the WAYNE SHORTER thread

Definitely. I think Wayne contributed more compositions to Miles studio work during that time than any other composer...it's a shame more of those weren't played live, though (save "Footprints" and "Masqualero").

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/arts/music/24shor.html
Small and cheery, dressed in I'm-not-going-outside-today clothes and bedroom slippers, Mr. Shorter struggled to set up his Krell home-theater pre-amp to play a CD. I was forming a suspicion that he didn't often listen to music. "Hey, man, the Krell: you ever see the movie 'Forbidden Planet'?" he asked. "There was this planet full of people called the Krells. The explorers from Earth didn't see anybody when they arrived. But they all went to sleep one night in their spacecraft, and you hear the first sound of special effects that really came to the fore in movies - this Chrrmmm! Chroooom! And you see the ground that's been depressed by huge footprints. ..."
i like this interview

yeah sort of seems like a lot of those tunes on the miles records were only played once -- during the recording session!

I don't think I've ever heard a bad Art Blakey album. But I've never listened to anything after Shorter left the group; all the discs I have are from the mid '50s to the mid '60s. It's very possible they became ordinary/pedestrian in the '70s and '80s.

yeah, you can rarely go wrong w/ blakey - though, yeah, i haven't heard much past 1966 or so. the latest one that was knocking me out was Ugetsu.

Finally getting around to Alegria and Beyond the Sound Barrier -- really good! He does an amazing job of not retreading old ground for a musician at such a point in such a career.

When I was a senior in high school the school jazz band got to "open" for Wayne once, and that same night his wife and niece were killed in a plane crash -- it's a really strange and horrible memory/association. He also had a daughter who died of a seizure in the 80s. I think about that a lot when I listen to his later music.

Wow, "Introducing Wayne Shorter" is kind of an overlooked gem, no?

Also it's helping me complete my quest to identify all of the jazz that leonard lopate uses as tag music.

haven't heard "introducing," guess i should check it out!

You add up the Blue Note records that Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock did during the time they were playing with Miles - that has to be one of the more productive periods for any band in any genre.

What's killer about Wayne Shorter's records is that you pretty much just swap parts in Coltrane's quartet on them. Speak No Evil, Juju and Night Dreamer are all amazing ESPECIALLY Speak No Evil, which is as good an any of those jazz records.

I love the 2nd quintet Miles Davis records, but I think Speak No Evil (and really also Maiden Voyage) are just as good as the best stuff that group did.

I'm also a fan of Weather Report although Wayne Shorter did less and less writing in that group deferring to Joe Zawinal as it went on as a composer.

xp It's really nice stuff -- Lee Morgan, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb. Very much a standard hard-bop record in sound but with Shorter's compositional nuances and distinct phrasing. Recorded the same year as Kind of Blue. Overall the band showcases Shorter much better than the Jazz Messengers did -- I always thought he was too introspective and that band called for a bigger, more brash tenor player, but I guess Blakey knew talent.

What's killer about Wayne Shorter's records is that you pretty much just swap parts in Coltrane's quartet on them. Speak No Evil, Juju and Night Dreamer are all amazing ESPECIALLY Speak No Evil, which is as good an any of those jazz records.

That's true, and his tunes interestingly get a fairly different sound and feel out of the same band. Like you can't picture coltrane on those tunes, it's really Wayne's band on those records.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGPQMpjAPxk&feature=related

Native Dancer is such a dope record

favorite record of all time material

What did you guys think of Without a Net? I've been enjoying it this year. I feel like I'm still getting into it but that it's because there's a lot there.

there's a lot there yeah but oh man the quality of those performances

i've never listened to native dancer, which is shameful. i'll fix that.

Without a Net and all of the recent quartet stuff is good but heavy listening. I think it's the kind of thing where I'd really like to see it live and just let myself enter the music fully, which is hard for me to do at home these days.

i've never listened to native dancer, which is shameful. i'll fix that.

welcome to the cool island steely dan record you never knew you needed

otm

plus it's a great gateway to milton nascimiento, so for day 2 on cool island you can check out Clube Da Esquina

yeah, i mean, i love both nascimiento and shorter, just never got to this one. music is magic.

I just finished Michelle Mercer's Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter, which is a good quick read ... he comes across as kind of a spaceman, but a super nice guy

in addition to his Blue Note and Weather Report albums, Footprints prompted me to play some of the Jazz Messenger records, which are awesome

High Life from 1995 was another discovery ... the compositions are not as striking as his earlier work, but I love the orchestral arrangements

The AMG description of Native Dancer sounds great. Definitely sounds different from Without a Net (which I also find to be 'heavy listening')!

