Monday, August 26, 2013

Cedar Walton (1934-2013), Major Pianist, Bandleader, and Composer

CEDAR WALTON  
1934-2013
 
All,

Cedar Walton was a master musician and composer whose elegant, dynamic, and deeply lyrical style on piano was one of the most widely influential and deeply admired of his extraordinary generation.  Walton was also a consummate composer who wrote many compositions in his own groups and for other ensembles that quickly became Jazz standards in the hardbop/postbop idiom of the 1950s and '60s.  To say he and his beautiful, disciplined playing will be sorely missed is a vast understatement...

Kofi 


Cedar Walton, Pianist and Composer, Dies at 79

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
August 20, 2013
New York Times


Cedar Walton, a pianist who distinguished himself as both an accompanist and a soloist, and who wrote some of the most enduring compositions in modern jazz while a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the early 1960s, died on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 79.

Rachel Papo for The New York Times
Cedar Walton performing with his quartet in 2009.


His death followed a brief illness, his manager, Jean-Pierre Leduc, said.

Mr. Walton sat in with Charlie Parker, spent a year accompanying the singer Abbey Lincoln, and recorded with both John Coltrane and, much later, the saxophonist Joshua Redman. He led a series of successful small groups, including a trio and a quartet that both featured his longtime collaborator, the drummer Billy Higgins. Yet he probably remained best known for his early work with one of the most influential incarnations of the Jazz Messengers, the group that the drummer Art Blakey ran as a kind of postgraduate performance academy for rising jazz stars.

Mr. Walton joined the Jazz Messengers in 1961, on the same day as the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. (Among the other members of the group at the time, was the tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter.) It was here that Mr. Walton established himself as a composer; over the years he would write a number of pieces that became jazz standards, including “Mosaic,” “Bolivia,” “Mode for Joe” and “Ugetsu,” also known as “Fantasy in D.”

Mr. Walton said his time with the Jazz Messengers helped him greatly as an accompanist, a role he often said he preferred to that of leader. Asked in a 2010 interview — conducted in conjunction with his being named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts — what was most important about providing accompaniment in an ensemble that thrives on improvisation, he said, “Total listening.”

Cedar Anthony Walton Jr. was born on Jan. 17, 1934, in Dallas. His mother, Ruth, played and sang popular songs at home. He was not initially interested in reading music, but he showed an early inclination to compose.

“Are you making up songs again?” his mother would call out.

He studied music composition at the University of Denver but later switched to music education. Instead of graduating he left in 1955 for New York, where he soon joined the local jazz scene.

Mr. Walton’s survivors include his wife, Martha Sammaciccia; three children from an earlier marriage, Carl, Rodney and Cedra; and a daughter from another relationship, Naisha.

In April 1959, after serving in the Army, Mr. Walton was sought out by John Coltrane to play on a rehearsal recording for what would become one of his landmark albums “Giant Steps.” Mr. Walton played on the technically daunting title song but declined to take a solo. He soon realized that had been a mistake.

“The song was too hard for me,” he said in a 2011 interview with JazzWax, Marc Myers’s Web site. “But you just didn’t do that. I was young.”

When the album was recorded, Mr. Walton was out of town and Tommy Flanagan played piano. Years later, the sessions with Mr. Walton were released as alternate tracks. By then, he had long since established himself as a forceful and elegant soloist. His years with Mr. Blakey helped.

“He had sort of a bombastic style, but he would leave little openings for you,” Mr. Walton said in the 2010 interview. “So you developed your radar when to get in. If you didn’t get in then, you wouldn’t be heard.”
 
AUGUST 26, 2013

THE GLORIOUS CEDAR WALTON
POSTED BY RICHARD BRODY
THE NEW YORKER

CEDAR WALTON
Photograph by Jack Vartoogian/Getty
 Cedar Walton performing with his quartet in 2009.    
       
