Im going to go to the end of the line and stick with what Im doing. But Im bringing things in. My next record has music from the 13th Century, a Villa Lobos thing, something from Wales, something I wrote about Angola, something from Spain that Miles had given me the sheet music for in 1965 and said [imitating Davis] Do something with this. Also, music I did as an assignment in my modern harmony class in 1952. Maybe eight measures that I had put away and brought back out in 1997 and developed a little bit. Herbie and I recorded it. Its about the lady in I still call it Burma Aung San Suu Kyi. So when I talk about recording as I go to the end of the line, for me its to celebrate everybody, all humanity, and the eternity that we all possess.
If you can remember the first thing of consciousness when you were a baby, if you can remember and can put a word to it. Some people cant, but when I go back I can see the high chair. After that high chair theres nothing, but there is a word, and the word that comes back to me now is always. want to celebrate eternity. Celebrating eternity means to me to manifest all of the time as a human being. Eternity presents surprises. Im celebrating lifes adventure. I like that guy on Oprah Winfrey who said that life is the story of everyone's soul. Its a one-time story, meaning one-time to me; but there are billions of stories, and they are linked. To be original, to me, is to want to celebrate something so hard that you want to give it a present. The more original you get, the deeper your confirmation of eternity itself. To celebrate oneself selflessly, not selfishly; to say that life is the damn religion. The entire alphabet cant exist without A, a million dollars cant exist without one penny.
This is what I think about when Im talking to myself, when Im checking out movies, books. Theres a good book called Drinking Midnight Wine by Simon Green, another one I have. The guy, Glenn Kleier, wrote one book, what is its nameabout a woman wandering around in the desert who is the sister of Jesus. Shes called Jeza, and she goes to Rome and says, I come not to kiss the ring of St. Paul, but to reclaim it. Its called The Last Day, and its a damned good book. Some lawyers read it and said, Damn, if they make a movie out of this one, everybodys going to go to court.
I have fun, I dont get serious. [In haughty voice] Oh, you take a minor third, and I use a Rico #4, Im looking for a Mark VI. I cant get into that. I get into what is anything for? I dont talk about music like Me and my horn, me and my little saxophone. Im not the cellist who grows up hiding behind the cello, or some actors who hide behind their characters. Thats okay, you can hide behind them, because its never too late to come out. I think life is supposed to be a lot of fun. The reason for life is happening, its happening right now. I dont like words like beginning and end. We lean on them for our sanity, but they are artificial, and they create a lot of other artificial stuff in our head, boundaries that we can tear down. People who stutter and want to break that habit, or bite their nails or twitch. Im not making fun of that but they dont really stutter, its something they are determined to break through. I think playing music and hearing more variety of stories and celebration in music, instead of only seeing red, blue and yellow, or having just CBS and NBC, or people trying to control the internetIf we all had our own newspaper, how about that? It would be like Network, Im not going to take it anymore! The internet is one breakthrough, but there is going to be another breakthrough, I think, in home entertainment. Soon well have Laundromats in our homes, nursing homes with a robotic paramedic.
In the notes to Night Dreamer, you say that up to a point you created music out of your own experience, but now wanted to start connecting your experience to the world. I read that recently and was reminded of when Joe Zawinul told me that you were the first person he met with what he called the new thinking. Were there particular experiences that brought you to these turning points and revelations?
The first book I read when I was 13 was Charles Kingsleys The Water Babies. I just called London and talked to an old lady who has a shop near the Thames. I wanted an 18-something edition, and I got a book by Charles Kingsleys son. She said [in halting, old voice], I-have-a-1935-edition, but-I-think-I-have-an-older-one. I-just-have-to-look-in-the-cupboard. And I was thinking, Man, thats where I want to be with her, going into the cupboard. I have about five or six copies. The first one I read had nice pictures; it was for children. Its about what happens when the hero goes to the ocean to see whats happening. Theres some stuff in there, wow.
Then, at 15, I read Occams Razor. What a nice title, though now it would be considered too Middle-Eastern. That book is about slicing time and walking through it. Then I crawled through Dune. Then I came to a screeching halt with The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand came to my school, NYUI took a class in philosophy there, and the professor used to walk around, reach over you and put the final grade on your paper before you were finished. On the day of the final exam, he reached over my shoulder, put a mark on my paper Im not going to tell you what he gave me said Why dont you major in philosophy? and kept on going.
I really dig science fiction, or science reality. I did a record with a Japanese friend, and a friend of his used to escort Stephen Hawking around Tokyo. So when my friend did a record about galaxies, he got Stephen Hawking to open it, [imitating Hawking] There are at least two hundred million stars in our galaxy, and he goes on. Anyway, Hawking enjoyed the project so much that he sent my friend some lectures on quantum physics, and he opens one with a limerick:
There once was a lady from Wight Who could travel much faster than light She took off one day In a relative way And arrived on the previous night.
I read that and said, Stephen Hawking, my man! As to the lectures, I read them a line at a time, think about them, go back to a science fiction book or a movie. But thats whats going on. I seem to attract that kind of thing now. I was seeking it when I was 16. I used to stay in the library when it closed, back on the floor reading about Beethoven or something else.
With so many vivid interests, why did you choose to pursue music?
Music has a sense of velocity in it. Theres also a sense of mystery. But everything is really mysterious. I used to look at my hand and say, What is this? Everything in life is not down pat. With music, its another kind of meal, another dimension, not just a language but another miracle. Its a gift not to do music, but just that music is there. And what else is there, that were not harvesting? So move over Bill Gates and Albert Einstein.
[Question from the audience] What influence did your brother Alan have on you?
We were influencing each other from the beginning, hipping each other to something, checking things out while walking down the street. My brother just talked out and said what he thought. He saw constraints in life that he didnt want to deal with, like the dating thing. He just skipped through all of that, and said, Nobodys ready for me. He played an alto sax for a while, and he painted Doc Strange on the side of his case. People used to call us Strange and Weird, so I put on my clarinet case Mr. Weird. Then we had this band together, nine guys. Another band at the time in New Jersey had bandstands, uniforms, lights, girlfriends who would carry their instruments, everything. Wed go to the gig, and my brother would bring his horn in a shopping bag, and play it with gloves on. Hed wear galoshes when the sun was shining; and wed take the chairs and turn them around and start playing Emanon or Godchild or :Jeru by ear, with newspapers on our music stands, making fun of people who read music. We made sure our clothes were wrinkled, because if you played bebop you were raggedy, not smooth. You didnt go out on dates, you made it with your instrument.
[Question from the audience] What can we do to save jazz?
I think that taking chances is the beginning. Being unafraid of losing this and that, jobs, friends. You dont have to have the extreme you see in biographies of Van Gogh, always being by himself or arguing with others, but youve got a lot of leeway. Knowing the difference between what youre told and what you find out for yourself; starting as an individual, being alone. We dont have to preserve jazz; we have to start preserving the stuff that comes before all of that.
[Question from the audience] Can you talk about playing with Miles Davis?
I had the most fun playing with Miles Davis, and John Coltrane told me that, too. Now, the same kind of fun is happening with John Patitucci and Brian Blade and Danilo Perez, and over the years I had fun playing with Joe Zawinul and Herbie Hancock. But Miles was a source kind of guy. You know how Captain Marvel would go to Delphi, to get his shazam stuff together? Miles was like that, and he was a buddy, too.
I stay away from calling people best friends, because best friends are always becoming; but Herbie, Joe, were all becoming better and better friends. There's no end to this growth. Were older now, we talk from time to time. I talk to Sonny Rollins on the phone once or twice a year, Horace Silver, Benny Golson. Gil Evans came to my home, unannounced, just before he passed away. I guess I'd better do a book, and keep it straight.
by Bob Blumenthal
Of the many interviews that I have conducted in Burlington, Vermont at the city's Discover Jazz festival, none has proven more memorable than my conversation with Wayne Shorter in 2002. As is the case with a handful of artists (Ornette Coleman and the late Andrew Hill come to mind), Shorter is a thinker of substance who speaks in images all his own, images that can sometimes be tricky to follow. In addition, I had seen interviews by others where a focus on historic and technical specifics evoked terse responses from Shorter, at best.
As you will see, Shorter was relaxed, loquacious and humorous, often slipping into voices or following his own stream-of-consciousness leads, but always addressing the issue at hand. The only moment of discomfort occurred in the section of audience questions, when someone asked what needed to be done to save jazz; but even then, after scowling, Shorter made his point. Ive tried to retain as much of the flow and the flavor of the conversation as possible, and want to thank Shorter for his permission to publish our exchange.
A lot of musicians are identified with their home towns, and you often hear talk of all the greats from Philadelphia, Detroit. You come from a place that I suspect was also a hotbed of music, Newark, New Jersey. What was the music scene like growing up in Newark?
WS: I didn't pay any attention to what was going on, because I was not into music until about the age of 15. I had been drawing, majoring in Fine Arts. Knowing about music only meant, to me, what I heard in film scores, but we didnt use those words. We called it a soundtrack, or background. I had heard about the background stuff that the organ player played in the Twenties, behind silent films. My mother would tell me about how people sat in the theaters, listening, and would say, Uh oh, the organ player's drunk! They could really tell when they were doing that Follow the bouncing ball stuff. So my parents generation was really glad when sound came in (in films). But thats the earliest recollection of something staying inside of me. Id go to the Capitol Theatre and see Captive Wild Woman with John Carradine and the guy who played Doc on Gunsmoke
Milburn Stone?
WS: Yes, that guy. He was the lion tamer, and the actresss name was Aquanita. She only had one name, like Burgess Merediths wife, Margo. Those are the things I was noticing people with one name, and the music behind Bela Lugosi when he played Igor in Frankenstein [WS pronounces it Frankensteen], the Son of Frankenstein. Then The Wolf Man. Now The Wolf Man was the start of something, the first time we went to the movies at night. When you were eight years old, going with your parents at night was a big thing. And they had two films, The Wolf Man and a movie with Olivia De Haviland called To Each His Own. It was a soap opera, but she was good in it. But as kids, we were waiting for The Wolf Man.
I always identified your piece Children of the Night with Bela Lugosi and Dracula.
Yes, but then Children of the Night became astronauts, going out into the darkness of the unknown. But that film music, the backgrounds when Lon Chaney was changing into a werewolf, or The Mummy. It seemed like those composers had carte blanche. No one was leaning over their shoulder saying, We want a hit. Lets get my cousin to write a hit song. That kind of writing in those films got me interested about sound, and I just got curious and more curious.
