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

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365071197/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366 

https://www.facebook.com/wayneshortermusic

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...

Kofi

VIDEOS:

Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil (1964) :



Wayne Shorter Quartet - "Footprints" (originally composed by Wayne Shorter in 1966) --Montreal Jazz Festival 2003:




Wayne Shorter Quartet - "Zero Gravity/ Lotus" 2010--compositions by Wayne Shorter


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTQMj4180CM

wayne shorter quartet - footprints
www.youtube.com

Wayne Shorter quartet - live at the Montreal jazz festival 2003 wayne shorter -tenor, and soprano saxophones, danilo perez - piano, john patitucci - bass, brian blade - drums

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.

 

 Alejandro Bolivar/European Pressphoto Agency
Wayne Shorter at a festival in January 2013

WEATHER REPORT ALBUM:  "HEAVY WEATHER"  RECORDED in 1977:

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

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, American art, Improvisation, Jazz composition, Jazz history, social philosophy, Wayne Shorter

 WAYNE SHORTER IN 2013

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/02/170882668/wayne-shorter-on-jazz-how-do-you-rehearse-the-unknown
 

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.

"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

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

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

WAYNE SHORTER

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.

A Historical Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement from 1960-1964

http://afroamhistory.about.com/od/civilrightsstruggle1/a/timeline1960_2.htm
 

Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1964

While the non-violent movement for civil rights started in the 1950s, it was during the early sixties that non-violent techniques began to pay off. Civil rights activists and students across the South challenged segregation, and the relatively new technology of television allowed Americans to witness the often brutal response to these protests.

By 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson was able to push through the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. This timeline of the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement reveals just what an impressive number of historic events happened between 1960 and 1964.

1960

On February 1, four young African-American men, students at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College, go to a Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sit down at a whites-only lunch counter. They order coffee. Despite being denied service, they sit silently and politely at the lunch counter until closing time. Their action marks the start of the Greensboro sit-ins, which sparks similar protests all over the South.

On April 15, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee holds its first meeting.

On July 25, the downtown Greensboro Woolworth desegregates its lunch counter after six months of sit-ins.

On Oct. 19, Martin Luther King, Jr., joins a student sit-in at a whites-only restaurant inside of an Atlanta department store, Rich's. He is arrested along with 51 other protesters on the charge of trespassing. On probation for driving without a valid Georgia license (he had an Alabama license), a Dekalb County judge sentences MLK to four months in prison doing hard labor. Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy phones King's wife, Coretta, to offer encouragement while his brother, Robert Kennedy, convinces the judge to release King on bail. This phone call convinces many African-Americans to support the Democratic ticket.

On December 5, the Supreme Court hands down a 7-2 decision in the Boynton v. Virginia case, ruling that segregation on vehicles traveling between states is unlawful because it violates the Interstate Commerce Act.

1961

On May 4, the Freedom Riders, composed of seven African-American and six white activists, leave Washington, D.C. for the rigidly segregated Deep South. Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), their goal is to test Boynton v. Virginia.

On May 14, Freedom Riders, now traveling in two separate groups, are attacked outside Anniston, Alabama and in Birmingham, Alabama. A mob throws a firebomb onto the bus that the group outside Anniston is riding. Members of the Ku Klux Klan attack the second group in Birmingham after making an arrangement with the local police to allow them 15 minutes alone with the bus.

On May 15, the Birmingham group of Freedom Riders is prepared to continue their trip down south, but no bus will agree to take them. They fly to New Orleans instead.

On May 17, a new group of young activists join two of the original Freedom Riders to complete the trip. They are placed under arrest in Montgomery, Alabama.

On May 29, President Kennedy announces that he has ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to enact stricter regulations and fines for buses and facilities that refuse to integrate. Young white and black activists continue to make Freedom Rides.

In November, civil rights activists participate in a series of protests, marches and meetings in Albany, Georgia, that come to be known as the Albany Movement.

In December, King comes to Albany and joins the protesters, staying in Albany for another nine months.

1962

On August 10, King announces that he is leaving Albany. The Albany Movement is generally considered a failure in terms of effecting change, but what King learns in Albany allows him to be successful in Birmingham, Alabama.

On September 10, the Supreme Court rules that the University of Mississippi must admit African-American student and veteran James Meredith.

On September 26, the governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, orders state troopers to prevent Meredith from entering Ole Miss's campus.

Between September 30 and October 1, riots erupt at over Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi or "Ole Miss."

On October 1, Meredith becomes the first African-American student at Ole Miss after President Kennedy orders U.S. marshals to Mississippi to ensure his safety.

1963

King, SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organize a series of demonstrations and protests to challenge segregation in Birmingham, Alabama.

