The Magnificent Legacy of Lester 'Prez' Young (1909-1959) On the 104th anniversary of his Birth

 LESTER YOUNG
(b. August 27, 1909)

 

 LESTER YOUNG IN 1958

 

"Goodbye Porkpie Hat" (immortal 1959 composition by bass player and composer Charles Mingus dedicated to Lester "Prez" Young upon his death in March 15 of that year)

This was recorded two months later by Mingus on May 12, 1959

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9L110v7NI0



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sfe_8RAaJ0

FROM 1959 RECORDING ON COLUMBIA RECORDS ENTITLED "MINGUS AH UM"

Charles Mingus: Bass
Booker Ervin: Tenor Saxophone
John Handy: Alto Saxophone
Horace Parlan: Piano
Dannie Richmond: Drums

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

The Greatest Jazz Films Ever - Parts 1 and 2

PART 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZJx33i63LM&feature=endscreen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZJx33i63LM&feature=endscreen
 

PART 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wN4ca7gr1E

Throughout his life, Young struggled with racism, from the Jim Crow laws his family faced in the 1920s to the way he felt the Army treated him during WW2 in the 1940s.

"They want everyone who's a Negro to be an Uncle Tom, an Uncle Remus and Uncle Sam, and I can't make it," Young said. "But it's the same way all over. You just fight for your life, you dig? Until death do you part.  Then you got it made."

 LESTER YOUNG IN 1956

 

http://foglobe.com/lester-young.html

American jazz saxophone player and songwriter Young revolutionized modern jazz tenor-saxophone playing, and his light, lyrical sound was featured in orchestras such as Count Basie's, in his partnering of such singers as Billie Holiday, and in his combo work with both traditional and modern jazz musicians.

Born: August 27, 1909; Woodville, Mississippi
Died: March 15, 1959; New York, New York

Also known as: Lester Willis Young (full name) and PREZ (a legendary nickname that Billie Holiday gave him meaning "President of the saxophone players")

The Pres Principal recordings albums: Kansas City Style, 1944; Lester Warms Up, 1944; Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, 1946 (with Coleman Hawkins); Lester Young: Buddy Rich Trio, 1946 (with Buddy Rich); Lester Young: Nat King Cole Trio, 1946 (with Nat King Cole); Lester Young Quartet and Count Basie Seven, 1950 (with Count Basie); Lester Young Swings Again, 1950; The Pres, 1950; Pres Is Blue, 1950;

Lester Young Collates, 1951; Lester Young Trio, 1951 (with Lester Young Trio); Pres, 1951; It Don't Mean a Thing, 1952; Pres and His Cabinet, 1952 (with others); Pres and Teddy and Oscar, 1952 (with Oscar Peterson and Teddy Wilson); Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio, 1952 (with Peterson); Battle of the Saxes, 1953 (with others); Just You, Just Me, 1953; Lester Young Collates No. 2, 1953;

Lester Young: His Tenor Sax, 1954; Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio, Vol. 1, 1954 (with Peterson); Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio, Vol. 2, 1954 (with Peterson); Mean to Me, 1954; The President, 1954; Pres and Sweets,

1955 (with Harry Sweets Edison); Pres Meets Vice Pres, 1955 (with Paul Quinichette); The Jazz Giants '56, 1956 (with Roy Eldridge); Lester Swings Again,

1956; Lester's Here, 1956; Nat King Cole: Buddy Rich Trio, 1956 (with Cole and Buddy Rich); Pres and Teddy, 1956 (with Wilson); Tops on Tenor, 1956; Going for Myself, 1957;
If It Ain't Got That Swing, 1957; Laughin' to Keep from Cryin', 1958; The Lester Young/Teddy Wilson Quartet, 1959 (with Wilson). The Life