Then I heard a lot of stuff on the radio, and I got really interested when I heard Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Max Roach and all those guys. I remember one evening, just when I was turning sixteen, some of the guys saying You ever heard of Charles Christopher Parker? These three or four guys, they were hip. We were the only ones in the school who were paying attention to Charlie Parker. We went to this theater around the corner from school, the Adams Theatre, they would have a movie and a show there, and they had all the bands there: Stan Kenton, Woody Herman. I saw Jimmie Luncefords band there, and of course Dizzy Gillespie, Illinois Jacquet, his brother Russell Jacquet, Andy Kirk. And comedians like Timmie Rogers. He used to say Oh yeah! all the time, and wed say Oh no! So all of that, sight and sound, was getting to me.
I played hooky a lot my third year of high school, going to that theatre. They caught me because I wrote a bunch of notes falsifying my mothers signature. This was the first high school to have an intercom and an elevator; when they called you down on the intercom, the whole school heard it. Miisster Shhhorter [imitates a bad intercom], report to the Viice Prrincipalls offfice immediately." To me, the whole school stopped, because I was supposed to be one of the nice guys. He played hooky? See, I would skip one class to hear the band at the Adams, go back for another class, and then skip again later in the day when the band would come back on. I had 56 absences in a short period of time. So they called my parents in and the Vice Principal asked, Where do you go when you play hooky?
The Adams Theatre.
Oh, do you like movies?
Yes, but also the bands there.
Oh, do you like music?
So they called in the music teacher, Achilles DAmico and told me, Were going to put you in a music class, so you can study music from the ground up. But this is primarily disciplinary, because Mr. DAmico is a disciplinarian. And the first day I was in his class and this is the hook; this is the hit he stood up after we had listened to Mozarts G minor 40[th Symphony] and said, Musics going to go in three directions. Then he held up The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, another record that I had been hearing by Yma Sumac, Xtabay, and a third record, which was Charlie Parker. That was the stuff on the radio.
So I remember what Charlie Parker was doing, and I remember the bunny hop at the prom. The band would play the bunny hop, but I wasnt in the band. They have to play the bunny hop, and wear band uniforms? Get out of here, man.Then at 15 or 16, I started taking clarinet lessons, but I was checking out the college guys. They had the brown and white bucks, the seersucker jackets and suits. Some had cars, and some of the other guys, with the leather jackets, had motorcycles. This was around the time that The Wild One came out, with Brando. Our schoolyard had a whole section for motorcycles, and another for cars. They guys who didnt have cars or motorcycles walked home. I was walking home, carrying my saxophone and a bag of books, thinking The guys getting rich are the guys making hits; but this stuff bebop, progressive music, because I was interested in all modern music.
I used to listen to a program every Saturday afternoon, New Ideas in Music, about the evolution of classical music into contemporary and onward. Anyway, I knew that this was going to be a long, long struggle, a long road. Because everybody I knew, at the parties and the dances, if you brought a modern record and put it onThey wanted the slow drag stuff, so the guys could dance with the girls, hook up and make time. But put something interesting on and shhhhhhhh [imitates a needle dragged over vinyl], Take that off! My brother and myself and another guy, Pete Lonesome, made it a point to keep going straight ahead. At the universities, they [Alan Shorter and Pete] would crash the fraternity parties to get new ideas from the records they were playing there.
Thats the only way that I can talk about music. Playing music, to me, reflects whats happening and whats not happening. And what some people wish could happen. Sometimes you get in a fantasy place all by yourself, you can be self-contained. Get a little cash flow, just do music for yourself while not being selfish. Dont record, just make music at home and little videos, like that. An interviewer asked me what I would do if I didnt do music, and I said it didnt make any difference because everything is connected. But the way things are going now - what is considered top-drawer, what a lot of young people consider great in music, books and films, towering this and that.
Two thumbs up?
Yeah. I dont see a lot of people in the science fiction section of bookstores. The imagination thing. You dont have to be a bad person to use your imagination, but if you have an imagination you can be 10,000 steps ahead of a lot of bad people. And this country is the greatest country for having this open-door policy, open-end for thinking and ideas. Everything stopped with classical, modern contemporary, with Gershwin and Copland and Leonard Bernstein. Weve got to keep going, but now guys are writing for movies: John Willians, Goldsmith, James Horner. But we need more than that from Hollywood, with its closed-door policy. If its racism, to hell with racism. Weve got to keep moving. As far as the imagination, there are a lot of people slipping through the cracks who could be inspiration for the salvation of the whole planet. A lot of us will say, Oh, I wont do it, I cant do it. But go back into your little dream box that you were in as a kid, and hey.
I'm ready to kick ass. I'm going to be 70 in August 2004, and it feels like [in conspiratorial voice] theres a red door down there, waiting for me. But before I go through that door, Im going to go to the end of the line and stick with what Im doing. But Im bringing things in. My next record has music from the 13th Century, a Villa Lobos thing, something from Wales, something I wrote about Angola, something from Spain that Miles had given me the sheet music for in 1965 and said [imitating Davis] Do something with this. Also, music I did as an assignment in my modern harmony class in 1952. Maybe eight measures that I had put away and brought back out in 1997 and developed a little bit. Herbie and I recorded it. Its about the lady in I still call it Burma Aung San Suu Kyi. So when I talk about recording as I go to the end of the line, for me its to celebrate everybody, all humanity, and the eternity that we all possess.
If you can remember the first thing of consciousness when you were a baby, if you can remember and can put a word to it. Some people cant, but when I go back I can see the high chair. After that high chair theres nothing, but there is a word, and the word that comes back to me now is always. want to celebrate eternity. Celebrating eternity means to me to manifest all of the time as a human being. Eternity presents surprises. Im celebrating lifes adventure. I like that guy on Oprah Winfrey who said that life is the story of everyone's soul. Its a one-time story, meaning one-time to me; but there are billions of stories, and they are linked. To be original, to me, is to want to celebrate something so hard that you want to give it a present. The more original you get, the deeper your confirmation of eternity itself. To celebrate oneself selflessly, not selfishly; to say that life is the damn religion. The entire alphabet cant exist without A, a million dollars cant exist without one penny.
This is what I think about when Im talking to myself, when Im checking out movies, books. Theres a good book called Drinking Midnight Wine by Simon Green, another one I have. The guy, Glenn Kleier, wrote one book, what is its nameabout a woman wandering around in the desert who is the sister of Jesus. Shes called Jeza, and she goes to Rome and says, I come not to kiss the ring of St. Paul, but to reclaim it. Its called The Last Day, and its a damned good book. Some lawyers read it and said, Damn, if they make a movie out of this one, everybodys going to go to court.
I have fun, I dont get serious. [In haughty voice] Oh, you take a minor third, and I use a Rico #4, Im looking for a Mark VI. I cant get into that. I get into what is anything for? I dont talk about music like Me and my horn, me and my little saxophone. Im not the cellist who grows up hiding behind the cello, or some actors who hide behind their characters. Thats okay, you can hide behind them, because its never too late to come out. I think life is supposed to be a lot of fun. The reason for life is happening, its happening right now. I dont like words like beginning and end. We lean on them for our sanity, but they are artificial, and they create a lot of other artificial stuff in our head, boundaries that we can tear down. People who stutter and want to break that habit, or bite their nails or twitch. Im not making fun of that but they dont really stutter, its something they are determined to break through. I think playing music and hearing more variety of stories and celebration in music, instead of only seeing red, blue and yellow, or having just CBS and NBC, or people trying to control the internetIf we all had our own newspaper, how about that? It would be like Network, Im not going to take it anymore! The internet is one breakthrough, but there is going to be another breakthrough, I think, in home entertainment. Soon well have Laundromats in our homes, nursing homes with a robotic paramedic.
In the notes to Night Dreamer, you say that up to a point you created music out of your own experience, but now wanted to start connecting your experience to the world. I read that recently and was reminded of when Joe Zawinul told me that you were the first person he met with what he called the new thinking. Were there particular experiences that brought you to these turning points and revelations?
The first book I read when I was 13 was Charles Kingsleys The Water Babies. I just called London and talked to an old lady who has a shop near the Thames. I wanted an 18-something edition, and I got a book by Charles Kingsleys son. She said [in halting, old voice], I-have-a-1935-edition, but-I-think-I-have-an-older-one. I-just-have-to-look-in-the-cupboard. And I was thinking, Man, thats where I want to be with her, going into the cupboard. I have about five or six copies. The first one I read had nice pictures; it was for children. Its about what happens when the hero goes to the ocean to see whats happening. Theres some stuff in there, wow.
Then, at 15, I read Occams Razor. What a nice title, though now it would be considered too Middle-Eastern. That book is about slicing time and walking through it. Then I crawled through Dune. Then I came to a screeching halt with The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand came to my school, NYUI took a class in philosophy there, and the professor used to walk around, reach over you and put the final grade on your paper before you were finished. On the day of the final exam, he reached over my shoulder, put a mark on my paper Im not going to tell you what he gave me said Why dont you major in philosophy? and kept on going.
I really dig science fiction, or science reality. I did a record with a Japanese friend, and a friend of his used to escort Stephen Hawking around Tokyo. So when my friend did a record about galaxies, he got Stephen Hawking to open it, [imitating Hawking] There are at least two hundred million stars in our galaxy, and he goes on. Anyway, Hawking enjoyed the project so much that he sent my friend some lectures on quantum physics, and he opens one with a limerick:
There once was a lady from Wight Who could travel much faster than light She took off one day In a relative way And arrived on the previous night.
I read that and said, Stephen Hawking, my man! As to the lectures, I read them a line at a time, think about them, go back to a science fiction book or a movie. But thats whats going on. I seem to attract that kind of thing now. I was seeking it when I was 16. I used to stay in the library when it closed, back on the floor reading about Beethoven or something else.
With so many vivid interests, why did you choose to pursue music?
Music has a sense of velocity in it. Theres also a sense of mystery. But everything is really mysterious. I used to look at my hand and say, What is this? Everything in life is not down pat. With music, its another kind of meal, another dimension, not just a language but another miracle. Its a gift not to do music, but just that music is there. And what else is there, that were not harvesting? So move over Bill Gates and Albert Einstein.
[Question from the audience] What influence did your brother Alan have on you?