Bad news arrived last week while I was out of town—the death of the pianist and composer Cedar Walton, at the age of seventy-nine. His name has always been a watermark of quality, and of particular qualities, for any recording he’s taken part in, as leader or sideman. Walton had a blend of power and swing, modesty and complexity, hearty tradition and fervent innovation. He joined the drummer Art Blakey’s sextet in 1961 and, together with the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and the tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, made it, for the next three years, one of the best ensembles in jazz. Blakey’s sheer force was joined to a true group concept—his younger band members composed works of a brooding intensity that joined modern post-bop modality (as pioneered by Miles Davis) to a bluesy, R. & B.-based feeling. The band’s music emerged with a ripping progressive edge and an exultation in sheer dark heat that sounded like the streets and distinguished it from more transcendent, conceptual, or restrained versions of modern jazz. Instead, the trio seemed more linked to the new funk of James Brown and Motown.

Walton’s first recording with Blakey was a live set, from August, 1961, that came out as part of the second volume of recordings called, drolly, “Three Blind Mice” (an arrangement of which was played with surprisingly un-jokey fervor). This clip, from 1963, gives a clear sense of the band’s exhilarating level of intricate aggression—and also includes a long interlude, from the thirty-first through thirty-eighth minutes, devoted to Walton, who plays solo and in a trio with Blakey and the bassist Reggie Workman. Walton delivers a florid ballad that snaps into an irrepressible up-tempo bounce. At minute forty-six, he thrillingly pierces Blakey’s drum fury while adding another layer of tension to it.

I have a special love for hearing piano trios (i.e., with bass and drums), and, in later years, Walton made many recordings in that format. But in Walton’s case, there’s a particular joy in hearing him play behind horn soloists, as in the obscure 1967 recording by the trumpeter Donald (Blackjack) Byrd. On this tune, “Eldorado,” Walton sticks close to the rhythm of the melody but seems to be hearing inside the heads of the soloists (especially the tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley—I wish their interplay had gone on for several more choruses). In his own solo, he used the insistent rhythm to loosely tether freewheeling inspirations until he meshes gears in a sultry, straightforward blues jaunt.



In 1986, in this concert from Japan (seen in the above clip) with the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and the trumpeter Woody Shaw, Walton, in his superb solo, does something similar: taking off from a bluesy strut, he breaks into an overflowingly melodic mode and touches base with swing before spinning out piquantly out-of-phase chords and teeming note-torrents.

Walton was as significant a composer as he was a performer. He played on the tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan’s quietly majestic, even modestly era-defining, 1973 recording “Glass Bead Games,” and contributed two compositions to the session—“Shoulders” and “Bridgework”—which are two of my all-time favorite jazz compositions, ones that exemplify their time and capture the essence of jazz moods while also posing an awesome challenge: to improvise on themes that are already perfect.

The very status of that great album (I’ve got the CD but fondly recall the double-LP from Strata-East, an exceptional, short-lived, artist-run record label) tells a remarkable and troubled story, of the glory and curse of “jazz” itself. Some musicians dislike that word (Ahmad Jamal distances himself from it, Nicholas Payton utterly repudiates it), but the underlying question is the range of musical styles that jazz implies. Walton’s latter-day music wouldn’t have been out of place in his performances from more than fifty years ago. The recording with Jordan—coming, as it did, at a moment when both the avant-garde and pop-tinged fusion were getting the bulk of attention (the former, from critics; the latter, from audiences)—is a summing-up of a post-bop manner that had already become traditional. This self-consciously historicist distillation, with compositions dedicated to elder greats, make a claim for that manner as newly yet definitively classical.

All art forms reach their point of crisis, regarding their own conventions and the acceptance of the public. The prospect of further progress depends on a self-conscious reassessment of the art’s history, and the open field of radical possibilities leads to a congealing of taste around earlier styles that arose in response to specific conditions that no longer exist. But the trends of an art form are one thing, the lives and experiences of artists another. Walton negotiated just such a divide with integrity and invention, which doubles his place in the music’s history.
 
 http://www.youtube.com/artist/cedar-walton

Cedar Walton
www.youtube.com/artist/cedar-walton 

One of the most valued of all hard bop accompanists, Cedar Walton is a versatile pianist whose funky touch and cogent melodic sense have graced the ...