The oldest of three children, LesterWillis Young grew up near New Orleans, where his father, a minstrel-show musician, instructed him on playing the trumpet, saxophone, and drums. Young toured several midwestern states with the family band, and, at age thirteen, he decided to concentrate on mastering the saxophone. Later, he often said that his distinctive sound was the result of his attempt to imitate on his tenor saxophone the C-melody saxophone timbre of his idol Frankie Trumbauer. During the late 1920's and early 1930's, Young played for various bands in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Minnesota, including the orchestras of King Oliver, Andy Kirk, and Walter Page. His most extensive and important association was with Count Basie's big band and small groups, which led to his first recordings. After leaving Basie in 1940, Young played in several combos led by himself and by other musicians. In 1944, when he won first place in the Down Beat poll for the best tenor saxophonist, he was drafted into the Army, which proved disastrous for his personal and professional life. He was court-martialed for using marijuana, and he spent several months in a Georgia military prison. When he was released at the end of 1945, he resumed playing, recording, and touring. However, the racism that he had experienced before and during the war created deep emotional distress, which was exacerbated by the breakup of his first two marriages to white women.

During the 1950's, his alcoholism and his inadequate diet contributed to a precipitous decline in his health. In 1959, after returning from an engagement in Paris, he died at the Hotel Alvin, located on "the musician's crossroad" at Fifty-second Street and Broadway in New York City. The Music Young had a deep and lasting influence on the development of modern jazz by creating a unique improvisatory style and a new type of jazz, sometimes called cool, because of its avoidance of emotional excess. By his nonconformity in music, dress, and behavior, and through the jazz argot he helped to popularize, Young influenced not only jazz musicians but also such Beat writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In fact, his jazz solos have often been characterized in terms of poetry, since his improvisations flowed like a good conversation.

He reveled in surprising combinations of sounds, the way a poet delights in a revelatory ordering of words. Sax Style. During his early career, Young's songlike style was sometimes compared unfavorably to the robust approach of Coleman Hawkins on the tenor saxophone. Young had a light tone, whereas Hawkins had a rich, rounded tone. Young had a slow vibrato, while Hawkins's was fast. Young's phrasing was smooth, melodic, and economical, where unplayed notes often had as important a role as played ones. Hawkins, on the other hand, constructed his expressive solos with a Baroque profusion of notes. One critic called Hawkins the "Rubens of jazz", while Young was its C?zanne. Young took Hawkins's place in Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, but he was quickly let go because he refused to duplicate Hawkins's sound and style. Young's graceful, melodic approach to tenorsaxophone playing achieved success largely through his recordings with the Count Basie Orchestra and with small groups of Basie sidemen. His solos on such big band favorites as "One o'Clock Jump" and "Jive at Five" were so admired that Young imitators memorized them note for note.

Even more influential were Young's solos in Basie sextets and septets. For example, some jazz musicians view his improvisations on the 1936 version of "Lady Be Good" as the best solo he ever recorded. In 1939 his recording of "Lester Leaps In", with the Kansas City Seven, was so successful that it became his signature tune (it was supposedly named because Lester arrived late for a take on his composition). Working with Billie Holiday. Young's recordings with the vocalist Holiday are legendary. She gave him the nickname "Pres" because he was the "President" of all saxophone players, and he affectionately nicknamed her "Lady Day". Holiday was attracted to Young's shy, sensitive personality, and she found his melodic and conversational improvisations compatible with the way she interpreted songs.

Young believed that a song's lyrics were important in his improvisations, both when he soloed and when he accompanied singers. In his improvisations he edited, reworked, and transformed the song's melody, while managing to create a unified solo or accompaniment that deepened and expanded the song's message and mood. So intimate was the rapport he achieved with Holiday on songs such as "The Man I Love" and "All of Me" that they seem to be thinking each other's thoughts. Something similar happened when Young collaborated with such talented instrumentalists as the guitarist CharlieChristian and the clarinetist Benny Goodman. After Prison. Acontroversy exists among aficionados and jazz critics over the quality of Young's music after his release from prison in 1945. Some believe that emotional and physical suffering sapped his will to create, and his work in small groups and large orchestras rarely equaled, and never surpassed, the high quality of his work in the late 1930's and the early 1940's.