(I'm playing dumb a little btw. I know and love some Weather Report and earlier Shorter like Speak No Evil and obv the electric Miles stuff.)

Native Dancer is definitely a go-to summer album

The Without a Net quartet stuff -- it's not that it's hard to listen to in the sense of being gratingly dissonant, it's more like it has this elaborate, challenging to follow narrative that requires a lot of attention.

Having seen that band live, and listened to all the 2000s-era live and studio albums (Footprints Live, Alegría, Beyond the Sound Barrier, Without a Net), I can safely say that any "narrative" is entirely listener-imposed. Those guys are wandering. The fact that they make it compelling speaks to the amazing collective talent onstage, but that is one of the free-est, most up-for-grabs bands in jazz right now, and I don't think any one of 'em knows where any of the other three (especially Shorter) may decide to take the music a minute into the future.

Ha, wow, is Native Dancer ever a different ballgame. Probably what I'll need while packing today.

man, you know what's great? motto grosso feio is great

^^^^Been on a shorter kick over the last few days, listening to it for the first time now. Can concur that it’s wonderful.

There’s something almost cosmic for me about the fact that he’s a common thread between the Miles Davis quintet, my favorite Steely Dan récord, Joni Mitchell and Milton Nascimento, not to mention art Blakey and Brian blade.

Timely thread--just finished his biography. What a weirdo / genius / original. I recommend the book to anyone with even a passing interest in the guy. It's an authorized bio, so not a lot of "dirt" and occasionally borders on hagiography, but if anyone deserves sainthood it's Wayne so it didn't bother me much

what's it called? I'd love to give it a read

Footprints: The Life & Work of Wayne Shorter, by Michelle Mercer. Hope you enjoy it!

favorite part: learning that, as a kid, Wayne created his own sci-fi comic book (there are a few pics of this too!)

any revive that inspires me to dig out Adam's Apple is a good 'un.

xp to PP thanks, will give it a read, for sure

I'm still deep in a Shorter bender, and finding 'etc.' an incredibly strong album, easily as good as any other of his BN releases of the time.

To my ears it's the most Coltrane-like record he ever cut, with a very lean quartet and some Trane-inspired sounds on stuff like the title cut and 'Indian Song'.

It's another testament to the embarrassment of riches that Blue Note amassed that they could leave it in the can for over a decade before it was released and more or less forgotten about until the digital era.

TY for getting me to dig out my copy of Etcetera... and Adam's Apple, which I remembered as also being a leanish traneish quartet rec - and indeed, virtually the same group - Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Joe Chambers, and either Cecil McBee (Etc) or Reggie Workman (AA) on bass. Chambers is a really interesting drummer I think, and his separateness from Elvin Jones does distinguish these albs, or help make them v. much their own good thing.

Thanks, I just happened to listen to Juju, Speak No Evil (still my favorite by far), and the Soothsayer yesterday. Never heard Etcetera until now.

What’s the story of him and his favorite movies again, that he’s watched The Red Shoes about 100 times?

The drumming on the title cut of Et Cetera has a hell of a lot more to do with Spanish Key than Elvin Jones - it's kind of amazing that way- very propulsive but with a light touch. I've listened to it over and over in the last few days alone...

'Barracudas' is great, I love Joe Chambers' playing. Speaking of which, The Almoravid is on Spotify, so that's my next stop. Such a crazy record. The first track sounds like M'Boom meets Steve Reich, which basically means it sounds like Tortoise. Breaking 4/4 down into all kinds of 7s and 9s in a really cool way.

oh man, thanks for the Chambers tip, I'll be playing this in short order.

ok want to give many thanks to you Jordan for the Chambers album. so very, very good.

Cool! It really is a special one.

Fun to hear Richard Davis on electric bass too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/arts/music/wayne-shorter-emanon.html

You’re fond of talking about eternity, and the need to recognize how fleeting and comparatively inconsequential our current moment is. How do you use music to connect with what’s beyond the moment?

To me, a song is not finished. To me, there’s no such thing as a finished anything. All of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, to me, are one. I think of it as having no beginning and no end. Do you know that it took Beethoven eight years to get the first several notes of the second movement of his Fifth Symphony together? So it was no deity that went through him and said, “O.K., genius!” You’ve got to challenge inspiration not yet begun to come out. There’s all kinds of closets, you know.

You hear about people saying, “You gotta get things fast because you only live once.” I think that’s a misnomer right there. Words like “only,” “never,” and all that, they’re crutches. We have to have people who are willing to — I don’t want to say it like this but — go down with the ship. Don’t worry about wealth and fame and all that stuff. It’s up to the person who’s being creative to find ways to emerge and shake up the world of wealth. And we have to do it ourselves. Want to change this stuff? Let’s change it ourselves. It’s like Miles Davis said: “Don’t you ask nobody for nothin’.”