Cedar Walton Quartet - Naima pt 1

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=Cedar+Walton+on+youtube&gbv=2&oq=Cedar+Walton+on+youtube&gs_l=heirloom-hp.12...699.5962.0.7603.23.7.0.7.0.0.533.1295.0j2j2j5-1.5.0....0...1ac.1.24.heirloom-hp..19.4.1144.PTFtmAJsAqk

► 7:10
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU1s3IjhM3w
Nov 11, 2006 -
 
Also from a performance in 1976 at the Umbria Jazz Festival, John Coltrane's composition ...
Cedar Walton's "Bolivia"

► 12:41
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FieH5e-dO4o
Apr 27, 2012
 
1984 Milt Jackson, Ray Brown, Cedar Walton -5+6: Midnight Waltz / The Very Thought Of You
Cedar Walton

► 5:42
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZzkhCe2npM
Nov 4, 2008 -
Cedar Walton Trio - TVJazz.tv - YouTube

► 3:25
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm4poXPHv60
Jul 18, 2012
 
Cedar Walton Trio Série Jazz dans la nuit series. Festival International de Jazz de Montréal 2012
Cedar Walton plays "Blue Monk"


► 2:54
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_UCN-ggMYw
Nov 11, 2006
 
From a performance in 1976 at the Umbria Jazz Festival,
Bobby Hutcherson & Cedar Walton Quartet

► 66:21
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyLLT17fbwA
Nov 1, 2012 -
Bobby Hutcherson Cedar Walton David Williams Eddie Marshall San Javier Jazz Festival 2010.
 
Cedar Walton Trio with Billy Higgins & David Williams -

► 14:46
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf6EETQl3tQ
Sep 29, 2012 
 
► 7:09
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tknpudwxRQ
Mar 1, 2013
 
One of the most celebrated Cedar Walton's compositions that is a real new jazz standard by Cedar Walton -"Bolivia" -
► 10:11
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvDsDF_Zid4
Nov 25, 2012
Cedar Walton Trio
 
 
 
Cedar Walton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Background information:
 
Birth name    Cedar Anthony Walton, Jr.
Born    January 17, 1934
Dallas, Texas, United States
Died    August 19, 2013 (aged 79)
Brooklyn, New York, United States
Genres    Jazz
Occupations    Musician
Instruments    Piano

Cedar Anthony Walton, Junior (January 17, 1934 – August 19, 2013) was an American hard bop jazz pianist. He came to prominence as a member of drummer Art Blakey's band before establishing a long career as a bandleader and composer.

Contents  

1 Biography
2 Discography
2.1 As leader
2.2 As sideman
3 References
4 External links

Biography

Walton grew up in Dallas, Texas. His mother was an aspiring concert pianist, and was Walton's initial teacher. She also took him to jazz performances around Dallas. Walton cited Nat King Cole, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Art Tatum as his major influences on piano.[1] He began emulating recordings of these artists from an early age. He attended the University of Denver as a composition major originally, but was encouraged to switch to a music education program targeted to set up a career in the local public school system. This switch later proved extremely useful since Walton learned to play and arrange for various instruments, a talent he would hone with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.
Walton was tempted by the promise of New York City through his associations with John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Richie Powell, whom he met at various after-hours sessions around the city of Denver, Colorado. In 1955, he decided to leave school and drove with a friend to New York City. He quickly got recognition from Johnny Garry, who ran Birdland at that time.

Walton was drafted into the U.S. Army, and stationed in Germany, cutting short his rising status in the after-hours scene. While in the Army, he played with musicians Leo Wright, Don Ellis, and Eddie Harris. Upon his discharge after two years, Walton picked up where he left off, playing as a sideman with Kenny Dorham and J. J. Johnson, and with Gigi Gryce.[2] Joining the Jazztet, led by Benny Golson and Art Farmer, Walton played with this group from 1958 to 1961. In April 1959, he recorded an alternate take of "Giant Steps" with John Coltrane, though he did not solo.