Other critics and such jazz musicians as Sonny Rollins dispute this evaluation. They observe Young conquering the depths of his despair to achieve his greatest musical creativity. For example, these commentators view his recording of "These Foolish Things", in his first session as a free man, as a masterpiece. Furthermore, his solos on "Lester Leaps In" during the Jazz at the Philharmonic tours exhibit consistently inspiring musicianship. Even as late as 1957, when he appeared for the last time with Holiday on the CBS television show Sound of Jazz, the sensitivity and creativity of their collaboration on Holiday's tune "Fine and Mellow" left musicians and viewers deeply moved. Musical Legacy Some scholars consider Young to be the greatest tenor player of all time, whereas others pair him with Hawkins as the two most vital creators of how the tenor is used in modern jazz. Young introduced a new sensibility into improvisations by creating a rhythmic flexibility and melodic richness that was malleable enough to transform both ballads and up-tempo tunes into a new jazz style that some called cool, a term that Young may have coined.

He had a major influence on many young tenor players, including Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Illinois Jacquet, and Dexter Gordon. Paul Quinichette based his style so closely on Young's that he was given the nickname "Vice Pres". Young also had an influence on other instrumentalists, including trumpeters, trombonists, and pianists. Some have claimed that Charlie Parker's alto sound was reminiscent of Young's tenor sound, but Parker responded that, though he deeply admired Young, his (Young's) style was in an entirely different musical world.

Some have described Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool album as an orchestration of Young's tenor sound. Young's influence extended even into motion pictures. In the film 'Round Midnight (1986), which some have called the best jazz film ever made, the principal character is largely based on Young. Bertrand Tavernier, the director, dedicated the film to Young and Bud Powell, and DexterGordon,who played the central figure, received an Academy Award nomination for his performance. In this way, through recordings and films, Lester Young's legacy lives on.

Last recording session with longtime close friend and colleague Billie Holiday. This session was filmed in 1958 for American television. Prez and LadyDay (Lester's nickname for Billie) both died within a month of each other in 1959). Young was 49 and Holiday was 44 when they died

LESTER YOUNG  AKA 'PREZ'

 Lester's Porkpie Hat

 

 

Lester Young at the Famous Door, New York, N.Y., ca. September 1946. Photo by William P. Gottlieb.

NAME: Lester Young
OCCUPATION: Saxophonist
BIRTH DATE: August 27, 1909
DEATH DATE: March 15, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH: Woodville, Mississippi
PLACE OF DEATH: New York, New York


Lester Young was a saxophonist who introduced an approach to improvisation that provided much of the basis for modern jazz solo conception.

The impact of Lester Young’s style was so broad that he has been cited as a favorite by such diverse modern jazz figures as Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, and John Coltrane. Much of the West Coast “cool” style was a product of Lester Young's approach. He was so important that singer Billie Holiday called him president of tenor saxophonists, and he was known thereafter as Prez.

© 2013 A+E Networks. All rights reserved.

 LESTER YOUNG

FOR LESTER YOUNG aka 'PREZ'
(1909-1959)
by Kofi Natambu

Tears are iodine
seeping thru tenor
perforations
                    A cloud of song
                    floats past an open ear
blowing kisses along the 

frontiers of memory
                    A beat that shines
                    blinds us
a writhing melodic curve dives &
swoops

In that capacious bell
lonely dreams hide

Our bodies become the dance his
voice provides

LADYDAY AND PREZ GO FOR BROKE IN 1958 AND LIGHT UP THE SKY!