On April 12, Birmingham police arrest King for demonstrating without a city permit.

On April 16, King writes his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in which he responds to eight white Alabama ministers who urged him to end the protests and be patient with the judicial process of overturning segregation.

On June 11, President Kennedy delivers a speech on civil rights from the Oval Office, specifically explaining why he sent the National Guard to allow the admittance of two African-American students to the University of Alabama.

On June 12, Byron De La Beckwith assassinates Medgar Evers, the first field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi.

On August 18, James Meredith graduates from Ole Miss.

On August 28, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is held in D.C. Around 250,000 people participate, and King delivers his legendary "I have a dream" speech.

On September 15, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham is bombed. Four young girls are killed.

On November 22, Kennedy is assassinated, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, uses the nation's anger to push through civil rights legislation in Kennedy's memory.

1964

On March 12, Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam. Among his reasons for the break is Elijah Muhammad's ban on protesting for Nation of Islam adherents.

Between June and August, SNCC organizes a voter registration drive in Mississippi known as Freedom Summer.

On June 21, three Freedom Summer workers--Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman--disappear.

On August 4, the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman are found in a dam. All three had been shot, and the African-American activist, Chaney, had also been badly beaten.

On June 24, Malcolm founds the Organization of Afro-American Unity along with John Henrik Clarke. Its aim is to unite all Americans of African descent against discrimination.

On July 2, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination in employment and in public places.

In July and August, riots break out in Harlem and Rochester, New York.

On August 27, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDM), organized to challenge the traditional state democratic party that had excluded African Americans, sends a delegation to the national Democratic convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They ask to represent Mississippi at the convention. Offered two seats at the convention in turn, the MFDM delegates reject the proposal.

On December 10, the Nobel Foundation awards MLK the Nobel Peace Prize.
 

Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, 1963-1964:
afroamhistory.about.com

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/07/1963-defining-year-civil-rights

1963: The defining year of the civil rights movement

Fifty years on, we look back at the year that signalled the beginning of the modern era
 
by Gary Younge
The Guardian
6 May 2013
 

GARY YOUNGE

On 28 August, in the shadow of Lincoln's monument, Martin Luther King announced to the March on Washington during his famous "I have a dream" speech that "1963 is not an end, but a beginning". For legal segregation, it would turn out to be the beginning of the end. The year started with Alabama governor George Wallace standing on the steps of the state capitol in hickory-striped trousers and a cutaway coat declaring: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever." The civil rights leadership was ambivalent about the suggestion of a national march and President John F Kennedy was focused on foreign affairs. Within a few months Alabama would become internationally renowned as policemen turned dogs and high-pressure water hoses on children as young as six in Birmingham. Civil rights leaders were running to catch up with the militancy of their grassroots activists and the Democratic House majority leader told Kennedy: "[Civil rights] is overwhelming the whole programme".

This phase of civil rights activism did not start in 1963. Far from it. Until that point there had, of course, been many fearless acts by anti-racist protesters. On 1 February 1960, 17-year-old Franklin McCain and three black friends went to the whites-only counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, and took a seat. "We wanted to go beyond what our parents had done. The worst thing that could happen was that the Ku Klux Klan could kill us … but I had no concern for my personal safety. The day I sat at that counter I had the most tremendous feeling of elation and celebration," he told me.

But in 1963 the number who were prepared to commit such resistance reached a critical mass. "In three difficult years," wrote the late academic Manning Marable in Malcolm X, "the southern struggle had grown from a modest group of black students demonstrating at one lunch-counter to the largest mass movement for racial reform and civil rights in the 20th century".

The pace and trajectory of these changes were global. Two days after McCain's protest, British prime minister Harold Macmillan addressed the South African parliament in Cape Town with an ominous warning: "The wind of change is blowing through this continent," he said. "Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact." As the decade wore on, that wind became a gale. In the three years between Macmillan's and King's speeches, Togo, Mali, Senegal, Zaire, Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika and Jamaica all became independent. "The new sense of dignity and self-respect on the part of the Negro," King argued in a 1960 essay, The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness, was due in part to "the awareness that his struggle is a part of a worldwide struggle".


Civil rights protestors are attacked with a water cannon. Photograph: Getty Images
 
In the US in May, events in Birmingham were transformative. The New York Times published more stories about civil rights in those two weeks than it had in the previous two years. Televised scenes of children campaigning against rigid segregation, being bitten by Alsatians and knocked off their feet by water fired with enough power to rip bark off a tree caused international outrage. Before, only 4% of Americans thought civil rights was the country's most pressing issue; afterwards it was 52%. According to the Justice Department, in the 10 weeks before King's "I have a dream" speech there were 758 demonstrations in 186 cities resulting in 14,733 arrests. "Birmingham became the moment of truth," argued Bayard Rustin, who organised the March on Washington. "Birmingham meant that tokenism is finished. The Negro masses are no longer prepared to wait for anybody … They are going to move. Nothing can stop them."