We were influencing each other from the beginning, hipping each other to something, checking things out while walking down the street. My brother just talked out and said what he thought. He saw constraints in life that he didnt want to deal with, like the dating thing. He just skipped through all of that, and said, Nobodys ready for me. He played an alto sax for a while, and he painted Doc Strange on the side of his case. People used to call us Strange and Weird, so I put on my clarinet case Mr. Weird. Then we had this band together, nine guys. Another band at the time in New Jersey had bandstands, uniforms, lights, girlfriends who would carry their instruments, everything. Wed go to the gig, and my brother would bring his horn in a shopping bag, and play it with gloves on. Hed wear galoshes when the sun was shining; and wed take the chairs and turn them around and start playing Emanon or Godchild or :Jeru by ear, with newspapers on our music stands, making fun of people who read music. We made sure our clothes were wrinkled, because if you played bebop you were raggedy, not smooth. You didnt go out on dates, you made it with your instrument.
[Question from the audience] What can we do to save jazz?
I think that taking chances is the beginning. Being unafraid of losing this and that, jobs, friends. You dont have to have the extreme you see in biographies of Van Gogh, always being by himself or arguing with others, but youve got a lot of leeway. Knowing the difference between what youre told and what you find out for yourself; starting as an individual, being alone. We dont have to preserve jazz; we have to start preserving the stuff that comes before all of that.
[Question from the audience] Can you talk about playing with Miles Davis?
I had the most fun playing with Miles Davis, and John Coltrane told me that, too. Now, the same kind of fun is happening with John Patitucci and Brian Blade and Danilo Perez, and over the years I had fun playing with Joe Zawinul and Herbie Hancock. But Miles was a source kind of guy. You know how Captain Marvel would go to Delphi, to get his shazam stuff together? Miles was like that, and he was a buddy, too.
I stay away from calling people best friends, because best friends are always becoming; but Herbie, Joe, were all becoming better and better friends. There's no end to this growth. Were older now, we talk from time to time. I talk to Sonny Rollins on the phone once or twice a year, Horace Silver, Benny Golson. Gil Evans came to my home, unannounced, just before he passed away. I guess I'd better do a book, and keep it straight.
WAYNE SHORTER IN 2013
MUSIC INTERVIEWS
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
Wayne Shorter On Jazz: 'How Do You Rehearse The Unknown?'
by NPR STAFF
February 02, 2013
Wayne Shorter turns 80 this year. His newest album is called 'Without a Net.'
The New York Times doesn't mince words when it writes, "Wayne Shorter is generally acknowledged to be jazz's greatest living composer."
Going back to his days jamming with John Coltrane fresh out of the Army, Shorter has seemed to move, Zelig-like, through some of the most important combos in jazz — from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, to his days with Miles Davis, to the groundbreaking fusion band Weather Report.
As Shorter approaches his 80th birthday, he's just reunited with the label that championed him as a bandleader back in the 1960s, Blue Note Records. On the new album Without a Net, he leads a quartet with whom he's spent more than a decade through live recordings and some striking new compositions.
First Listen
Hear 'Without A Net' In Its Entirety
Speaking with NPR's Laura Sullivan, Shorter says he absorbed a common principle from Davis, Coltrane, Blakey and his other great peers and mentors: They left their musicians alone.
"This music, it's dealing with the unexpected," he adds. "No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?"
Hear more of the conversation, including Shorter's Miles Davis impression, by clicking the audio link on this page.
Wayne Shorter On Jazz: 'How Do You Rehearse The Unknown?' : NPR
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
Wayne Shorter On Jazz: 'How Do You Rehearse The Unknown?'
by NPR STAFF
February 02, 2013
Wayne Shorter turns 80 this year. His newest album is called 'Without a Net.'
The New York Times doesn't mince words when it writes, "Wayne Shorter is generally acknowledged to be jazz's greatest living composer."
Going back to his days jamming with John Coltrane fresh out of the Army, Shorter has seemed to move, Zelig-like, through some of the most important combos in jazz — from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, to his days with Miles Davis, to the groundbreaking fusion band Weather Report.
As Shorter approaches his 80th birthday, he's just reunited with the label that championed him as a bandleader back in the 1960s, Blue Note Records. On the new album Without a Net, he leads a quartet with whom he's spent more than a decade through live recordings and some striking new compositions.
First Listen
Hear 'Without A Net' In Its Entirety
Speaking with NPR's Laura Sullivan, Shorter says he absorbed a common principle from Davis, Coltrane, Blakey and his other great peers and mentors: They left their musicians alone.
"The six years I was with Miles, we never talked about music. We never had a rehearsal," Shorter says. "Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that's required to sound like jazz. For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.' The effort to break out of something is worth more than getting an A in syncopation."
"This music, it's dealing with the unexpected," he adds. "No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?"
Hear more of the conversation, including Shorter's Miles Davis impression, by clicking the audio link on this page.
Wayne Shorter On Jazz: 'How Do You Rehearse The Unknown?' : NPR
www.npr.org
Shorter says that in combos led by John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Art Blakey, he learned a crucial rule of playing music
Shorter says that in combos led by John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Art Blakey, he learned a crucial rule of playing music
http://wayneshorterdoc.com/about-us/
WAYNE SHORTER: ZERO GRAVITY
For over 50 years composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter has shattered the limitations of jazz with his transcendent musicality. His iconic body of work as a solo artist, as a part of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, the famed Miles Davis Quintet and fusion pioneers Weather Report, has defined and redefined jazz for generations.
Wayne Shorter is a multiple Grammy Award-winner whose compositions have become jazz standards and whose unique approach to saxophone has forever changed how the instrument is played. His stunning creativity is powered by his fiercely spiritual lifestyle built upon a Buddhist philosophy. Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity is a complete and intimate portrait of this mythical figure, peeling away the enigmatic aura of his legacy to reveal the essence of this landmark artist. The film is expected to be completed by 2015.
Producer/Director Dorsay Alavi has been a longtime friend and documentarian of Shorter since they met in 1994 when Verve Records hired her to produce and direct a video for the release of High Life. In 2006, the seeds for a documentary on Shorter’s life were planted when Alavi began filming Shorter’s tour with his groundbreaking Quartet.
In 2013, a successful crowd funding campaign along with the Herb Alpert Foundation gave the project partial funds to begin production. Filmmaker Dorsay Alavi began principle photography on the documentary to celebrate Wayne Shorter’s 80th birthday. She has had unprecedented access to his creative process, family life and long time collaborators and friends such as Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell and Carlos Santana.
Over the next 12 months, Alavi will continue to follow Shorter over several countries, interviewing prolific artists, collaborators such as Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, Jimmy Heath, Dave Holland, Ron Carter, The BBC Orchestra, The Orpheus Orchestra, Rene Fleming, Esperanza Spalding, Terri Lyne Carrington, Joni Mitchell, Milton Nascimentos and many others who have been impacted by Shorter’s music.
In his own words, Shorter will share personal and creative exchanges with John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Miles Davis and many others. Family and close friends will share pivotal moments in his personal life and how he overcame adversity by transforming his life through his Buddhist practice. His moral courage, his enlightened vision of life reflects his commitment towards creating world peace and positive social change. For many who have had the opportunity to know him personally and professionally, he has been not only a source of inspiration but a life mentor.
The innovative world of Wayne Shorter is diverse, progressive and unique. Books, movies, science fiction, mythology and philosophy have informed his music and had a profound impact on all aspects of his life. This documentary will give viewers insight into Shorter’s history with interviews and archival footage of his prolific years as a sideman and composer. The film will further delve into his fantastical imagination with animated images as well as a first hand look into his artistic process.
In Shorter’s rare case, he is even more prolific and groundbreaking now in his 80’s than he was in the last five decades. This documentary will not only capture the depth of his legacy but his current modern orchestral compositions and collaborations with world renowned orchestras and his own stellar Wayne Shorter Quartet.
Wayne Shorter plays music to be more human. By giving our audience the freedom to experience his music without any constraints or preconceived ideas of what jazz is or should be, we have the rare opportunity to celebrate the history and musical legacy of a jazz legend in the present tense while taking a humanistic journey into the fruits of the unknown with his next creative venture … ZERO GRAVITY
http://wayneshorterdoc.com/wayne-shorters-handprint-at-solidarity-of-arts-walk-of-fame/
http://wayneshorterdoc.com/
Wayne Shorter gives his handprint at the Solidarity of Arts Walk of Fame in Gdansk, Poland. Photo by Marcus Miller.
https://www.facebook.com/WayneShorterDocumentary
http://jazztimes.com/articles/150476-all-for-wayne
All for Wayne
A fundraising event for an icon becomes an all-star tribute
12/24/14
On Sept. 28, Los Angeles’ posh Bel Air neighborhood played host to a fundraising dinner and concert in support of Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity, filmmaker Dorsay Alavi’s in-progress documentary on the life and music of the game-changing composer and saxophonist.
Presented on a breeze-kissed outdoor stage at the estate of Dr. Frank and Shelley Litvack, the evening united longtime and latter-day Shorter collaborators for a program of tunes mainly composed by Shorter, along with interview clips from Alavi’s film.
The music kicked off with an enigmatic solo feature from pianist Herbie Hancock, who thanked an audience brought together by “love of the arts, love of humanity … love of Wayne.” (Among those in attendance were architect Frank Gehry and actors Alfre Woodard and Don Cheadle; the latter is director and star of the upcoming Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, for which Hancock composed the score.) The performers, under the direction of drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, paid tribute to Shorter’s musical and metaphysical breadth. Vocalist Lalah Hathaway graced the Gershwin/Heyward standard “Summertime” with acrobatic melismatic effects and a wistful wordless solo, while Hancock and bassist Marcus Miller worked Shorter’s “Beauty and the Beast” into a righteous groove, flecked with spacey extrapolations from keyboardist Russell Ferrante. Lizz Wright’s vocals quite appropriately soared on Neville Potter’s lyric for Chick Corea’s “Open Your Eyes, You Can Fly,” her powerful voice complemented by an intensely felt solo from guitarist Matthew Stevens. Simply commanding the stage, Dee Dee Bridgewater was simultaneously regal and heartbreakingly vulnerable on “Long Time Ago,” her marriage of Shorter’s “Footprints” with lyrics about her own African ancestry, and she was joined by the funkified alto saxophone of Josh Johnson for a ripping medley of Horace Silver’s
“The Jody Grind” and the Davis/Ron Carter composition “Eighty One.” The evening featured commentary from Blue Note Records president Don Was, who reminisced about rediscovering his sense of self during his hardscrabble Michigan college days through repeated listens to side two of Shorter’s Blue Note classic Speak No Evil. Actor/comedian Sinbad garnered guffaws when he attempted to play one perfect note on a trumpet “I bought last week.” The interview clips from Alavi’s documentary showcased collaborators like Wayne Shorter Quartet bassist John Patitucci, who declared that “the spirit of God was resting on the stage” when they first played together, and notables like Berklee president Roger Brown, who praised Shorter’s encouragement of young musicians to “play music for the kind of world you want to be in.” Also from the film, operatic soprano Renée Fleming said Shorter “lives on an artistic plane most of us can’t comprehend,” while singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell compared his “onomatopoeic” conception of musical color to that of Debussy and Beethoven.