No superlatives of any kind could possibly capture the otherwordly beauty, depth, dignity, integrity, passion, grace, ectasy, and sweet enduring subtlety of this sublime musical meeting of the minds and spirits iof Bllie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben webster, Roy eldridge, and Gerry Mulligan in this magnificent video of a 1958 TV program featuring Billie's great blues composition "Fine & Mellow". INDEED...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtgUbJN8oPE




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IyuG_2jXsE


Billie Holiday and Lester Young:  "Fine and Mellow"  (COMPOSITION BY BILLIE HOLIDAY)
www.youtube.com

WANNA HEAR SOMETHING ABSOLUTELY G...L...O...R...I...O...U...S?

CHECK OUT THIS MAGNIFICENT CONVOCATION OF MUSICAL GENIUSES LED BY THE LEGENDARY INVENTOR OF THE MODERN JAZZ TENOR SAXOPHONE, LESTER YOUNG WHO WAS BORN ON THIS DATE IN 1909!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Z10gZTxdHhQ#t=80



Life Magazine photographer Gjon Mili joined with jazz producer and Verve-label owner Norman Granz to produce the short film "Jammin' the Blues" in 1944 with Lester Young, Red Callendar, Harry Edison, "Big" Sid Catlett, Illinois Jacquet, Barney Kessel, Jo Jones and Marie Bryant. The film was nominated for Best Short Subject at the 1945 Academy Awards, but didn't win.

The pair came together again in 1950 to shoot footage of leading jazz artists of the day, but when funding dried up, the film ceased production and sat on shelves for 50 years (except for a few snippets which found their way onto bootlegs).

Blues For Greasy is one of those pieces shot by Gjon Mili and Norman Granz, using musicians from his Jazz at the Philharmonic tour.

Harry 'Sweets' Edison: trumpet
Lester Young: Tenor Sax
Flip Phillips: Tenor Sax
Bill Harris: Trombone
Hank Jones: Piano
Ray Brown: Bass
Buddy Rich: Drums
Ella Fitzgerald: Vocals

STILL MORE GLORY FROM LESTER YOUNG AND HIS MAGISTERIAL COLLEAGUES IN 1944...EVERYTIME I HEAR AND WATCH THIS FILM I FEEL LIKE LITERALLY JUMPING OUT OF MY SKIN...AND I ACTUALLY WIND UP DOING IT...JUST INCREDIBLE...AND WHAT CAN ANYONE SAY ABOUT THAT SOARING FORCE OF NATURE ON TRUMPET NAMED HARRY "SWEETS" EDISON?...OMG!!

This is the absolute beauty that blackfolks were generous and confident enough to share with the entire world...DON'T FORGET THAT FACT...and teach it to the youngfolks...PLEASE!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1EYOdIr-HE


 

HOW MUCH SHEER SUBLIME BEAUTY CAN ONE STAND? 

BIRD AND PREZ OCCUPYING YET ANOTHER DIMENSION  IN 1949!
 

Jazz at the Philharmonic 1949:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9cZF2dOZPM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Young

Lester Young
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Background information
Birth name    Lester Willis Young
Also known as    "Pres" or "Prez"
Born    August 27, 1909
Woodville, Mississippi, U.S.
Origin    Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.
Died    March 15, 1959 (aged 49)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Genres    Jazz
Occupations    Saxophonist, clarinetist
Instruments    Tenor saxophone, clarinet
Years active    1933–1959

Record Labels:    Verve

Lester Willis Young (August 27, 1909 – March 15, 1959),[1] nicknamed "Pres" or "Prez", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and sometime clarinetist.

