the WAYNE SHORTER thread

Been jamming a lot of Schizophrenia lately, and have always wanted to check out Super Nova. Don't know much else. Let's call this a S&D thread, shall we?

Super Nova is GREAT.

the all seeing eye!

I mean the classic Blue Note shit is great -- esp JuJu and Speak No Evil

If you can stomach a slight touch of smooth jazz, Native Dancer has amazing moments

Of course there's also Weather Report, all the records he did with the 60s Miles Quintet, etc.

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

Bobby Short
Wayne Shorter

I'm not a huge fan, but I've tried to do some in-depth listening in the past year or two. The All Seeing Eye is a great one, and his last two on Verve - Alegria and Footprints Live - are really pretty terrific; much more abstract than you might expect from a dude his age.

Also his solo on "Aja"!

Super Nova is astounding. Everyone I've played it for says the exact same thing: "THAT'S Wayne Shorter?!" Same thing with the Miles' It's About That Time Fillmore East set.

super nova is totally astonishing, get it asap

Just bought it - found it cheap on Amazon - thanks!

pretty much everything this guy did in the 60s is essential, from the the jazz messengers to the solo blue note stuff to the miles quintet. not sure how he found the time to do all of that, and keep it at such a high level of quality. i still haven't entirely fallen for weather report, etc., but i imagine it'll click with me one day.

He didn't really do much of that concurrently; he left the Messengers to go with Miles, and there were several long stretches of inactivity in Miles' group. Williams and Hancock put out a bunch of Blue Notes around the same time (and Williams' Spring and Life Time are sick).

hey, i am really fucking stoked for this thread, assholes.

i know all the miles stuff and a lot of the weather report stuff, and i too have been wearing out my copy of schizophrenia, the only WS solo record i have. cant wait to check out more from these recommendations.

FWIW I never cared that much about his stuff with the Messengers. I think it was probably a good training ground but not really the right vehicle for his more contemplative and bittersweet style.

xpost, yeah, he wasn't doing all that stuff at the same time, just saying he had a busy, supremely creative decade!

re: the messengers, some of that stuff is great -- mosaic, free for all, in partic.

night dreamer is a really great album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iZ7id-lxXo

I think he might be the most underrated jazz composer in a way -- I mean not literally, b/c there's probably someone much less known who's more underrated as a composer, but among the giants you always hear people talk about the compositions of Miles, Mingus, Coltrane, Monk. Shorter belongs in the same breath, I think.

hey, i am really fucking stoked for this thread, assholes.

Please! Douchebags, if you don't mind.

xpost, yeah, he wasn't doing all that stuff at the same time, just saying he had a busy, supremely creative decade!

― tylerw, Friday, October 22, 2010 1:07 PM (32 minutes ago)

re: the messengers, some of that stuff is great -- mosaic, free for all, in partic.

― tylerw, Friday, October 22, 2010 1:07 PM (31 minutes ago)

Ah, got it...he was active, but with a minimum of juggling (mental image of Wayne juggling on stage behind Miles soloing) and a ridiculous level of consistent brilliance. Never actually heard his work with the Messengers...must check out.

yeah -- i mean, a lot of jazz dudes played a lot of sessions/gigs in the 60s, but Shorter was writing the bulk of the original compositions for blakey, miles, his solo stuff, and a lot of those songs are pretty classic.

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.

unperson otm: "his solos were calmly reasoned explications of the beautiful melodies he composed."

Yeah obviously the '60s albums are total classics. I love that they exist as a merger of the Miles and Coltrane classic lineups, if they didn't it would be an unfulfilled fantasy.

you know, i've never thought of those albums like this-

they exist as a merger of the Miles and Coltrane classic lineups

not in a bad way or anything just... huh, good observation.

Yeah, it's true; Night Dreamer and Juju are Shorter plus Tyner, Workman, and Jones (and Lee Morgan on ND). A kind of alternate universe Coltrane band.

And Soothsayer has Tony Williams & Ron Carter + Tyner!

Blakey's "Free For All" also sounds to me very Quartet-ish, Art and Wayne driving each other like Elvin and Trane at peak intensity

RIP to another giant

love Free For All

This is blowing my mind: according to Wikipedia, Shorter appears on 22 Jazz Messengers albums recorded 1959-1964, with 10 of those recorded wholly or in part in 1961. During the same period he was on three albums with Miles, three with Freddie Hubbard, and one-offs with Lee Morgan, The Young Lions, Donald Byrd, Benny Golson, and Gil Evans. Plus six albums of his own!

amazing

i saw his quartet play in 2010… in truth wayne shorter played very little, he spent a lot of time listening, adjusting his reed, raising his instrument then deciding not to contribute at that moment. from what i have read of this group, not saying anything if he didn’t have anything to say was his regular MO, but even given that I still felt it must’ve been an off night.

having said that, i still walked away thinking it was one of the best bands i have ever seen! i am a jazz dumbo but the way they navigated between structure and freedom seemed unique and searching and not quite like anything i have ever heard before or since.

going for the blue note marathon upon hearing the news and yeah: none of these records will ever get old. the all seeing eye features grachan moncur iii and james spaulding and is roughly a thousand times better than i remember.

(an aside: how many times did mccoy tyner get the shaft "etc." credit on blue note covers? i mean i know it was probably a contractual thing, but dang. can't we retcon that lol?)

The band with Blade, Pattituci, Perez, are one of those bands where the cliche of "telepathic" communincation may be true. They made every performance seem inevitable, kind of like the Necks (says "the man who just discovered the Necks and is now all like, 'ah I detect a Necks vibe here'").

(I was a Shorter fan first, and for a long time)

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

― emo canon in twee major (BradNelson), Saturday, May 10, 2014 9:46 PM (eight years ago)

listening to it now, RIP

WATER BABIES

"infant eyes" <3

^^^ that's the one I wanted to hear when i heard the news. one of the few perfect songs.