Praising his stature within the jazz community as “interstellar … universal … definitely eternal,” bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding welcomed Shorter to the stage. The guest of honor was his mysteriously compelling self, reminding the audience that “we’re all on this spaceship Earth together. … We have to transition from being mostly followers to leaders.” Shorter joined the band for Milton Nascimento’s “Encontros e Despedidas,” his spare, passionate soprano saxophone in a pas de deux with Spalding’s emphatic yet lilting Portuguese vocal. British songstress Corinne Bailey Rae caressed a yearning rendition of Mitchell’s “River” and her own composition “Like a Star,” for which she took up the acoustic guitar.
Throughout Rae’s numbers, Shorter evinced a mastery of space equal to that of his old bandleader Davis; his phrases were judiciously placed, sharp yet ever attuned to the music’s emotional moment. The finale saw Shorter in duet with longtime colleague Hancock, the two musicians trading ethereal and haunting bursts of song.
The program’s speakers and performers made clear the necessity of completing a film like Zero Gravity to preserve the now 81-year-old Shorter’s legacy for future generations of jazz players and listeners. But they also frequently evoked the concept of eternity as the evening celebrated Shorter as one of jazz’s most enduring exploratory forces. Summing it up best, Hancock said, “I’ve known him for almost 50 years … and he’s only 8 years old.”
Presented on a breeze-kissed outdoor stage at the estate of Dr. Frank and Shelley Litvack, the evening united longtime and latter-day Shorter collaborators for a program of tunes mainly composed by Shorter, along with interview clips from Alavi’s film.
The music kicked off with an enigmatic solo feature from pianist Herbie Hancock, who thanked an audience brought together by “love of the arts, love of humanity … love of Wayne.” (Among those in attendance were architect Frank Gehry and actors Alfre Woodard and Don Cheadle; the latter is director and star of the upcoming Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, for which Hancock composed the score.) The performers, under the direction of drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, paid tribute to Shorter’s musical and metaphysical breadth. Vocalist Lalah Hathaway graced the Gershwin/Heyward standard “Summertime” with acrobatic melismatic effects and a wistful wordless solo, while Hancock and bassist Marcus Miller worked Shorter’s “Beauty and the Beast” into a righteous groove, flecked with spacey extrapolations from keyboardist Russell Ferrante. Lizz Wright’s vocals quite appropriately soared on Neville Potter’s lyric for Chick Corea’s “Open Your Eyes, You Can Fly,” her powerful voice complemented by an intensely felt solo from guitarist Matthew Stevens. Simply commanding the stage, Dee Dee Bridgewater was simultaneously regal and heartbreakingly vulnerable on “Long Time Ago,” her marriage of Shorter’s “Footprints” with lyrics about her own African ancestry, and she was joined by the funkified alto saxophone of Josh Johnson for a ripping medley of Horace Silver’s
“The Jody Grind” and the Davis/Ron Carter composition “Eighty One.” The evening featured commentary from Blue Note Records president Don Was, who reminisced about rediscovering his sense of self during his hardscrabble Michigan college days through repeated listens to side two of Shorter’s Blue Note classic Speak No Evil. Actor/comedian Sinbad garnered guffaws when he attempted to play one perfect note on a trumpet “I bought last week.” The interview clips from Alavi’s documentary showcased collaborators like Wayne Shorter Quartet bassist John Patitucci, who declared that “the spirit of God was resting on the stage” when they first played together, and notables like Berklee president Roger Brown, who praised Shorter’s encouragement of young musicians to “play music for the kind of world you want to be in.” Also from the film, operatic soprano Renée Fleming said Shorter “lives on an artistic plane most of us can’t comprehend,” while singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell compared his “onomatopoeic” conception of musical color to that of Debussy and Beethoven.
Praising his stature within the jazz community as “interstellar … universal … definitely eternal,” bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding welcomed Shorter to the stage. The guest of honor was his mysteriously compelling self, reminding the audience that “we’re all on this spaceship Earth together. … We have to transition from being mostly followers to leaders.” Shorter joined the band for Milton Nascimento’s “Encontros e Despedidas,” his spare, passionate soprano saxophone in a pas de deux with Spalding’s emphatic yet lilting Portuguese vocal. British songstress Corinne Bailey Rae caressed a yearning rendition of Mitchell’s “River” and her own composition “Like a Star,” for which she took up the acoustic guitar.
Throughout Rae’s numbers, Shorter evinced a mastery of space equal to that of his old bandleader Davis; his phrases were judiciously placed, sharp yet ever attuned to the music’s emotional moment. The finale saw Shorter in duet with longtime colleague Hancock, the two musicians trading ethereal and haunting bursts of song.
The program’s speakers and performers made clear the necessity of completing a film like Zero Gravity to preserve the now 81-year-old Shorter’s legacy for future generations of jazz players and listeners. But they also frequently evoked the concept of eternity as the evening celebrated Shorter as one of jazz’s most enduring exploratory forces. Summing it up best, Hancock said, “I’ve known him for almost 50 years … and he’s only 8 years old.”
Originally published in December 2014
Wayne Shorter is one of the musical geniuses of this century. He ranks among Ellington, Parker, Monk and Coltrane both as an improviser and as a composer. His influence on several generations of musicians is evident and speaks for itself. For nearly three decades he has been a prolific composer, always developing and working with new concepts and ideas. Like Miles Davis he has refused to stagnate and has had the ability to leave music that he loves behind in order to develop and explore. As a saxophonist he has it all, from the relentless swinging tenor with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers to the lyrical and romantic soprano saxophone on many later recordings. He has during his career always belonged to the foremost and ground-breaking bands at the time: Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, the legendary Miles Davis Quintet, the late 60's Miles Davis, Weather Report and currently his own Wayne Shorter Group. His own current group is one of the most successful and sought after acts on the jazz scene today.
Shorter was born in Newark, New Jersey, on August 26, 1933. His first creative sparks were not shown in music but in painting and sculpting. He was admitted to the Newark Arts High School and did not start to study music until he was 16. He was given a clarinet from his grandmother and started taking lessons with a local band leader. Soon he was to be exposed to the great jazz masters of the time. He went to hear performances by such acts as Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker and just about everybody else that was on the scene at the time. After falling in love with this music he then got a tenor saxophone, switched to the music major during the last year of high school and started a band that he called The Group. He was now completely immersed in transcribing arrangements and compositions, especially from the bands that Dizzy Gillespie led at the time. He claims that the broad range he now has on his soprano comes from playing trumpet parts on his clarinet.
After graduation with honors in music and art from Newark Arts High School, he enrolled at New York University, majoring in music education. During these four years he started to do gigs around New York, sitting in at jam sessions at Birdland and all the jazz clubs that were blooming at the time. Just as he was about to get recognition he was drafted into the Army. He played with the Army band in Washington D.C. and during his stay there played a couple of concerts with Horace Silver's band. After leaving the army things really started to take off for Shorter. One of the most important experiences of Shorter's musical life was about to take place, namely his relationship with John Coltrane. They would practice and jam together, sharing conceptual ideas and even playing gigs together. Coltrane had heard about Shorter and was very exited about his playing, especially since he could relate to the way Shorter was trying new concepts and also stretching the limits of the tenor sax. Coltrane supposedly had said to Shorter that he liked the way he was "scrambling them eggs" referring to Shorter's highly imaginative sheets of sound. They both were practicing from violin and harp etude books in order to play wider leaps and intervals and these wide intervals became one of the trade marks of Shorter's improvisations and compositions. It was around this time Coltrane wrote Giant Steps using a tri-tonic system to break away from the be-bop and standard type of changes. One can hear how Shorter emulated this, and one can hear some clear evidence of Giant Steps soloing patterns in his solo on his composition E.S.P., from the 1964 Miles Davis Quintet album with the same name. Coltrane's influence on the overall mood is also obvious on most of the Blue Note recordings that Shorter did as a leader. Shorter also used Coltrane's rhythm sections or at least part of them on these recordings. The 26-year-old Shorter played with Coltrane one memorable night in December 1958, at Birdland. Among the other musicians were Freddie Hubbard, Cedar Walton and Elvin Jones. Cannonball and Nat Adderly's band were playing opposite Coltrane's band. Shorter says about this gig,"We had a rehearsal at his house, and that night we were playing. Opposite us were Cannonball with his brother Nat. Cannonball and Trane were working with Miles then, but they had time off and they split up and got different bands. Elvin Jones was on drums that night. It was historic; everybody realized it- we tore that place up. Ten years later when I went to California, people were still talking about it.- 'Yeah we heard about it out here, that memorable Monday night at Birdland.' That's when Trane started playing all the new stuff he had written. It was a new wave. 1"Shorter has said about his practicing during this time, "I used to practice about 6 hours a day, play the first thing that came into my head, which was always harder than a regular exercise."2
In 1959 Coltrane was about to leave Miles Davis' band and had been wanting to for a while. He told Shorter if he wanted to do it it was all his. Shorter called Davis only to get the response of "If I need a tenor player I'll get one." Obviously Davis did not know that Coltrane was about to leave his group, and next time he saw Coltrane he told him, "Don't be telling nobody to call me like that, and if you want to quit then just quit, but why don't you do it after we get back from Europe?" 3 Instead Shorter joined Maynard Ferguson's band for a short stint. This was upon recommendation of pianist Joe Zawinul. Zawinul and Shorter were at this time socializing a lot but did not play together other than with Ferguson' band. It would take another 10 years before they started their collaboration in Weather Report. After sitting in one night with Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers Shorter was offered the gig and joined them for a 5 year stint. After being with Blakey for a short while he was offered the gig with Miles Davis but opted to stay with the Jazz Messengers.