Coming to prominence while a member of Count Basie's orchestra, Young was one of the most influential players on his instrument. In contrast to many of his hard-driving peers, Young played with a relaxed, cool tone and used sophisticated harmonies, using "a free-floating style, wheeling and diving like a gull, banking with low, funky riffs that pleased dancers and listeners alike".[2]
Famous for his hip, introverted style,[3] he invented or popularized much of the hipster jargon which came to be associated with the music.[4]

Contents

1 Early life and career
2 With the Count Basie Orchestra
3 Leaving Basie
4 Army service
5 Post-war recordings
6 Struggle and revival
7 The final years
8 Posthumous dedications and influence
9 Discography
9.1 As Leader
9.2 As member of Basie band
9.3 Solo career
9.4 With Oscar Peterson
10 References
11 External links

Early life and career

Lester Young was born in Woodville, Mississippi, and grew up in a musical family. His father, Willis Handy Young, was a respected teacher, his brother Lee Young was a drummer, and several other relatives played music professionally. His family moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, when Lester was an infant and later to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Although at a very young age Young did not initially know his father, he learned that his father was a musician. Later Willis taught his son to play the trumpet, violin, and drums in addition to the saxophone.

Lester Young played in his family's band, known as the Young Family Band,[3] in both the vaudeville and carnival circuits. He left the family band in 1927 at the age of 18 because he refused to tour in the Southern United States, where Jim Crow laws were in effect and racial segregation was required in public facilities.[5]

With the Count Basie Orchestra

In 1933 Young settled in Kansas City, where after playing briefly in several bands, he rose to prominence with Count Basie. His playing in the Basie band was characterized by a relaxed style which contrasted sharply with the more forceful approach of Coleman Hawkins, the dominant tenor sax player of the day.

Young left the Basie band to replace Hawkins in Fletcher Henderson's orchestra.[6] He soon left Henderson to play in the Andy Kirk band (for six months) before returning to Basie. While with Basie, Young made small-group recordings for Milt Gabler's Commodore Records, The Kansas City Sessions. Although they were recorded in New York (in 1938, with a reunion in 1944), they are named after the group, the Kansas City Seven, and comprised Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, Basie, Young, Freddie Green, Rodney Richardson, and Jo Jones. Young played clarinet as well as tenor in these sessions. He was a master of the clarinet, and there too his style was entirely his own. As well as the Kansas City Sessions, his clarinet work from 1938–39 is documented on recordings with Basie, Billie Holiday, Basie small groups, and the organist Glenn Hardman.

After Young's clarinet was stolen in 1939, he abandoned the instrument until about 1957. That year Norman Granz gave him one and urged him to play it (with far different results at that stage in Young's life—see below).
Leaving Basie[edit source]

Young left the Basie band in late 1940. He is rumored to have refused to play with the band on Friday, December 13 of that year for superstitious reasons, spurring his dismissal.[6] Lester left the band around that time and subsequently led a number of small groups that often included his brother, noted drummer Lee Young, for the next couple of years; live and broadcast recordings from this period exist.

During this period Young accompanied the singer Billie Holiday in a couple of studio sessions in 1940 and 1941 and also made a small set of recordings with Nat "King" Cole (their first of several collaborations) in June 1942. His studio recordings are relatively sparse during the 1942 to 1943 period, largely due to the American Federation of Musicians' recording ban. It was Holiday who gave Young the nickname "Pres", short for President.[7]

In December 1943 Young returned to the Basie fold for a 10-month stint, cut short by his being drafted into the army during World War II (see below). Recordings made during this and subsequent periods suggest Young was beginning to make much greater use of a plastic reed, which tended to give his playing a somewhat heavier, breathier tone (although still quite smooth compared to that of many other players). While he never abandoned the wooden reed, he used the plastic reed a significant share of the time from 1943 until the end of his life. Another cause for the thickening of his tone around this time was a change in saxophone mouthpiece from a metal Otto Link to an ebonite Brilhart. In August 1944 Young appeared alongside drummer Jo Jones, trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison, and fellow tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet in Gjon Mili's short film Jammin' the Blues.