In the early 1960s, Walton joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers as a pianist-arranger for three years (on the same day as Freddie Hubbard), where he played with Wayne Shorter and Hubbard. In this group, he demonstrated a keen sense of arranging in originals such as "Ugetsu" and "Mosaic". He left the Messengers in 1964 and by the late 1960s was part of the house rhythm section at Prestige Records, where in addition to releasing his own recordings, he recorded with Sonny Criss, Pat Martino, Eric Kloss, and Charles McPherson. For a year, he served as Abbey Lincoln's accompanist, and recorded with Lee Morgan from 1966 to 1968. During the mid-1970s, he led the funk group Mobius.[2]

Many of his compositions have been adopted as jazz standards, including "Firm Roots", "Bolivia" and "Cedar's Blues". "Bolivia" is perhaps Walton's best known composition, while one of his oldest is "Fantasy in D", recorded under the title "Ugetsu" by Art Blakey in 1963.[3]
 
In January 2010, he was inducted as a member of the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters.[4]
After a brief illness, Walton died on August 19, 2013, at his home in Brooklyn, New York at the age of 79.[5]
Discography[edit source]

As leader

1967: Cedar! (Prestige)
1968: Spectrum (Prestige)
1969: The Electric Boogaloo Song (Prestige)
1969: Soul Cycle (Prestige)
1972: Breakthrough! with Hank Mobley (Cobblestone)
1973: A Night At Boomers, Vol. 1 (Muse)
1973: A Night At Boomers, Vol. 2 (Muse)
1974: Firm Roots (Muse)
1974: Pit Inn (East Wind)
1975: Mobius (RCA)
1976: The Pentagon (East Wind)
1977: First Set (SteepleChase)
1977: Second Set (SteepleChase)
1977: Third Set (SteepleChase)
1978: Animation (Columbia)
1980: Soundscapes (Columbia)
1980: The Maestro (Muse)
1981: Piano Solos (Clean Cuts)
1982: Among Friends (Theresa Records)
1985: The Trio, Vol. 1 (Red)
1985: The Trio, Vol. 2 (Red)
1985: The Trio, Vol. 3 (Red)
1985: Cedar's Blues (Red)
1985: Bluesville Time (Criss Cross)
1986: Up Front (Timeless)
1986: Cedar Walton Plays (Delos)
1987: This Is For You, John (Timeless)
1992: Live at Maybeck (Concord Jazz)
1992: Manhattan Afternoon (Criss Cross)
1996: Composer (Astor Place)
1999: Roots (Astor Place)
2001: The Promise Land (Highnote Records)
2002: Latin Tinge (Highnote)
2005: Naima (Savoy Jazz)
2005: Midnight Waltz (Venus Records)
2005: Underground Memoirs (Highnote)
2006: One Flight Down (Highnote)
2008: Seasoned Wood (Highnote)
2009: Voices Deep Within (Highnote)
2010: Cedar Chest (Highnote)
2011: The Bouncer (Highnote)
With Eastern Rebellion
1975: Eastern Rebellion, Vol. 1 (Timeless Muse)
1977: Eastern Rebellion, Vol. 2 (Timeless Muse)
1990: Mosaic (Musicmasters)
1992: Simple Pleasure (Musicmasters)
1994: Just One of Those... Nights At The Village Vanguard (Musicmasters)
With Timeless All Stars
1982: It's Timelss (Timeless)
1983: Timeless Heart (Timeless)
1986: Essence (Delos)
1991: Time For The Timeless All Stars (Early Bird Records)
As sideman[edit source]
With Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt
God Bless Jug and Sonny (Prestige, 1973 [2001])
Left Bank Encores (Prestige, 1973 [2001])
With Art Blakey
Mosaic (Blue Note, 1961)
Three Blind Mice (Blue Note, 1962)
Free For All (Blue Note, 1964)
Kyoto (Riverside, 1964)