Together with Lee Morgan, Shorter formed one of the most formidable front lines at the time. The Messengers was a hard- swinging band driven by the propulsive, down to earth drummer Art Blakey. Even though the music became too limited for Shorter after a while, there is no doubt that it was here he developed a strong connection to the roots of jazz and built the foundation that allowed him to stretch and experiment later on. Shorter became the musical director and his compositions and arrangements would characterize the sound of the Jazz Messengers for the 5 years he was with them. During his stay with Blakey he also recorded several albums as a leader.
In 1964 Shorter left Art Blakey and spent the summer practicing and composing. Miles Davis returned from a tour of Japan and found out that Shorter had left Art Blakey. He then asked everybody in his band to call Shorter and convince him to join the quintet. And so he did. The first engagement was at the Hollywood Bowl in late 1964. "Getting Wayne made me feel good , because with him I just knew some great music was going to happen. And it did; it happened real soon,"4 Miles says in his autobiography. "If I was the inspiration and wisdom and the link for this band, Tony (Williams) was the fire, the creative spark; Wayne was the idea person, the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did; Ron (Carter) and Herbie (Hancock) were the anchors."5 Miles also says: "At first Wayne had been know as free-form player, but playing with Art Blakey for those years and being the band's musical director had brought him back in somewhat. He wanted to play freer than he could in Art's band, but he didn't want to be all the way out, either. Wayne has always been someone who experimented with form instead of someone who did it without form. That's why I thought he was perfect for where I wanted to see the music I played go. Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didn't work, then he broke them, but with a musical sense; he understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your own satisfaction and taste. Wayne was out there on his own plane, orbiting around his own planet. Everybody else in the band was walking down here on earth. He couldn't do in Art Blakey's band what he did in mine; he just seemed to bloom as a composer when he was in my band. That's why I say he was the intellectual musical catalyst for the band in his arrangement of his musical compositions that we recorded." 6 Shorter said about playing with Miles: "Everyone noticed a difference, it wasn't bish-bash, sock- em-dead routine we had with Blakey, with every solo a climax. With Miles, I felt like a cello, I felt viola, I felt liquid, dot-dash, and colors started really coming..." 7 This quintet dissolved in 1967-68 because Davis was again trying to break new ground. He brought in a lot of different musicians and a period of experimenting took place. Shorter still appeared on Davis' albums as late as 1969. During his stay with Davis he recorded a substantial amount of records as a leader, most of them on Blue Note. It is interesting to note that the music on these recordings although recorded during the same era as the Davis Quintet are much less experimental and stays closer to the jazz tradition. This is with the exception of Etcetera (1965) and the albums recorded after 1968.
In 1970 Shorter formed Weather Report together with Joe Zawinul and Miroslav Vitous. He had played with both in different constellations during 1968-69, with Davis and in his own formations as a leader. Weather Report was to be at the forefront of the jazz fusion era, breaking new ground for 15 years, and a new unique sound was born. He shared the role as composer with Zawinul on the 15 albums that they recorded. His improvisations became almost minimalistic on some of the recordings, since compositions and group playing was the main focus of the group. His ability to think compositionally while improvising, and to say a lot with a few right notes, still makes his solos very interesting. The freedom to stretch out on longer improvisations is evident on their live album 8:30 recorded in 1979.
In 1985 Weather Report and the collaboration with Zawinul came to an end. Shorter started his own band and recorded Atlantis. This was his first album as leader since Native Dancer, a collaboration with Brazilian singer-composer Milton Nascimento that was recorded in 1974. The music on Atlantis was all through-composed, almost a form of jazz-fusion chamber music. It seemed like this was material that he did not get to record with Weather Report and now, not having to compromise, he got to control every aspect of the music. The writing on this album is very complex and utilizes many different compositional techniques. It also has an interesting blend of acoustic and synthesized instruments in the arrangements. There is hardly any improvisation except for short soloistic statements similar to the Weather Report recordings. As with Weather Report though, the same material is opened up for long improvisations in live performances and contains a lot of group interaction. After Atlantis two more albums were released, Phantom Navigator in 1987 and Joy Ryder in 1989. These are similar in style but have more of a high-tech sound, with sequenced drum and keyboard parts.
The Artist and Philosopher
Some of the words that come to mind when trying to describe Wayne Shorter are: mysterious, intuitive, spontaneous, artistic, imaginative, universal, free, black esthetics, naive, swinging, traditional and unpredictable.
The early curiosity and involvement in painting and sculpting is something that became a part of Shorter's artistry throughout his career. The majority of his tunes have very vivid images that go with them. When talking about his compositions Shorter always mentions a particular feeling or mood that he was thinking about when he was writing a particular tune. Also specific movements, shapes and even stories and science-fiction become the script that the composition is based on. Sometimes it is the overall mood and sometimes there is a very specific and more direct relation. An example of the latter would be the tune Lester Left Town (Art Blakey-The Big Beat) which is about Lester Young. Shorter illustrates the way Lester Young walked with the melody line. Shorter says,"He had a way of walking, and the descending chromatic notes, which have a tempo of their own, pictorialize Lester Young walking at a fast pace." 8 The strong igniting role that these images played is evident when Shorter comments on how certain compositions were conceived. He says about Lester Left Town : " I was sort of thinking about the 40's and I was in my 20's when I wrote it. I was thinking, "Lester Young". The writing just went by itself." 9 Another example of a direct physical image used as inspiration is the tune The Last Silk Hat (Atlantis). This tune was written for Nat "King" Cole and specifically his ambidextrousness at playing the piano and singing at the same time. Saying that these images would serve as inspiration for his composing seems like an understatement. Rather, these images seems to be crucial as the creative spark that sets forth the process of composing and stays closely knit to the final product.
On his pivotal album Speak No Evil , recorded in 1964 for Blue Note, Shorter drew on folklore, black magic and legends. About the collection of compositions on this album Shorter says, "I was thinking of misty landscapes with wild flowers and strange, dimly-seen shapes- the kind of places where folklore and legends are born." He goes on. "I'm getting more stimuli from things outside of my self. Before I was concerned with myself, with my ethnic roots, and so forth. But now, and especially from here on, I'm trying to fan out, to concern myself with the universe instead of just my own corner of it." 10 All the compositions on this album have very specific images in mind. Witch Hunt is about the Salem witch burnings. Fee-fi-fo-fum is inspired by a couplet spoken by the giant in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. About Dance Cadaverous Shorter says, " I was thinking of some of these doctor pictures in which you see a classroom and they're getting ready to work on a cadaver." 11 Speak No Evil is the last part of the saying, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil "This piece is about caution, be careful about what you say: What comes out of your mouth can cause some horrendous effects or beautiful ones." 12 says Shorter in the liner notes. Shorter's inspiration can also come from more real life experiences as is the case with Infant Eyes , which is a ballad referring to Shorter's daughter, Miyako. Wildflower is simply an ode to a wild flower.
Despite these statements that suggest a departure from the jazz and other black music traditions, the music on Speak No Evil is still imbued with blues and swinging rhythms. The development here does not mean leaving the roots behind but rather expanding the range of influences and emotions. This is of course crucial for any art form if it is to develop and not stagnate.
As an improviser Shorter never succumbs to patterns and practiced "licks". There are many trademarks and melodic materials that he uses in his writing and improvising, but these are motives that are his own and are used in a very flexible manner. He will use quotes from his own solos from 20 years ago in his playing today, but these melodic motives are so strong that although they were improvised at the time they have become part of the composition. His composer and improviser self are very symbiotic and work closely together. His compositions never become contrived and academic but rather seem to spring out like improvised spontaneous phrases that are left alone to grow on their own as much or little as they want. A good example of this is the classic Nefertiti (Nefertiti , Miles Davis Quintet, 1967) which he claims to have written in less than 3-4 minutes. His improvisations are much the same way, especially after he joined Miles Davis and stepped into his own leaving the hard-bop tenor identity behind. He does not force himself or any preconceived ideas on the music. Instead, he has full confidence in himself as a medium for creativity, and lets the music play through him. He also has the prowess to stick to the essence of the song, and not play music that is far removed from the compositions. One can hear the original melody of the composition following his lines like a shadow. He also takes himself and the musical ideas that come out of his instrument very seriously. Every idea is treated with respect and won't be dismissed and hurriedly buried by another unrelated line. Even in his most erratic flurries of sounds he can at any moment state fragments from the melody. As a listener one can feel the sense of cohesion at all times.
In his later works, Atlantis, Phantom Navigator and Joy Ryder, his interest in science-fiction movies and extraterrestrial phenomena are evident. Shorter says about Flagships from Phantom Navigator, "This piece was actually meant to be cinematic. It's a large field, late evening, a big huge UFO descending and hovering over this field. Two children actually starting out to play and getting entangled in something that is totally alien to them, but at the same time, experiencing, from a listening point of view, something that's warm with excitement." He goes on to say, "I wanted to have this piece of music result in anticipation for the future." 13 Forbidden Plan-iT ! from the same album is also the title of a 50's science-fiction movie, the first movie to use an all electronic sound track. From the same album titles like Condition Red and Remote Control are actual movie titles. "Yamanja was inspired by the Brazilian legend of the goddess of the sea." 14 says Shorter about another title.