I'm not really interested in the accompanying graphic novel/concept stuff, but his new epic treble album is sounding pretty great on first listen.

The 4 part suite for quartet and chamber orchestra bit of this album has grown on me a lot, haven't even got around to the other 2 discs yet. But the band includes Danilo Perez, so that should be good.

"As an aside, I always loved that in most record store jazz sections it went:

Bobby Short
Wayne Shorter"

hah!

I've watched the first two hours — the second hour is unbelievably tragic, but at the same time you get a lot of insight into the inner workings of Weather Report, which I found fascinating. I also had no idea just how much work he'd done with Joni Mitchell, because I don't listen to her music, but now I might.

This thing is in three parts? So far the first part is excellent. It even made me like Neil deGrasse Tyson again.

Damn, don't have Amazon but I need to watch this.

"Shorter was such a ... erm...unique human"

I saw him play as duo with Herbie in 97 or 98. Before they played Maiden Voyage he gave a rather lengthy explanation that the song was about aliens and space travel.

Boy, I feel terrible not liking Native Dancer. The rhythm section blands out. Much of the album sounds as if I'm overhearing it from an apartment four flights up.

I’m more into the self-titled Milton album with Shorter from around the same time

Took me some getting used to. The first two tracks are really the standout for me, then it gets a little dull but enjoyable until Lilia imo.

Not my favorite record from either artist, but I think Ponto de Areia is sublime.

speak no evil recorded 60 years ago today

Classic

the fact it was recorded on christmas eve is CRAZY

i won't ruin everybody's night by unleashing a torrent of Wayne Shorter Christmas puns, but i am tempted

This remarkable man not only kept incredible records and archives that look like they are as diverse and wonderful as you might expect, but he has willed them to the NY Public Library so that the public will have unfettered access.

Gift link to NYT article -- there are some amazing pictures in there of, e.g., photographic art by Joni Mitchell, lovely letter to Obama, etc.

Seeing his documentary gave me a similar feeling as when I watched Thelonious Monk's
Nothing was going to interfere with the artist freely expressing their vision.
I know I'm romanticising, but it's like they were born with this inherent purpose.

The world can use a little romanticizing right now... that article lifted me when reading the news usually does the opposite. If putting Wayne Shorter on a pedestal is wrong, I don't want to be right

I always like this quote from wayne:

“It’s no great mystery about why things are the way they are. Doubt, denial, fear, trepidation reinforce the artificial barriers to the real, the barriers that keep us from going into the real adventure of eternity. If you don’t believe we have eternity, it doesn’t matter; it’s there. You’ll never be bored. I think you’ll always be you, and I’ll always be me. When you say ‘what is life?’ — well, life is the one time you have an eternal adventure. Sounds like a contradiction. The one time you have an eternal adventure. I like that! It rubs against itself; it makes sparks. To me those sparks are fuel.”

that's great, thanks

damn gonna be thinking about that one, nice. thanks for sharing tyler

yeah, i mean what a guy.

quote is from here which is worthy reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/arts/music/wayne-shorter-happening-and-meandering-a-burst-at-a-time.html

Keep meaning to say I went to the NYPL of the Performing Arts towards the end of July and there was the tail end of some kind of celebration going on and a guy was standing behind a table with some stuff which included a musicians union log and a letter from Wayne about his authorship of the tune "Sanctuary" which I believe Miles wrongly appropriated for himself at the time.

That gentleman turned turned out to be the library curator mentioned in the article. I talked to him for a few minutes about the Shorter collection but I wish I had known more about him beforehand so as to ask him better questions since he himself seems like a really interesting guy.

Man, that’s a great quote!

Yeah, that's beautiful...

:(

RIP beautiful one

RIP indeed....but in 2023 :(

it must be afternoon cuz my brain isn't working

i was just talking about him the other day with my kid, who is a noted steely dan enthusiast, dansplaining how that sax solo on Aja is from him, and he was the same guy we were listening to just a couple days before on an Art Blakey album ripping it up w/Lee Morgan, and then we got to talking about how awesome music was in the '70s, where a band like that could bring in someone like him and he could contribute in his own way without compromising or watering it down, and how a band like that could be so huge at the time, bigger than ever while making a much more difficult album in a lot of ways. so now he's interested in doing a WS deep dive.

https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/art-of-the-story/2026-03-02/palladium-celebrates-the-music-of-wayne-shorter