Army service

In September 1944 Young and Jo Jones were in Los Angeles with the Basie Band when they were inducted into the U.S. Army. Unlike many white musicians, who were placed in band outfits such as the ones led by Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw, Young was assigned to the regular army where he was not allowed to play his saxophone.[citation needed] Based in Ft. McClellan, Alabama, Young was found with marijuana and alcohol among his possessions. He was soon court-martialed. Young did not fight the charges and was convicted. He served one year in a detention barrack and was dishonorably discharged in late 1945. His experience inspired his composition "D.B. Blues" (with D.B. standing for detention barracks).

Some jazz historians have argued that Young's playing power declined in the years following his army experience, though critics such as Scott Yanow disagree with this entirely. Recordings show that his playing began to change before he was drafted. Some argue that Young's playing had an increasingly emotional slant to it, and the post-war period featured some of his greatest renditions of ballads.[citation needed]

Post-war recordings

Young's career after World War II was far more prolific and lucrative than in the pre-war years in terms of recordings made, live performances, and annual income. Young joined Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) troupe in 1946, touring regularly with them over the next 12 years. He made a significant number of studio recordings under Granz's supervision for his Verve Records label as well, including more trio recordings with Nat King Cole. Young also recorded extensively in the late 1940s for Aladdin Records (1946-7, where he had made the Cole recordings in 1942) and for Savoy (1944, '49 and '50), some sessions of which included Basie on piano.

While the quality and consistency of his playing ebbed gradually in the latter half of the 1940s and into the early 1950s, he also gave some brilliant performances during this stretch. Especially noteworthy are his performances with JATP in 1946, 1949, and 1950.[citation needed] With Young at the 1949 JATP concert at Carnegie Hall were Charlie Parker and Roy Eldridge, and Young's solo on "Lester Leaps In" at that concert is a particular standout among his performances in the latter half of his career.

Struggle and revival]

From around 1951, Young's level of playing declined more precipitously, as he began to drink more and more heavily. His playing showed reliance on a small number of clichéd phrases and reduced creativity and originality, despite his claims that he did not want to be a "repeater pencil" (Young coined this phrase to describe the act of repeating one's own past ideas). A comparison of his studio recordings from 1952, such as the session with pianist Oscar Peterson, and those from 1953–1954 (all available on the Verve label) also demonstrates a declining command of his instrument and sense of timing, possibly due to both mental and physical factors.[citation needed] Young's playing and health went into a crisis, culminating in a November 1955 hospital admission following a nervous breakdown.

He emerged from this treatment improved. In January 1956 he recorded two Granz-produced sessions featuring pianist Teddy Wilson (who had led the Billie Holiday recordings with Young in the 1930s), trumpet player Roy Eldridge, trombonist Vic Dickenson, bassist Gene Ramey, and drummer Jo Jones – available on the Jazz Giants '56 and Prez and Teddy albums. 1956 was a relatively good year for Lester Young, including a tour of Europe with Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet and a successful stint at Olivia's Patio Lounge in Washington, DC.

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Young had sat in on Count Basie Orchestra gigs from time to time. The best-known of these is their July 1957 appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, the line-up including many of Lester's old buddies: Jo Jones, Roy Eldridge, Illinois Jacquet and Jimmy Rushing. His playing was in better shape, and he produced some of the old, smooth-toned flow of the 1930s. Among other tunes he played a moving "Polkadots and Moonbeams", which was a favorite of his at that time

The final years

On December 8, 1957, Young appeared with Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, and Gerry Mulligan in the CBS television special The Sound of Jazz, performing Holiday's tune "Fine and Mellow". It was a reunion with Holiday, with whom he had lost contact for years. She was also in decline at the end of her career, and they both gave moving performances. Young's solo was brilliant, considered by many jazz musicians an unparalleled marvel of economy, phrasing and extraordinarily moving emotion.[citation needed] But Young seemed gravely ill, and was the only horn player who was seated (except during his solo) during the performance. By this time his alcoholism had cumulative effect. He was eating significantly less, drinking more and more, and suffering from liver disease and malnutrition. Young's sharply diminished physical strength in the final two years of his life yielded some recordings with a frail tone, shortened phrases, and, on rare occasions, a difficulty in getting any sound to come out of his horn at all.