The early shorter compositions are stylistically in a typical neo-bop style with 8th note runs in the melody over II-V oriented progressions. There are also many Dom7 passing chords and deceptive resolutions that give them Shorter's distinctive touch. A lot of typical be-bop tunes were written over familiar chord changes from standards. Charlie Parker's Donna Lee was written over the chord changes to Indiana . George Gershwin's I Got Rhythm is another example of a tune that has had hundreds of different melodies written for it. In these cases it was often the familiar harmonic progressions, with logical and clear tonal centers, that gave a composition cohesiveness. The melody could afford to be very flexible and less "catchy" or singable because the harmony provided stability. What Shorter started to do was to have the melody give cohesiveness over unfamiliar, complex, and vagrant harmonic progressions. Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk and others had, of course, already started to compose independently of these familiar chord changes. Monk especially had written very complex progressions. In the light of this one can say that Shorter's compositions were not at this point that ahead of their time or by any means revolutionary. What put them in a class by themselves was Shorter's distinctive personal voice that is even today unmistakable. Shorter further developed this on the albums that he recorded as a leader for Blue Note Records. Tunes like Armageddon, Deluge, Speak No Evil, Witch Hunt and Wild Flower have melodies that are very simple. They have none of the complex 8th note runs and melodic twists typical of 50's be-bop. Instead the melodies are very limited in terms of pitch set and the rhythms are spacious and repetitive. Some of the melodies (Armageddon and Deluge ) stick almost exclusively to a minor pentatonic scale. This scale is also the basis for the blues scale and therefore these tunes have a very "bluesy" character. As a contrast to the simple inside melodic part of the tune there is always a bridge, that provides variation and interest enough to make the composition complete. What also provides variation and makes these compositions very different from earlier writing is the harmony. Underneath these quite singable and simple sounding melodies lie very complex harmonic progressions. What we get is a perfect balance between complexity and simple lyricism. Understanding this relation between melody and harmony is also often the key to learning how to improvise over Shorter's tunes. Just like the melody bridges the distance between the chords, one can improvise in a similar linear manner to achieve an organic connection between the chords. A mix of a linear and vertical approach works best, as does of course staying close to the melody. The harmonic progressions break the common written and unwritten rules, and especially the root motion changes its role from providing simple movements in 4'ths and 5'ths to being vagrant and taking very unexpected paths. Due to Shorter's uncanny sense for tension and release, and an obvious knowledge of the basics of harmony, we still feel the organic flow of logical harmonic progressions. One important contributor to this is the fact that Shorter never over-writes, i.e. he has very good sense of when to stop introducing more new music material. Especially since the unfamiliar and often very charged harmonic motions give away so much more information than what regular diatonic progressions would do, it is very important as a composer to be able to "hear" when the "painting" has had the final stroke. In Shorter's writing from this time, and especially through the Miles Davis Quintet period, one can also have a sense that in the composing process the melody and harmony take turns unfolding the composition. As a listener one is equally drawn to listen to the melody at times and to the chords at other times. In Shorter's writing for Miles Davis Quintet there is also an openness inherent in the compositions which allows the rest of the band to fully explore the song with improvisational statements. Herbie Hancock's unmistakable genius at reharmonization and both rhythmic and harmonic embellishment was here at its peak. Tony Williams' propulsive and rhythmic inventiveness was allowed to flourish in the space that was built into the compositions. Shorter's harmony also freed up the bass role and Ron Carter was a master at changing the root of a chord, sometimes staying on a pedal point throughout an extended section and thus making a section having a modal sound. All this took place at the same time as he was providing the band with cohesiveness, swing and rhythmic interest. Miles Davis steered the "ship" and gave it soul, connected it with the past. Above all, he had an explicit sense for when to bring everybody, and the music, back and therefore not allow the "painting" to get blurry. On later recordings, when the same members, without Davis, play the same material with the same concept of interplay, the music takes on a nearly grotesque quality of overplaying. This is of course in comparison with the original setting. What made this whole process possible was the chemistry between the musicians, the deeply rooted sense of collective improvisation stemming back to the African roots of musical and social sensibilities. Although they allowed themselves a lot of individualistic freedom the whole did not suffer because their common firm roots in the jazz tradition held them together.
Major Changes
The two years before Zawinul, Vitous and Shorter started Weather Report, Shorter had been experimenting in the true sense of the word, both with Miles Davis and on his own projects. The years of 1967-70 were a revolutionary time politically, and it showed in the music of the time also. Davis had started mixing in elements from outside the jazz tradition. Elements from rock, funk and rhythm & blues were present. American styles were not the only ones. Indian and African influences were also present. In a sense it was a kind of "world music" 20 years before the term was invented. It made the biggest change within the rhythm sections, where the acoustic bass was replaced by the electric and the typical jazz drummer was replaced by a funk rock drummer. The other big change was the emergence of electronic instruments, electric pianos and synthesizers. When Shorter together with Zawinul and Vitous started Weather Report it was actually a step back "inside" compared with what Shorter had been doing on his previous albums such as Super Nova, Moto Grosso Feio and Odyssey of Iska. All the new ingredients discussed above were present, and added to that were new recording techniques like over-dubbing and "cutting and pasting". Miroslav Vitous once described how he on one of his compositions played chords on the piano but had the engineer not start recording until after the attack thus creating a spacious and not easily identified sound. What was more "inside" now than before was the sense of composed form structures instead of improvised form. The first album Weather Report (recorded in 1971) is the most loosely conceived. Shorter's compositions did not change drastically from his writing for Miles Davis Quintet in the mid 60's. For example, Shorter's Tears from Weather Report (1971), could also have been played by a regular jazz quintet, but is played on this recording with a back beat and a heap of percussion that add additional colors. Since up through 1968 the rhythms were all based on jazz tradition with influences from Latin, Afro-Cuban and Brazilian rhythms, the biggest change was maybe not in the harmony, melody or form but rather the way the melodic rhythms and overall feel were tailored.
With the change of rhythm section on their album Mysterious Traveler (in 1974) the band took on a funkier and more groove- oriented character. The rhythm section with roots in black American music styles pulled the band closer to the popular rhythms of the time and thus won big audiences world-wide. Now Shorter's compositions started to change more drastically. Particularly the 16th note rhythms and the back beat from funk and rock were what stood out as being what changed in the compositions. The harmony took on a more modal character with sometimes catch 3-4 chord repetitive vamps. The melodies went from being long floating phrases to short and sometimes catchy statements. Shorter's compositions still kept artistic integrity at the same time as they communicated with a large audience.
The main change in Shorter's compositions after Weather Report, on the albums he released as a leader, is the strong presence of counterpoint. On Atlantis, one can hear the very intricate counterpoint between the bass and melody. This is really the first examples of completely written out bass parts although his awareness of the important relation between bass and melody has been present throughout his career. His composition Joy Ryder, from Joy Ryder, is solely built on two counter lines that interact in a sort of improvised free counterpoint with occasional hints at tonal centers. Not until after the main body of the tune, at the solo section is there a clear sense of tonality and actual chord changes. What has not changed in Shorter's music is his keen sense of melody, explicable taste for harmony, his rhythmic understanding and his own unmistaken voice. As a Coda I will let Shorter speak with his own words, " Life to me is like an art, because life has been created by an artist, the Chief Architect."15
Copyright © Bruno Råberg 1995
1 Chambers Jack, Milestones, (Quill), p. 303.
2 Third Earth Productions, Wayne Shorter, (Hal Leonard Pub. Corp.), p. 4.
3 Troupe, Quincy , Davis, Miles , Miles the Autobiography, (Touchstone, Simon and Schuster), p 247.
4 Ibid., p.270.
5 Ibid., p.273.
6 Ibid., p. 273.
7 Third Earth Productions, Wayne Shorter, (Hal Leonard Pub. Corp.), p.5.
8 Third Earth Productions, Wayne Shorter, (Hal Leonard Pub. Corp.), p. 47.
9 Ibid., p.47.
10 Heckman,Don, quote from liner notes to Speak No Evil.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Third Earth Productions, Wayne Shorter, (Hal Leonard Pub. Corp.), p. 32.
14 Ibid., p.106.
15 Shorter, Wayne, Creativity and Change, (Down Beat 12/12/68)
Copyright© Bruno Råberg 1998
http://artsmeme.com/2012/10/23/wayne-shorter-blows-horn-for-l-a-jazz-society/
Wayne Shorter blows his own horn at L.A. Jazz Society tribute
At a swank do at the Universal Hilton Hotel Sunday evening, the Los Angeles Jazz Society, for the past 29 years the labor of love of Flip Manne (she’s the surviving widow of drummer Shelly Manne), honored saxophonist Wayne Shorter as its 2012 Jazz Tribute Honoree.
Movie maven Leonard Maltin, also a jazz lover, smoothly emceed the event.
A grand master of the art form both as composer and player, Shorter, whose jazz pedigree peaked with his mid-1960s membership in Miles Davis’s quintet (or was it his launching of the fusion group Weather Report?), thrilled the audience, all supporters of the Society’s jazz educational programs.
Among the evening’s other honorees was guitarist John Pisano, garnering a Lifetime Achievement Award, and Denise Donatelli, recipient for Jazz Vocalist. A cool cat named Gordon Goodwin accepted the award for arranger/composer, then led his Big Phat Band in his Grammy-winning blast-out of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” So colorful and so well played by Goodwin’s rambunctious 16-piece orchestra.
Presenting Shorter with the award (recent recipients include Arturo Sandoval, Poncho Sanchez, George Duke, and James Moody), singer Patti Austin quipped, “I spoke to Wayne a little while ago and asked him, ‘Why me?’ He told me he thought a woman should present his award. But then he asked me to send him “binders of women”!
“Wayne’s from New Jersey; from the school of innovators. He’s going to turn 80 next year. He’s a Leo-Virgo cusp. He’s my favorite Buddhist,” she said.
Shorter also made comments: “One word keeps coming to me. The word is singularity. When I talk to young people, I ask them what music is for — beyond money and fun. What is anything for? It has to be worth trusting being in the moment. That’s what jazz is. Being in the moment is creating singularity in your life.
“Tragedy is temporary. A single moment is an eternity. Singularity is about handling the unexpected.
“How do you rehearse the unknown? Not to be arrogant or scared … you have to start with courage or fearlessness. You have to turn a train wreck into an opportunity,” he offered, with slight solemnity.
Then breaking into a devilish grin he added, “and … have fun wid’ dat!”
With those words, Shorter repaired across the stage and joined a clutch of jazz kids from UCLA’s Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance. Leading them, he laid down heavy sounds. Launching with his soprano saxophone into a super slow anthem, he built a wall of noise that erupted into the occasional screech, or blaring. It was all deliberate, all muscular; yes, he blew a mighty horn.
A huge thrill to hear Wayne Shorter in such great form.
International Jazz Day 2014: Wayne Shorter: Philosophy of Life Through Jazz:
Published on May 14, 2014
This
discussion features legendary saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter.
Organized by UNESCO and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, the 2014
International Jazz Day Daytime Educational Program took place at the
Osaka School of Music in Osaka, Japan.
THE MUSIC OF WAYNE SHORTER : AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. SHORTER:
First composition on the following album mix is 'Orbits' (1966) by Wayne Shorter:
Wayne Shorter Quartet - Jazz in Marciac 2013:
WAYNE SHORTER QUARTET live in Bonn (2014):
Electronic Beats TV: Electronic Beats meets Jazzfest Bonn.
Watch WAYNE SHORTER QUARTET
(Wayne Shorter, pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade) live and in 1080p HD video at Telekom Forum in Bonn (01 June 2014)
Electronic Beats is the international music program of Deutsche Telekom, which owns an innovative media portfolio and live events across Europe.
