the WAYNE SHORTER thread

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!

LOL

Of course, a REALLY good jazz rec shop would go

Bobby Short
Alan Shorter

Poor Alan had to live in the shadow of a ridiculously talented younger sibling and then died relatively young.

Both of Alan's albums, Orgasm and Tes Esat, are really good and worth hearing - and they're both on Spotify.

When @milesdavis and I talked, he would ask me a question. 'Hey Wayne -- do you ever get tired of playing music that sounds like music?' Before I answered him, he said, 'I know what you mean.' Like, he's answering his own question. 🕵️‍♀️👣💫

— Wayne Shorter (@Wayne_Shorter) March 13, 2019

Shorter's quartet may be one of the most extraordinary units I've ever heard. I truly cannot get enough of this music.

absolute unit

As I said upthread, they really are one of the free-est bands in current jazz. They can and will go anywhere.

Has Shorter ever been on a bad record? Later Weather Report stuff maybe? I haven't heard anything I didn't like.

I <3 Wayne Shorter so much

Def one of the great bands of the early 21st century.

Looking at his wiki discography, this was my guess for the worst record he's been on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_of_Delight

But now I'm listening, and it's kind of sick (Carlos Santana playing fantasy camp with Miles Davis' second classic quintet)

Is Brian Blade still in the band?

Supernova seems to be the one I go back to a lot, gorgeous album.

OMG I am a longtime STAN of Supernova. I wrote a thing about it for my college paper.

Is Brian Blade still in the band?

He played here last year, I think ...

four years ago is when i last saw him, at that year's jazzfest, and he still sounded great. it was just him and herbie onstage, and they played an entirely improvised single-"song" set, it was astonishing and bent my mind permanently

amazing

Anyone seen the documentary? I want to see it but I don't really want to subscribe to Amazon Prime (and it isn't currently available as a rental, I guess because it's new)

Loved the doc. It's unwieldy in parts but I think that's because Shorter was such a ... erm...unique human. He just seemed to be pure creativity - if that makes any kind of sense. And through this his life was constantly pummeled with crazy, sad blows. The kind of stuff that would make a husk out of most of us. And the man just kept on being spiritual, being in love with music and searching for whatever he was searching for. I have even greater respect for him after watching this.

I need to watch this pronto.

I haven’t listened to but a drop of his catalogue but is there anybody who embodied pure creativity the way he did? I mean as I type this I am thinking of a few names but in a lot of ways he was first in class.

I remember once I briefly met one of his collaborators and they pretty much started talking about him right away: “Wayne said this, Wayne said that” etc

Meant to say started talking about him without any prompting from me. As of course I should know who Wayne was and of course I would want to hear what he said which was 100% true.

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.