The march for jobs and freedom in Washington, which had aroused precious little interest just months before, now became the order of the day. It was a bold initiative. At the time marches in the capital were rare and this one was not particularly popular. A Gallup poll just a few weeks before the march revealed that 71% of Americans knew about it and of those only 23% were favourable while 42% were unfavourable, 18% thought it wouldn't accomplish anything and 7% thought it would end in violence. Kennedy, who was trying to get civil rights legislation through Congress, tried to talk them out of it. "We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the capitol," he said. Union organiser A Philip Randolph, who had called the march, told him: "The Negroes are already in the streets. It is very likely impossible to get them off."

Still, the march drew 250,000 people, roughly a quarter of whom were white and was deemed a great success by many. King's speech – which received no mention in the Washington Post the following day – would eventually become its most celebrated articulation of the period. "That day for a moment it almost seemed that we stood on a height," wrote James Baldwin in No Name in the Street. "And could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not for ever remain that dream one dreamed in agony."

It did not take long for the realities of southern bigotry to deflate the mood. "There was no way we could have known then that that afternoon would represent the peak of such feelings, that the hope and optimism contained in King's words would dwindle in the coming years," wrote Congressman John Lewis; "that in a matter of mere days after he stepped down from that stage a bomb blast in Birmingham would kill four little girls and usher in a season of darkness for the movement and for me."

• Gary Younge's The Speech, The story behind Martin Luther King's Dream Speech, will be published in August

1963: the defining year of the civil rights movement
www.theguardian.com

Ari Berman On Why the Major Core Demands of the 1963 March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom Remain More Important, Relevant, and Necessary Than Ever

http://www.thenation.com/article/175757/time-march-washington-again?rel=emailNation#

Time to March on Washington—Again
 

Fifty years after King’s historic march, the struggle for racial justice faces unprecedented challenges.
 
by Ari Berman 

August 14, 2013

This article appeared in the September 2-9, 2013 edition of The Nation.

Demonstrators hold signs during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963
 
They carried signs that demanded “Voting Rights,” “Jobs for All” and “Decent Housing.” They protested the vigilante killing of an unarmed black teenager in the South and his killer’s acquittal. They denounced racial profiling in the country’s largest city.
 
This isn’t 1963 but 2013, when so many of the issues that gave rise to the March on Washington fifty years ago remain unfulfilled or under siege today. That’s why, on August 24, a broad coalition of civil rights organizations, unions, progressive groups and Democratic Party leaders will rally at the Lincoln Memorial and proceed to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the march and dramatize the contemporary fight. (President Obama will participate in a separate event commemorating the official anniversary on August 28.) The Supreme Court’s decision gutting the Voting Rights Act in late June and the acquittal of George Zimmerman less than three weeks later make this year’s march “exponentially more urgent” with respect to pressuring Congress and arousing the conscience of the nation, says Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, a co-sponsor of the march.
“The main themes will be voting rights, state laws like ‘stand your ground’ or local laws like stop-and-frisk, and the whole question of jobs and union-busting,” says the Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, who convened the march along with Martin Luther King III. “Fifty years after the original march for jobs and justice, we have a new version of the same issue.”

In 1963, current Congressman John Lewis—who nearly died marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama—was the youngest and most radical speaker at the March on Washington. When Lewis returns to the Lincoln Memorial to address the rally on August 24, he will be the only surviving speaker from that historic afternoon. “We have come a great distance since that day,” he said recently, “but many of the issues that gave rise to that march are still pressing needs in our society—violence, poverty, hunger, long-term unemployment, homelessness, voting rights and the need to protect human dignity.”

When it comes to voting rights, seven Southern states have passed or implemented new restrictions that disproportionately target people of color since the Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling. This follows a presidential election in which voter-suppression efforts took center stage and blacks waited twice as long as whites to vote, on average. On a more structural level, one out of thirteen African-Americans (2.2 million people) cannot vote because of felon disenfranchisement laws—four times higher than the rest of the population.

When it comes to the criminal justice system, there are more black men in prison today than were enslaved in 1850, according to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. African-Americans comprise 13 percent of the population but made up 55 percent of shooting deaths in 2010. Under Florida’s “stand your ground” law, “people who killed a black person walked free 73 percent of the time, while those who killed a white person went free 59 percent of the time,” according to the Tampa Bay Times.

