Wayne Shorter has passed away

[Milestones]

It's hard to choose among Shorter's Blue Note albums.   Lately I've been favoring Juju (a quartet session with Trane's rhythm section), and there always Speak No Evil.  Schizophrenia, with a slightly bigger sound, is also quite fine. 

I also like some works on Blue Note from decades later: Manhattan Project and Power of Three with Petrucciani and Hall (although Wayne is not on all tracks of the latter).

 

 

Edited March 4, 2023 by Milestones

[Dub Modal]

Stephen Colbert's house band led by Louis Cato played Footprints last night as they went to the break after the monolog. They might have played more Shorter compositions later on...?

I've never heard a bad record from Wayne. I recently listened to All Seeing Eye for the first time and loved it. He was an artist that brought quality to everything he did. Hard to really miss in that situation. 

[Milestones]

I personally still find it a little hard to assess his work in Weather Report.  He has fine moments to be sure, though the group definitely comes across basicially as Zawinul's vision.  Curiously, some of his high spots are on Zawinul tunes like "The Juggler" and "A Remark You Made."

Edited March 4, 2023 by Milestones

[Teasing the Korean]

39 minutes ago, Milestones said:

I personally still find it a little hard to assess his work in Weather Report.  

I never cared for Weather Report.  I had the Heavy Weather album, which may have been a compilation. When I did my first jazz purge, it went.  I don't like the overall sound or aesthetic.

My first Wayne Shorter album, as I mentioned on the other page, was The All Seeing Eye.  That one holds a special place for me, maybe because it was the first, and I was so excited to find the Blue Note albums for so cheap in the cutout bin. 

[Rabshakeh]

He seemed to sit out a lot of the time on Weather Report's records.

[Teasing the Korean]

20 minutes ago, Rabshakeh said:

He seemed to sit out a lot of the time on Weather Report's records.

Weather Report always struck me as an act that was a rock fan's idea of what jazz is.  I knew rock guys in the late 1970s/early 1980s who had "jazz" albums by Weather Report, Jeff Beck, Jean Luc Ponty, etc.  That's not Weather Report's fault - and maybe that was the idea, to draw audiences outside of the typical jazz audience - but that was a stumbling block for me, as well as not liking their overall aesthetic.  I would rather spin Cannonball with Zawinul; or Wayne Shorter with Miles or solo.

[Justin V]

I'm grateful for the several opportunities I had to see him perform and the legacy of recordings he has left us.  Between his sideman work with Blakey and Miles, his years with Weather Report and his incredibly rewarding career as a leader, it's difficult to fathom it all being the work of only one remarkable person.  Thank you for the music, Mr. Shorter, and rest in peace.

[JSngry]

Weather Report was a truly great band whose distance from "fusion" becomes increasingly apparent as time passes. To what degree they were or were not "jazz" depends on whose lens you're looking through, but objectively, in terms of compositions, color, texture, rhythmic layering, and both individual and collective virtuosity, they were truly in a class of their own. And they had a real arc of their own, all the way to the end.

No time to engage in the old arguments, especially the "Where Is Wayne?" thing. Wayne had his own life arc, and a portion of it did not involve being the star of Weather Report. But when he was there, he ws all the way there, being whatever Wayne he was at the time. And jesus, live, Wayne Shorter took no prisoners and suffered no fools - including Jaco at his worst. I saw that happen once and it was terrifyingly life-affirming!

To know Wayne Shorter's music, you have to know all of it, even the stuff you might not think you like. His was a superior musical mind that militantly rejected triteness and cheapness. 

His output may now at last be finite, but it will also prove to be infinite (for as long as we can tell).

 

[BillF]

22 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

Weather Report always struck me as an act that was a rock fan's idea of what jazz is.  I knew rock guys in the late 1970s/early 1980s who had "jazz" albums by Weather Report, Jeff Beck, Jean Luc Ponty, etc.  That's not Weather Report's fault - and maybe that was the idea, to draw audiences outside of the typical jazz audience - but that was a stumbling block for me, as well as not liking their overall aesthetic.  I would rather spin Cannonball with Zawinul; or Wayne Shorter with Miles or solo.

Agreed.👍

[Larry Kart]

The Blue Notes are great but I have a special spot in my heart for the two on VeeJay -- "Introducing Wayne Shorter" and Wynton Kelly's "Kelly Great." Both have instances of Wayne's surrealistic sense of humor. 