At electronicbeats.net, as well as in the award-winning EB magazine, which comes out quarterly, the readers find pioneering music-journalism. Through EB.TV and EB.Radio, which can be used online and via app, users can discover the enjoyment of interviews, recordings of concerts and livestreams as well as the 24/7- radio channel.
Wayne Shorter quartet - zero gravity - "witch hunt”
Wayne Shorter quartet - live at jazz fest Bonn,
Germany june 1st, 2014:
Wayne Shorter - soprano saxophone
danilo perez - piano
john patitucci - bass
brian blade - drums
Wayne Shorter - Native Dancer (1975, Columbia):
Personnel
- Wayne Shorter - Saxophone, Sax (Soprano), Sax (tenor)
- Milton Nascimento - Guitar, Vocals
- David Amaro - Guitar
- Jay Graydon - Guitar
- Herbie Hancock - Piano, Keyboards
- Wagner Tiso - Organ, Piano
- Dave McDaniel - Bass
- Roberto Silva - drums
- Airto Moreira - percussion
Ponta De Areia (5:18)
Beauty And The Beast (5:05)
Tarde (5:49)
Miracle Of The Fishes (4:49)
Diana (3:01)
From The Lonely Afternoons (3:14)
Ana Maria (5:07)
Lilia (7:03)
Joanna's Theme (4:21)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1vdSUAam00
Wayne Shorter Quartet - Jazz a Vienne 2010 [FULL HD]
Track list:
-Zero Gravity (Wayne Shorter, Danilo Perez, John Patitucci, Brian Blade)
- Lotus (Wayne Shorter)
- Myrrh (Wayne Shorter)
- I Go My Way by Myself (Wayne Shorter)
- Joy Rider (Wayne Shorter)
- Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean (Wayne Shorter)
WAYNE SHORTER - tenor sax, soprano sax
DANILO PEREZ - piano
JOHN PATITUCCI - bass
BRIAN BLADE - drums
Wayne Shorter 4tet (Danilo Perez, John Patitucci, Brian Blade):
Live at Jazz a Vienne 2010
Wayne Shorter Quartet & NDR Big Band - JazzBaltica, Salzau, Germany, 2002-07-07
Wayne Shorter Quartet & NDR Big Band, Jazzbaltica, 7 July 2002 DVD (PAL)
Wayne Shorter, ss, ts
Danilo Perez, p
John Patitucci, b
Brian Blade, dr
NDR Big Band
Dieter Glawischnig, cond
Setlist:
1. Children Of The Night (Suite)
2. Angola
3. Prometheus Unbound
4. Meridianne - A Wood Sylph (Shorter & Perez)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw6UqqWneW4
Wayne Shorter, légende du jazz Arte 2013 08
Wayne Shorter 4tet - Joy Ryder [2003]:
Traumzeit Festival Duisburg, Germany - Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, 4th July 2003
Wayne Shorter - Tenor & Soprano Saxophone
Danilo Perez - Piano
John Patitucci - Bass
Brian Blade - Drums
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD6oma1MeI0
Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil (1964)
All Compositions by Wayne Shorter:
1. Witch Hunt (00:00)
2. Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum (08:11)
3. Dance Cadaverous (14:06)
4. Speak No Evil (20:52)
5. Infant Eyes (29:16)
6. Wild Flower (36:11)
Personnel:
Wayne Shorter (saxo tenor)
Freddie Hubbard (trompeta)
Herbie Hancock (piano)
Ron Carter (contrabajo)
Elvin Jones (batería)
Wayne Shorter 4tet - Medley [2003]
Sanctuary 5:16 / On Wings Of Song 4:24/ Go 5:10 /As Far As The Eye Can Eye 6:18 / Aung San Suu Kyi 16:28
Traumzeit Festival Duisburg, Germany - Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, 4th July 2003
Wayne Shorter - Tenor & Soprano Saxophone
Danilo Perez - Piano
John Patitucci - Bass
Brian Blade - Drums
Wayne Shorter Quartet - “Aung San Suu Kyi”
Wayne Shorter quartet - live at the Montreal Jazz Festival 2003:
wayne shorter - saxophone
danilo perez - piano
john patitucci - bass
brian blade - drums
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB8eSc3GM-E
Wayne Shorter Quartet - Live at the Montreal Jazz Festival:
by mbalatimo
16 videos
Wayne Shorter Quartet - "All blues”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cstx6lDLc64&list=PL8D0A215EB4835E24&index=1
Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding—“Footprints”
Wayne Shorter quartet - "Footprints"
Wayne Shorter quartet - live at the montreal jazz festival 2003:
wayne shorter - saxophones,
danilo perez - piano
john patitucci - bass
brian blade - drums
Herbie Hancock & Wayne Shorter "Footprints":
"Footprints" (by Wayne Shorter)Herbie Hancock, piano,
Wayne Shorter, soprano sax
Live in concert in Tokyo, Japan 2012
Weather Report: 'Heavy Weather' (Full Album), 1977:
The
Weather Report Band cofounded by Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul performed from 1971 until 1986. This video collects
the songs from the Heavy Weather Album (1977). The songs are arranged in
a different order than in the original Album.
(00:00) 1. A Remark You Made
(06:47) 2. Harlequin
(10:41) 3. Teen Town
(13:30) 4. Havona
(19:25) 5. The Juggler
(24:23) 6. Rumba Mama
(25:53) 7. Palladium
(30:39) 8. Birdland
(00:00) 1. A Remark You Made
(06:47) 2. Harlequin
(10:41) 3. Teen Town
(13:30) 4. Havona
(19:25) 5. The Juggler
(24:23) 6. Rumba Mama
(25:53) 7. Palladium
(30:39) 8. Birdland
Wayne Shorter - 'Night Dreamer' (Album)-1964
http://www.jazzavienne.com/
http://www.npr.org/event/music/315272550/blue-note-at-75-the-concert-wayne-shorter-quartet
Jazz Night In America Videos
Blue Note At 75
The Concert: Wayne Shorter Quartet
May 28, 2014
by Patrick Jarenwattananon
During the 1960s, Wayne Shorter came to the fore not just for his talent on saxophone, but also for the compositions he created. Whether with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers or with Miles Davis' quintet, or on his own string of solo albums, Shorter's harmonic conception, sense of space and bending of music-theory rules destined many of his tunes to become jazz standards.
Many of those pieces were first recorded on Blue Note way back when, so it only makes sense that Shorter's "new" band (of more than a decade now) is back on the label. At the Blue Note at 75 concert, he and his quartet — with pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade — visit those themes and launch beyond them.
Set List:
"Orbits" (composition by Wayne Shorter)
Credits
Producers: Mito Habe-Evans, Suraya Mohamed, Patrick Jarenwattananon; Audio Engineer: Duke Markos; Videographers: Gabriella Garcia-Pardo, Olivia Merrion, Christopher Parks; Special Thanks: Jason Moran (Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center), Blue Note Records, Mark and Rachel Dibner of the Argus Fund, The Wyncote Foundation; Executive Producer: Anya Grundmann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Shorter
Wayne Shorter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information:
Born August 25, 1933 (age 80)
Newark, New Jersey, United States
Genres Modal jazz, crossover jazz, post-bop, hard bop, jazz fusion, third stream
Occupations Saxophonist, composer
Instruments Tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone
Years active 1958–present
Labels Blue Note, Columbia, Verve
Associated acts Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Weather Report, Joni Mitchell, John Pattitucci
Notable instruments:
Tenor and soprano saxophones
Wayne Shorter (born August 25, 1933) is an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Jazz critic Ben Ratliff of the New York Times has described Shorter as "probably jazz's greatest living small-group composer and a contender for greatest living improviser."[1] Many of Shorter's compositions have become jazz standards. His output has earned worldwide recognition, critical praise and various commendations, including multiple Grammy Awards.[2] He has also received acclaim for his mastery of the soprano saxophone (after switching his focus from the tenor in the late 1960s), beginning an extended reign in 1970 as Down Beat's annual poll-winner on that instrument, winning the critics' poll for 10 consecutive years and the readers' for eighteen.[3]
Shorter first came to wide prominence in the late 1950s as a member of, and eventually primary composer for, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. In the 1960s, he went on to join Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet, and from there he co-founded the jazz fusion band Weather Report. He has recorded over 20 albums as a bandleader.
Contents:
1 Biography
1.1 Early life and career
1.2 With Miles Davis (1964–1970)
1.2.1 Solo Blue Note recordings
1.3 Weather Report (1971–1985)
1.3.1 Solo and side projects
1.4 Recent career
1.4.1 Quartet
2 Personal life
3 Discography
4 Awards
5 References
6 External links
Biography
Early life and career
Shorter was born in Newark, New Jersey, and attended Newark Arts High School[4] from which he graduated in 1952. He loved music, being encouraged by his father to take up the saxophone as a teenager (his brother Alan became a trumpeter). After graduating from New York University in 1956, Shorter spent two years in the U.S. Army, during which time he played briefly with Horace Silver. After his discharge, he played with Maynard Ferguson. In his youth Shorter had acquired the nickname "Mr. Gone", which later became an album title for Weather Report.[5]
In 1959, Shorter joined Art Blakey. He stayed with Blakey for five years, and eventually became the band's musical director
With Miles Davis (1964–1970):
When John Coltrane left Miles Davis' band in 1960 to pursue his own group (after previously trying to leave in 1959), Coltrane proposed Wayne Shorter as a replacement, but Shorter was unavailable. Davis went with Sonny Stitt on tenor, followed by a revolving door of Hank Mobley, George Coleman, and Sam Rivers. In 1964 Davis persuaded Shorter to leave Blakey and join his quintet alongside Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Miles's so-called Second Great Quintet (to distinguish it from the quintet with Coltrane) that included Hancock and Shorter has frequently been cited by musicians and critics as one of the most influential groups in the history of jazz, and Shorter's compositions are a primary reason. He composed extensively for Davis (e.g. "Prince of Darkness", "E.S.P.", "Footprints", "Sanctuary", "Nefertiti", and many others); on some albums, he provided half of the compositions, typically hard-bop workouts with long, spaced-out melody lines above the beat.
Herbie Hancock said of Shorter's tenure in the group: "The master writer to me, in that group, was Wayne Shorter. He still is a master. Wayne was one of the few people who brought music to Miles that didn't get changed."[6] Davis said, "Wayne is a real composer. He writes scores, write the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound. ... Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didn't work, then he broke them, but with musical sense; he understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your own satisfaction and taste."[7]
Shorter remained in Davis's band after the breakup of the quintet in 1968, playing on early jazz fusion recordings including In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew (both 1969). His last live dates and studio recordings with Davis were in 1970.