When it comes to the economy, the black unemployment rate (12.6 percent) is nearly double that of whites (6.6 percent), almost the same ratio as in 1963. The average household income for African-Americans ($32,068) lags well below that of white families ($54,620) and declined by 15 percent from 2000 to 2010.

These jarring statistics show a clear need for a twenty-first-century civil rights movement. “After the march, my hope is we will see more people going home being committed to doing work in their communities,” says Judith Browne Dianis, co-
director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization in Washington co-sponsoring the march. The Moral Mondays protests in North Carolina, the sit-ins by the Dream Defenders in Florida and the spontaneous rallies in 100 cities following the George Zimmerman verdict are evidence of a new wave of civil rights activism. “We’re seeing the civil rights movement rise again,” says Browne Dianis. “People understand that we have to get back to organizing and movement-building.”
For many years, civil rights organizations like the NAACP focused on building institutional power through litigation, lobbying and voting. Though they accomplished a great deal—we now have a two-term African-American president, after all—there’s a growing realization within the civil rights community that the protests and civil disobedience that defined the movement of the 1960s are once again essential to draw more attention to contemporary problems. “I wish this activism had more outbursts than just in North Carolina and Florida,” says civil rights veteran Julian Bond. “You wish it was twenty times as great, but to see these things that are going on—it’s exciting. These tactics are tried and true. They’ve worked in the past, and they’ll work now.”

Yet while the civil rights coalition is more diverse than it was in 1963—now including supporters from women’s rights, environmental, pro-immigration and LGBT groups—the funds are scarce today, even as the needs are growing. The declining strength of organized labor, which has accelerated following the passage of anti-union laws in GOP-controlled states since 2010, has drained the coffers of the organizations most accustomed to mobilizing masses of people. “The movement is more financially
strapped than it has been in modern memory,” says Jealous.
Another daunting obstacle for the civil rights coalition is the right wing’s success in promoting the notion that historic remedies for centuries of discrimination, like the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action, are no longer needed. “One of the great difficulties we have in helping people understand where we are on civil rights today is the desire of so many people to fix the civil rights movement in historical amber and visit it like a museum, without honoring that movement by being dynamically engaged in the principles that the movement stood for,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, another co-sponsor of the march.

At a recent congressional celebration of the 1963 march at the US Capitol, for example, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell reminisced about attending the march as a young civil rights activist, and House Speaker John Boehner introduced John Lewis. But when Senate majority leader Harry Reid denounced the flood of new voting restrictions in places like North Carolina and Texas following the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision and called for a congressional fix—to great applause—McConnell and Boehner remained pointedly silent. “Boehner turned to McConnell with a questioning glance during the applause,” reported the Associated Press.

“You cannot, on the one hand, celebrate the march like John Boehner did, but then undermine what the march stood for, which is jobs and justice,” says Sharpton. “You can’t take a movement and say, ‘I celebrate the drama, but I don’t agree with the content.’”

At the same time, some progressive skeptics of the Obama administration believe the current civil rights leadership is too timid and cozy with those in power. Talk-show host Tavis Smiley predicts the new march will sidestep issues, like systemic poverty and the escalation of drone strikes, that King would have confronted were he alive today. “We’re going to get a lot of platitudes, a lot of great stories, a lot of endearing moments,” Smiley says. “But at the end of the day, we won’t even scratch the surface of the issues King was trying to get us to wrestle with.”

The radical politics of the 1960s civil rights movement, including those of its most mainstream leaders, is often glossed over in contemporary remembrances of pivotal anniversaries. Professor Cornel West, a caustic critic of this year’s commemoration, calls it the “Santa Clausification” of King. Many people also forget just how controversial the march was in 1963, both among the public and inside the civil rights community. Some thought it was too radical. President Kennedy asked the leaders to cancel the march. Lewis’s speech was censored to placate the archbishop of Washington. Bayard Rustin, the veteran socialist and civil rights activist who organized the event, was ostracized within the movement because of his homosexuality. Others thought it was too tame; Malcolm X dubbed it the “Farce on Washington.”

Despite all the criticism, the 1963 march remains a singularly important event in American history: the first time the country really understood what the civil rights movement stood for. The effect was greatest on the marchers themselves. “Many of the people at the march had never been to Washington before,” says Bond. “It was evidence to them that they had done something great and that great things would follow.”

Fifty years later, “there is, unfortunately, too much parallel between now and then,” says Jealous. “This is a moment for all of us to be rebaptized in the struggle.”



Ari Berman also wrote about North Carolina’s new voter-supression legislation in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act.


About the Author

Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and an Investigative Journalism Fellow at The Nation.
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