A friend of mine studied bass, and one of her first gigs out of conservatory was on a cruise ship. Because she was new, and younger than everyone else in the band, the other musicians started hazing her by calling out relatively obscure and/or complex tunes. So she hunkered down in her cabin with The Real Book, spending hours each day going through tunes. She hit on one that a) she already knew and loved, and b) was pretty sure the other musicians wouldn’t know (or at least know well). She called out “Virgo” that night, and stumped a few in the band, but the other musicians were grateful — and a bunch of Wayne’s tunes made it into the band’s book for the rest of the cruise.

^love this. Thanks for posting.

yeah that's great — I love "Virgo" ...

never heard moto grosso feio before this afternoon. wow.

The earliest Weather Report material — the self-titled album and the 2CD Live in Tokyo, chunks of which were originally released in the US on I Sing the Body Electric, are seriously fucking out. Some of my favorite music from that era, by anybody.

Absolutely. I always preferred Weather Report's earlier records, and Live in Tokyo is probably my favorite among them. Mysterious Traveller may be my favorite among their studio LP's though.

It's mind-boggling what he did throughout his career - he covered so much ground across so many groups, it feels like enough for at least four great bodies of work, never mind one. If I had to pick one era to focus on, it would be the great Miles Davis Quintet, both the albums and the live releases (Live in Europe 1967, Plugged Nickel). All five of them were all great, but given his playing and the compositions he brought to the group, Shorter could arguably be the single greatest collaborator Miles ever had in any of his groups, rivaling even Coltrane.

But yeah, he's another one I regret never seeing live. Totally missed that Town Hall show, but regardless it seemed unlikely I would get a chance when it was clear his health was failing years ago.

FYI Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas's group Sound Prints are currently doing shows at the Village Vanguard - they were scheduled months ago, but it seems fitting they'd be playing right now.

(Shorter is the inspiration behind the group, hence the name which references "Footprints")

'Free For All' is such a burner (the whole album). Also exhibit A for my belief that Rudy Van Gelder records are good because they sound exciting, not because they're clean and transparent, and that jazz records could use more distortion.

Otm

Maybe it's too ambitious, but I'm thinking about doing a listen to his discography start to finish project (not sure whether to just do solo stuff or not. Weather Report? I don't really want to do Jazz Messengers or 60s Miles Quintet, love those just not interested in retreading them right now). Would that be worth a thread? Would people be interested?

Sure I love a liveblog, and I'm not as familiar with his post-'60s work

Introducing Wayne Shorter (1959) is a record I've dug for a while and I think is severely underrated. I've never listened to his second-recorded album as a leader, Second Genesis, which was recorded in '60 but didn't come out until '74.

I'd be interested, don't know how much I'd have to contribute but I'd love to see what others have to say. I'm woefully unfamiliar with his solo output, know a fair amount of Weather Report. But this morning I've listened to Night Dreamer, Juju, and am currently on Speak No Evil, and they're all excellent.

Listening to Introducing Wayne Shorter now (for the first time), it's swangin. I didn't know that he recorded with the Miles Davis rhythm section of the (Kind of Blue) time for his first record, years before joining MD.

Also great to hear peak Jimmy Cobb getting some trading and solos in

WKCR Memorial Broadcast going until midnight tonight
https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/story/wayne-shorter-memorial-broadcast

My expat jazz cat buddy JohnW just now in gmail:

My favorite Wayne Shorter solos are the ones where it seems that the "real" solo is going on in his head, and what he's playing on the tenor saxophone are occasional comments on that solo.

I think the most vibrant and resounding tribute album to Wayne as a composer was done back in the 80's in the jazz piano duo format. Shorter by Two - Kirk Lightsey & Harold Danko. Just had to drop this here because it's beautiful and imbued with the spirit of Wayne.

Wow, haven't heard it but the description sounds great!

I liked Denny Zeitlin’s tribute album from a few years back.

I liked Denny Zeitlin’s tribute album from a few years back.

Shorter by Two

👍

I actually ran into Wayne Shorter once with him coming off an elevator at a Hilton in Miami Beach during one of the few business trips I ever had to do. Him and running into Kurt Vonnegut way at the back of the Union at IU really are the only two celebrity encounters I ever had like that.

Thinking about Shorters music and going through his huge discography a couple of his sideman appearances jumped out at me as not being mentioned in this thread and if you have not heard them, they are worth checking out. Both of them have all star lineups of players.

Lee Morgan- The Search for New Land

McCoy Tyner- Extensions

Good interview:
https://ethaniverson.com/interview-with-wayne-shorter/
intro:

From April 2015, for the BBC’s Jazz on 3, but unfortunately that show concluded before this interview could be aired. Transcribed by Kevin Sun.

The following is heavily edited for clarity. One of the best previous interviews of Wayne was the first, collected in Black Music by Amiri Baraka.

—-

Speaking of Wayne and Lee Morgan, Indiana Public Radio's every-handy Night Lights' Shorter stash is topped with a blow-out showcase of (some of) the sounds they made together--but what the hell, here's the whole Night Lights Wayne train:
https://indianapublicmedia.org/search/?q=Wayne+Shorter&cx=002327456492095995457%3Aatgbv6ivl-g&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=UTF-8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIgQCgMbRDE

been going through all the blakey records finally. this ("contemplation") is a wonderful wayne song/showcase

Definitely a highlight of a great album. That group in particular (with Hubbard, Fuller and Walton as well as Shorter) was Blakey's best - marvelous chemistry.

https://jonimitchell.com/news/newsitem.cfm?id=1731

^kind of one of the best stories ever really imo

amazing