Until 1968, he played tenor saxophone exclusively. The final album on which he played tenor in the regular sequence of Davis albums was Filles de Kilimanjaro. In 1969, he played the soprano saxophone on the Davis album In a Silent Way and on his own Super Nova (recorded with then-current Davis sidemen Chick Corea and John McLaughlin). When performing live with Miles Davis, and on recordings from summer 1969 to early spring 1970, he played both soprano and tenor saxophones; by the early 1970s, however, he chiefly played soprano.
Solo Blue Note recordings
Simultaneous with his time in the Miles Davis quintet, Shorter recorded several albums for Blue Note Records, featuring almost exclusively his own compositions, with a variety of line-ups, quartets and larger groups including Blue Note favourites such as Freddie Hubbard. His first Blue Note album (of eleven in total recorded from 1964-1970) was Night Dreamer, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in 1964 with Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman and Elvin Jones.
JuJu and Speak No Evil are well known recordings from this era. Shorter's compositions on these albums are notable for their use of:
pentatonic melodies harmonised with pedal points and complex harmonic relationships; structured solos that reflect the composition's melody as much as its harmony; long rests as an integral part of the music, in contrast with other, more effusive, players of the time such as John Coltrane.
The later album The All Seeing Eye was a free-jazz workout with a larger group, while Adam's Apple of 1966 was back to carefully constructed melodies by Shorter leading a quartet. Then a sextet again in the following year for Schizophrenia with his Miles Davis band mates Hancock and Carter plus trombonist Curtis Fuller, alto saxophonist/flautist James Spaulding and strong rhythms by drummer Joe Chambers.
Shorter also recorded occasionally as a sideman (again, mainly for Blue Note) with Donald Byrd, McCoy Tyner, Grachan Moncur III, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, and bandmates Hancock and Williams.
Weather Report (1971–1985)
Following the release of Odyssey of Iska in 1970, Shorter formed the fusion group Weather Report with Miles Davis veteran keyboardist Joe Zawinul. The other original members were bassist Miroslav Vitous, percussionist Airto Moreira, and drummer Alphonse Mouzon. After Vitous' departure in 1973, Shorter and Zawinul co-led the group until the band's break-up in late 1985. A variety of excellent musicians that would make up Weather Report alumni over the years (most notably the revolutionary bassist Jaco Pastorius) helped the band produce many high quality recordings in diverse styles through the years, with funk, bebop, Latin jazz, ethnic music, and futurism being the most prevalent denominators.
Solo and side projects
Shorter also recorded critically acclaimed albums as a bandleader, notably 1974's Native Dancer, which featured his Miles Davis bandmate Herbie Hancock and Brazilian composer and vocalist Milton Nascimento.
In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, he toured in the V.S.O.P. quintet. This group was a revival of the 1960s Miles Davis quintet, except that Freddie Hubbard filled the trumpet chair instead of Miles. Shorter appeared with the same former Davis bandmates on the Carlos Santana double LP The Swing of Delight, for which he also composed a number of pieces.
From 1977 through 2002, he appeared on ten Joni Mitchell studio albums, gaining him a wider audience. He played an extended solo on the title track of Steely Dan's 1977 album Aja.
Recent career
After leaving Weather Report, Shorter continued to record and lead groups in jazz fusion styles, including touring in 1988 with guitarist Carlos Santana, who appeared on This is This!, the last Weather Report disc. There is a concert video recorded at the Lugano Jazz Festival in 1987, with Jim Beard, keyboards, Carl James, bass, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums and Marilyn Mazur, percussion. In 1989, he contributed to a hit on the rock charts, playing the sax solo on Don Henley's song "The End of the Innocence" and also produced the album Pilar by the Portuguese singer-songwriter Pilar Homem de Melo. He has also maintained an occasional working relationship with Herbie Hancock, including a tribute album recorded shortly after Miles Davis's death with Hancock, Carter, Williams and Wallace Roney. He continued to appear on Joni Mitchell's records in the 1990s. Shorter's distinctive sound is also apparent in the soundtrack for the Harrison Ford film The Fugitive, released in 1993.
In 1995, Shorter released the album High Life, his first solo recording for seven years. It was also his debut as a leader for Verve Records. Shorter composed all the compositions on the album and co-produced it with the bassist Marcus Miller. High Life received the Grammy Award for best Contemporary Jazz Album in 1997.
Shorter worked with Hancock once again in 1997, on the much acclaimed and heralded album 1+1. The song "Aung San Suu Kyi" (named for the Burmese pro-democracy activist) won both Hancock and Shorter a Grammy Award.
In 2009, he was announced as one of the headline acts at the Gnaoua World Music Festival in Essaouira, Morocco. His 2013 album Without a Net is his first with Blue Note Records since Odyssey of Iska.
Quartet
In 2000, Shorter formed the first permanent acoustic group under his name, a quartet with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade, playing his own compositions, many of them reworkings of tunes going back to the 1960s. Three albums of live recordings have been released, Footprints Live! (2002), Beyond the Sound Barrier (2005) and Without A Net (2013). The quartet has received great acclaim from fans and critics, especially for the strength of Shorter's tenor saxophone playing. The biography Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter by journalist Michelle Mercer examines the working life of the musicians as well as Shorter's thoughts and Buddhist beliefs.[8] Beyond the Sound Barrier received the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Album.
Shorter's 2003 album Alegría (his first studio album for ten years, since High Life) received the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Album; it features the quartet with a host of other musicians, including pianist Brad Mehldau, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and former Weather Report percussionist Alex Acuña. Shorter's compositions, some new, some reworked from his Miles Davis period, feature the complex Latin rhythms that Shorter specialised in during his Weather Report days.
Personal life
Shorter met Teruka (Irene) Nakagami in 1961. They were later married and had a daughter, Miyako.[9] Some of his compositions are copyrighted as "Miyako Music". Shorter dedicated some pieces to his daughter: "Miyako" and "Infant Eyes". The couple separated in 1964.[10]
Shorter met Ana Maria Patricio in 1964 and they were married in 1970.[10] In 1985, their daughter Iska died of a grand mal seizure at age 14.[1] Ana Maria and the couple's niece Dalila were both killed on July 17, 1996, on TWA Flight 800, while en route to see him in Italy.[11] Dalila was the daughter of Ana Maria Shorter's sister and her husband, jazz vocalist Jon Lucien.[10] In 1999, Shorter married Carolina Dos Santos, a close friend of Ana Maria. He is a Nichiren Buddhist and a member of Sōka Gakkai.[10]
Discography
Main article: Wayne Shorter discography
Title Year Label
Introducing Wayne Shorter 1959 Vee-Jay
Second Genesis 1960 Vee-Jay
Wayning Moments 1962 Vee-Jay
Night Dreamer 1964 Blue Note
JuJu 1964 Blue Note
Speak No Evil 1965 Blue Note
The Soothsayer 1965 Blue Note
Et Cetera 1965 Blue Note
The All Seeing Eye 1965 Blue Note
Adam's Apple 1966 Blue Note
Schizophrenia 1967 Blue Note
Super Nova 1969 Blue Note
Moto Grosso Feio 1970 Blue Note
Odyssey of Iska 1970 Blue Note
Native Dancer with Milton Nascimento 1974 Columbia
Atlantis 1985 Columbia
Phantom Navigator 1986 Columbia
Joy Ryder 1988 Columbia
Carlos Santana and Wayne Shorter - Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1988 with Carlos Santana 1988 Image Entertainment
High Life 1995 Verve
1 + 1 with Herbie Hancock 1997 Verve
Footprints Live! 2002 Verve
Alegría 2003 Verve
Beyond the Sound Barrier 2005 Verve
Without a Net 2013 Blue Note
Awards[edit source]
Down Beat Poll Winner New Star Saxophonist (1962)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Fusion Performance for Weather Report's 8:30 (1979)
Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition for Dexter Gordon's Call Sheet Blues (1987)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Individual or Group for A Tribute to Miles (1994)
Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album for High Life (1996)
Miles Davis Award Wayne Shorter was granted the Miles Davis Award by the Montreal International Jazz Festival. (1996)
Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition for Aung San Suu Kyi (1997)
NEA Jazz Masters (1998)
Honorary Doctorate of Music (1999; Berklee College of Music)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo for In Walked Wayne (1999)
Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition for Sacajawea (2003)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Individual or Group for Alegría (2003)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Individual or Group for Beyond The Sound Barrier (2005)
Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Award Small Ensemble Group of the Year to Wayne Shorter Quartet (2006)
References[edit source]
^ a b Ratliff, Ben. "Music Review: A Birthday Bash With a Harmonious Mix of Guests". The New York Times. December 3, 2008. Retrieved 2013-06-04.
^ Past Winners Search for Wayne Shorter. GRAMMY.com. Retrieved 2013-06-04.
^ Down Beat Poll Archive. DownBeat.com. Retrieved 2013-06-02
^ A Brief History, Newark Arts High School. Accessed August 10, 2008.
^ The Big Takeover: Weather Report – Forecast: Tomorrow (Columbia Legacy) :
^ Len Lyons (1989). "Herbie Hancock". The Great Jazz Pianists: Speaking Of Their Lives And Music. Da Capo Press. p. 274. ISBN 978-0306803437.
^ Davis, Miles; Troupe, Quincy (1990). "Chapter 13". Miles: The Autobiography. Simon and Schuster. p. 274. ISBN 0-671-72582-3.
^ "Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter". allaboutjazz.com. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
^ "Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil". 100greatestjazzalbums.blogspot.com. 1964-12-24. Retrieved 2012-04-04.
^ a b c d "A Separate Peace". People. Retrieved February 21, 2010.
^ "Times Topics" The New York Times. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
External links[edit source]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Wayne Shorter
Essay on Wayne Shorter (Internet archive copy from February 2008)
"An Interview with Wayne Shorter" by Bob Blumenthal, (Jazz.com).
The Complete Wayne Shorter
Wayne Shorter's letter read during Joe Zawinul's funeral
Wayne Shorter discography
Wayne Shorter Quartet with NEC Philharmonia, Boston on AllAboutJazz.com
Wayne Shorter's artist file on Montreal Jazz Festival's website
Wayne Shorter on creativity