[Rabshakeh]

I don’t know what the anti Weather Report stuff is on here. 

Early Weather Report delivered on the promise of In A Silent Way more than any other group or artist I can think of. Late Weather Report (A Sporting Life?) is its own weird thing. Whatever it is, it’s great stuff. In between, some awesome jazz records.

But, to my taste, the only down side is that Shorter quietened down from around 1972 onwards, no matter whose albums he was playing on.

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

No time to engage in the old arguments, especially the "Where Is Wayne?" thing. Wayne had his own life arc, and a portion of it did not involve being the star of Weather Report.

I don’t know the “old argument” referred to here. But surely anyone who followed Shorter’s career has come to the view that he did not play as much as we would have wanted on his own records. That’s true even of those great 90s/00s records. 

[gvopedz]

The guitar player stepped aside and there you go...

 

[Late]

Speak No Evil helped me get through high school. I think I played it every morning before going to school my senior year. My undergrad college years were consumed by Miles, which of course included Wayne.

This album helped me get through graduate school:

[Brad]

On Sunday at 2pm EST WKCR is replaying the Birthday Broadcast for Wayne Shorter’s 80th birthday. The show was hosted by Phil Schaap. 

[JSngry]

2 hours ago, Rabshakeh said:

I don’t know the “old argument” referred to here. But surely anyone who followed Shorter’s career has come to the view that he did not play as much as we would have wanted on his own records. That’s true even of those great 90s/00s records. 

In real time, people were wondering why Wayne was not playing as much on those records. "We" wanted one thing but Wayne wanted another.

 Learn about what he was going through with his daughter, his family, all that other stuff What "we"wanted was one thing, but what Wayne needed for himself was something else. And it's not like Zawinul wasn't more than primed to step up like he did. But he knew that if he was the Yang that Wayne was the Yin, and they kept that balance through whatever extremes were going on. 

Besides, follow the live stuff. All this stuff about Wayne disappearing and all that was just a lot of passive-agreesive macho vicarious warrior-mongering. I saw them live .. 6,7, maybe 8 times, and Wayne was never anything other than locked in at the highest level. Just because he was less interested in making the records doe not mean that he was less interested in playing the music. 

Life is bigger than records. 

 

 

Oh, I see, on HIS records. I think he played more than ever, because of what he played by what he didn't play. He was not one of those people whose spaces existed only to facilitate breathing or regrouping or an imposed rudimentary symmetry. His spaces were his notes and his notes were his spaces.

In other words, it was all music. 

[Milestones]

That's a killer solo on "Apache."  Need to know why Wayne is so great, just take a listen.

 

[mjzee]

I was the head of my college's jazz concert commission, and we put on Weather Report in November 1974.  I remember Wayne played far more, and far more emphatically, than on the WR albums, and he really helped push the band.  It was one of the hottest concerts I still can recall.  One student on the college's radio station brought a stack of Wayne's Blue Note albums, and had him sign them; she had almost a groupie's awe about her.

I also saw his quartet play Houston in April 2014.

[ep1str0phy]

Stopping by to leave my condolences. Wayne's music has meant so much to me at so many different stages of my life, and it's difficult to process a loss of this magnitude when his music is still virtually everywhere - on stage, at sessions, coming out of other peoples' horns, popping up on news feeds, and on and on.

I will say this re: Wayne's taciturnity - the debate over whether he had receded a little too far into the wallpaper of Weather Report - and, indeed, if his late-career resurgence constituted a return to form vs. a mere change of scenery - always struck me as a little wrongheaded. Like, what was the alternative? Did he need to play a two minute solo on every Weather Report track?

I feel as if the core principles of Wayne's improvisational ethos - the unerring patience, the care and intention of his phrasing, the unexpected densities and silences - are the same ideas that animated his participation in Weather Report, his later fusion efforts, etc. Maybe he didn't play because he didn't want to? 

This also gets into some artistically awkward territory with regard to the valuation of maximalism over minimalism. The liners to It's About That Time (the "Lost Quintet" FIllmore shows) touch on this a bit. I do not think that Wayne the "fierce maximalist" is as a rule more appealing than the Wayne who plays two notes and dips. Your milage may vary, yes, but we're dealing at that point in subjectivities rather than qualitative absolutes. 

[Rabshakeh]

I mean, it is clearly because his vision for what he wanted involved him soloing less on those records, from Weather Report onwards.