Lester Young made his final studio recordings and live performances in Paris in March 1959 with drummer Kenny Clarke at the tail end of an abbreviated European tour during which he ate next to nothing and virtually drank himself to death. He died in the early morning hours of March 15, 1959, only hours after arriving back in New York, at the age of 49. He was buried at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn.[9] According to jazz critic Leonard Feather, who rode with Holiday in a taxi to Young's funeral, she said after the services, "I'll be the next one to go."[10] Holiday died four months later at age 44.
Posthumous dedications and influence[edit source]

Charles Mingus dedicated an elegy, "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat", for Young only a few months after his death.[11] Wayne Shorter, then of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, composed a tribute, called "Lester Left Town".

Young's playing style influenced many other tenor saxophonists. Perhaps the most famous and successful of these were Stan Getz and Dexter Gordon, but he also influenced many in the cool movement such as Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, and Gerry Mulligan. Paul Quinichette modeled his style so closely on Young's that he was sometimes referred to as the "Vice Prez" (sic).[12] Sonny Stitt began to incorporate elements from Lester Young's approach when he made the transition to tenor saxophone. Lester Young also had a direct influence on young Charlie Parker ("Bird"), and thus the entire be-bop movement. Indeed, recordings of Parker on tenor sax are similar in style to that of Young. Lesser-known saxophonists, such as Warne Marsh, were strongly influenced by Young.

Don Byron recorded the album Ivey-Divey in gratitude for what he learned from studying Lester Young's work, modeled after a 1946 trio date with Buddy Rich and Nat King Cole. "Ivey-Divey" was one of Lester Young's common eccentric phrases.

Young is a major character in English writer Geoff Dyer's 1991 fictional book about jazz, But Beautiful.
The Resurrection of Lady Lester by OyamO (Charles F. Gordon) is a play and published book depicting Young's life, subtitled "A Poetic Mood Song Based on the Legend of Lester Young".[13]

In the 1986 film Round Midnight, the fictional main character Dale Turner, played by Dexter Gordon, was partly based on Young – incorporating flashback references to his army experiences, and loosely depicting his time in Paris and his return to New York just before his death.

Acid Jazz/boogaloo band the Greyboy Allstars song "Tenor Man" is a tribute to Young. On their 1999 album "Live", saxophonist Karl Denson introduces the song by saying, "now some folks may have told you that Lester Young is out of style, but we're here to tell you that the Prez is happenin' right now." Those were literally the lyrics Rahsaan Roland Kirk wrote and sang to the melody of the Charles Mingus elegy, "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat".

Peter Straub's short story collection Magic Terror (2000) contains a story called "Pork Pie Hat", a fictionalized account of the life of Lester Young. Straub was inspired by Young's appearance on the 1957 CBS-TV show The Sound of Jazz, which he watched repeatedly, wondering how such a genius could have ended up such a human wreck.[1]

Lester Young is said to have popularized use of the term "cool" to mean something fashionable.[14] Another slang term he coined was the term "bread" for money. He would ask, "How does the bread smell?" when asking how much a gig was going to pay.[15]

Discography

As Leader:

Just You, Just Me (1953)
As member of Basie band[edit source]
The Complete Decca Recordings (1937–39) Decca Records
America's No. 1 Band: The Columbia Years (1936–1940 and non-Young sessions to 1942) Columbia Records
Super Chief (1936–1940 and non-Young sessions to 1964) Columbia Records
Solo career[edit source]
The Kansas City Sessions (1938 and 1944) Commodore Records
The Master's Touch (1944) – Savoy Records
The Complete Aladdin Recordings (1942–7) – the 1942 Nat King Cole session and more from the post-war period
Lester Young Trio (1946) – with Cole again, and Buddy Rich Verve Records
The Complete Savoy Recordings (1944–50)
Lester Young Trio (1946) – Verve Records
One Night Stand - The Town Hall Concert 1947 – live recording
Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio (1952) Verve Records
Live at Birdland- Lester Young (1953)
Pres and Teddy (1956) Verve Records
The Jazz Giants '56 (1956) – Verve Records
The Complete Lester Young Studio Sessions on Verve – 8-CD boxed set (includes the only two Young interviews in existence)
Lester Young in Washington, D.C., 1956 (5 volumes), with house-band the Bill Potts Trio.
Count Basie – Count Basie at Newport (1957)
Going for Myself (1957–1958, released posthumously) with Harry Edison
With Oscar Peterson[edit source]
Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio (1952, Verve)
References[edit source]

^ "Lester Young". Find a Grave. Retrieved October 17, 2010.
^ Deveaux, Scott (2011). Jazz "Essential Listening". Matrix Publishing Services, Inc. p. 172. ISBN 978-0-393-93563-9 (pbk.).
^ a b Deveaux, Scott (2011). Jazz "Essential Listening". Matrix Publishing Services, Inc. p. 171. ISBN 978-0-393-93563-9 (pbk.).
^ "Charlie [Parker] was shy of hipster elaborations. He added nothing to the vocabulary, as did Lester Young, one of the great hip verbalists." Russell, Ross (1973). Bird Lives: The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker. DaCapo Press, p. 186
^ 24 part "Interview with Lester Young", conducted in the 1950s
^ a b Berendt, Joachim (1976). The Jazz Book. Paladin. pp. 79–80.
^ "Lester Young: Biography by Scott Yanow" at allmusic.com
^ "Lester Young", The African American Registry -
^ "Lester Young", Evergreens Cemetery
^ Feather, Leonard (1987). From Satchmo to Miles. Da Capo Press. p. 82. ISBN 978-0-306-80302-4.
^ Mingus Ah Um, Allmusic. Retrieved July 17, 2009
^ Repost of item from "Jazz Legends: Paul Quinichette" on Jazzimprov.com
^ Mel Gussow, THEATER: 'Lady Lester', New York Times, November 14, 1981.
^ – Online Eymology Dictionary
^ – NPR Retrieved August 28, 2009
Luc Delannoy. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 1-55728-264-1. Unknown parameter |es:Luc Delannoytitle= ignored (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)
External links[edit source]

Biography portal
Music portal
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lester Young
The Legendary Lester Young: an article in the TLS by John Mole, July 18, 2007.
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Lester Young on YouTube:

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Lester Young - YouTube
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL160E86405562C4F7 

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/arts/music/cedar-walton-pianist-and-composer-dies-at-79.html 

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

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Also from a performance in 1976 at the Umbria Jazz Festival, John Coltrane's composition ...
Cedar Walton's "Bolivia"

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1984 Milt Jackson, Ray Brown, Cedar Walton -5+6: Midnight Waltz / The Very Thought Of You
Cedar Walton

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Cedar Walton Trio - TVJazz.tv - YouTube

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Cedar Walton Trio Série Jazz dans la nuit series. Festival International de Jazz de Montréal 2012
Cedar Walton plays "Blue Monk"

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Nov 11, 2006
 

From a performance in 1976 at the Umbria Jazz Festival,
Bobby Hutcherson & Cedar Walton Quartet

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Nov 1, 2012 -
Bobby Hutcherson Cedar Walton David Williams Eddie Marshall San Javier Jazz Festival 2010.
 

Cedar Walton Trio with Billy Higgins & David Williams -

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Sep 29, 2012 

 

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Mar 1, 2013
 

One of the most celebrated Cedar Walton's compositions that is a real new jazz standard by Cedar Walton -"Bolivia" -
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Nov 25, 2012
Cedar Walton Trio

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_Walton

 

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.

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