Indestructible (Blue Note, 1964)
Golden Boy (Colpix, 1964)
Buhaina (Prestige, 1973)
Anthenagin (Prestige, 1973)
With Donald Byrd
Slow Drag (Blue Note, 1967)
With Ornette Coleman
Broken Shadows (Columbia, 1972 [1982])
With John Coltrane
Giant Steps (Atlantic, 1959)
With Sonny Criss
Up, Up and Away (Prestige, 1967)
The Beat Goes On! (Prestige, 1968)
With Kenny Dorham and Cannonball Adderley
Blue Spring (Riverside, 1959)
With Teddy Edwards
It's All Right! (Prestige, 1967)
With Art Farmer and Benny Golson
Big City Sounds (Argo, 1960)
The Jazztet and John Lewis (Argo, 1961)
The Jazztet at Birdhouse (Argo, 1961)
With Curtis Fuller
Soul Trombone (Impulse!, 1961)
Smokin' (Mainstream, 1972)
With Benny Golson
Take a Number from 1 to 10 (Argo, 1961)
With Dexter Gordon
Tangerine (Prestige, 1972 [1975])
Generation (Prestige, 1972)
With Steve Grossman
Love is the Thing (Red Record, 1985)
With Eddie Harris
Cool Sax from Hollywood to Broadway (Columbia, 1964)
The In Sound (Atlantic, 1965)
Mean Greens (Atlantic, 1966)
The Tender Storm (Atlantic, 1966)
Excursions (Atlantic, 1966-73)
How Can You Live Like That? (Atlantic, 1976)
With Jimmy Heath
The Quota (Riverside, 1961)
Triple Threat (Riverside, 1962)
With Joe Henderson
Mode for Joe (Blue Note, 1966)
With Freddie Hubbard
Here To Stay (Blue Note, 1962, [1979])
With Bobby Hutcherson
Highway One (Columbia, 1978)
With Milt Jackson
Milt Jackson at the Museum of Modern Art (Limelight, 1965)
Born Free (Limelight, 1966)
Milt Jackson and the Hip String Quartet (Verve, 1968)
Goodbye (CTI, 1973)
Olinga (CTI, 1974)
With J. J. Johnson
J.J. Inc. (Columbia, 1961)
With Sam Jones
Seven Minds (East Wind Records, 1974)
With Clifford Jordan
Spellbound (Riverside, 1960)
Starting Time (Jazzland, 1961)
Bearcat (Jazzland, 1962)
With Eric Kloss
First Class Kloss! (Prestige, 1967)
With Abbey Lincoln
Abbey Is Blue (Riverside, 1959)
With Pat Martino
Strings! (Prestige, 1967)
With Christian McBride
New York Time (Chesky, 2006)
With Charles McPherson
From This Moment On! (Prestige, 1968)
Horizons (Prestige, 1968)
With Lee Morgan
The Sixth Sense (Blue Note, 1968)
With Blue Mitchell
The Cup Bearers (Riverside, 1962)
Boss Horn (1966)
Summer Soft (Impulse!, 1977)
With Houston Person
Chocomotive (Prestige, 1967)
Trust in Me (Prestige, 1967)
Blue Odyssey (Prestige, 1968)
Broken Windows, Empty Hallways (Prestige, 1972)
With Sonny Red
The Mode (Jazzland, 1961)
Sonny Red (Mainstream, 1971)
With Stanley Turrentine
Another Story (Blue Note, 1969)
With Woody Shaw
Setting Standards (Muse, 1983)
References[edit source]

^ Deardra Shuler, "Cedar Walton and Barry Harris to play Jazz at Lincoln Center", New York Amsterdam News, June 20, 2013.
^ a b Cedar Walton page at Last.fm.
^ Bailey, Phil (1985), Volume 35 - Cedar Walton, Jamey Aebersold, 1985.
^ Lifetime Honors, National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters.
^ Mark Memmott, "Jazz Pianist Cedar Walton Dies", NPR, August 19, 2013.
External links[edit source]

Cedar Walton at the Internet Movie Database
Interview with Cedar Walton, Do The Math, March 2010.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

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

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

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.