He's not the only one. Pharaoh Sanders for example sat out on his own records all the time, then came in at the points he needed to.

But Shorter's music is completely different to Sanders', and, whereas I am generally happy to listen to whatever musicians were in Sanders' band at the time vamp away, I do find that I miss Shorter's solos. Not so much on the Weather Report records, where there's plenty happening, as on the VSOP and 'Footprints' records.

Hopefully with time some of those live gigs you're all referring to above will start to surface as recordings. I'd love to hear that. Particularly for the later group (the so called Footprints group). 

[Mark Stryker]

13 hours ago, Rabshakeh said:

I don’t know what the anti Weather Report stuff is on here. 

Early Weather Report delivered on the promise of In A Silent Way more than any other group or artist I can think of. Late Weather Report (A Sporting Life?) is its own weird thing. Whatever it is, it’s great stuff. In between, some awesome jazz records.

But, to my taste, the only down side is that Shorter quietened down from around 1972 onwards, no matter whose albums he was playing on.

I don’t know the “old argument” referred to here. But surely anyone who followed Shorter’s career has come to the view that he did not play as much as we would have wanted on his own records. That’s true even of those great 90s/00s records. 

Leaving the records aside, when I saw Wayne live for the first time -- Jazz Showcase, November 1985, with his first post-WR quartet -- he played almost non stop. First there were were extended-form compositions whose melodies he carried, and then he often played long improvisations that delivered not only beguiling individual moments but also coalesced into larger narratives. It was a kind of "goal-oriented" soloing against a steady rhythmic beat that he rarely entertained with his post- 2002-quartet, which was defined more by the four-way conversational aesthetic -- we always solo,  we never solo.  I will say that as much as I did love this last band, there were concerts when I was frustrated that Wayne didn't play more -- not because  I wanted or expected gunslinger "solos" but because there were times where it wasn't really an equal, four-way conversation. Wayne sometimes ceded so much space and decision making to the others that he didn't have at least a 25% say on where the music was going, or where it might or could go.  I loved hearing Wayne react to what was going on around him; but sometimes I wanted him to lead the conversation more -- because he's Wayne Shorter, and the ideas you're gonna get from him in front of the band are going to be more profound than when those come from the others.  

Folks may recall that this happened once in Detroit.  https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/arts/mark-stryker/2015/03/21/wayne-shorter-quartet/25143431/

Edited March 4, 2023 by Mark Stryker

[Mark Stryker]

Folks who want more saxophone soloing from Wayne should check out the recording from the concerts with the Lazz at Lincoln Center band. The arrangements are hit and miss but Wayne does stretch out at age 82 with a traditional rhythm section behind him playing 4/4 swing. Many levels of beauty, amusement, sincerity, irony, and legacy in how he plays on Contemplation. 

 

Edited March 4, 2023 by Mark Stryker

[Milestones]

I don't go back very much to the acoustic quartet records of the last two decades.  There are good spots, but on the whole they don't enthrall me.  I'm not sure why.  I don't think it's Wayne himself.  I have been reading on the thread about minimalism and how "present" Wayne is on some records/groups.  But I sure do hear him in that quartet; it in an absolutely different thing from WR.

I often like a minimalist approach. It characterizes some of our greatest figures, such as Miles and Monk.  You hear it in Jim Hall and many others.  Minimalism doesn't mean they are not the star, as all those that I named are consistently the main attraction--on their own records and even as sidemen.

 

[HutchFan]

1 hour ago, Mark Stryker said:

Folks may recall that this happened once in Detroit.  https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/arts/mark-stryker/2015/03/21/wayne-shorter-quartet/25143431/

That's fascinating, Mark.  Wish I could've heard that.

 

[Pim]

10 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

That's fascinating, Mark.  Wish I could've heard that.

 

Yeah me too! Unusual repertoire for him but I am pretty sure he rocked it as Mark mentioned

My favorite Shorter albums are Etcetera and The All Seeing Eye but he made so many great records. And yeah he swung and bopped but his ballad playing.... oh my how I love his phrasing there.

[sidewinder]

I never saw the 80s/90s bands but I did have a ticket for a Western Canada appearance circa 1995, which got cancelled. Big downer that week. I think that was the band with Rachel Z and Dave Gilmour.

Remember reading a nice interview with him at that time in the Toronto Globe and Mail where he was enthusing about the CDs and LPs in Sam The Record Man.

Edited March 4, 2023 by sidewinder