Play what you wish the world to be.
- Wayne Shorter
On many a Saturday night back in 1983 or so, my buddy Fitz and I would hop in his car and drive from “Ground Zero” to Washington Square for a weekend in Greenwich Village. When we hit the Palisades Parkway, he’d pop in Weather Report’s 8:30 cassette and fast-forward to Teen Town to let Jaco loosen things up. Then, A Remark You Made would play. It was the perfect one-two punch. Here’s A Remark You Made from that album:
8:30 won the Grammy in 1979 for Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal Or Instrumental. Although he had been recording incredible albums for 30 years, that was Shorter’s first Grammy - Weather Report’s I Sing The Body Electric was nominated for a Grammy in 1972 in the same category, but Freddie Hubbard’s First Light won.
The first time I heard Wayne Shorter play was in about 1978 on the song Badia from Weather Report’s 1975 Tale Spinnin’:
Tale Spinnin’ was the first Weather Report album I ever heard and it remains my favorite, followed closely by their 1977 Heavy Weather (I find these two albums infinitely better than I Sing The Body Electric, but that’s just me).
In late 1970s White Bear Lake, Minnesota, jazz albums were very hard to come by. I could not drive, so I’d have to con my brother John or sister Juli to take me to the used record store by Aldrich Arena, down from where we lived. The record store was in a strip mall, and I have no recollection of what the name was. All I remember now is that one day I bought three used jazz albums on a whim - I wanted to learn more about jazz. The town library had no jazz albums and really no jazz books to speak of, so that was really the only way. As I learned a few years later, once I could drive, there were actually a few really solid used records stores in St. Paul - Electric Fetus is one I recall, and two more around Dinkytown by the University of Minnesota.
Those three albums were: Walt Dickerson’s Peace; Dewey Redman’s The Ear of the Behearer; and Miroslav Vitouš’ Infinite Search. On the first two, I was going in completely blind. However, on the third, at least I had heard of John McLaughlin (my brother Paul had Santana’s Welcome album in his collection, which McLaughlin played on). I also noticed it was produced by Herbie Mann, who I was familiar with - in fact, my brother also had Mann’s Et Tu Flute, which I loved.
As it turned out, I didn’t like any of them. I hated them.
Out of the whole lot, I could only listen to one song - Mountain in the Clouds on Vitous’ Infinite Search:
Here’s that song, and I wore that track out - all 1 minute and 51 seconds of it:
This is a heavy album with McLaughlin on guitar, Joe Henderson on tenor, Herbie Hancock on electric piano, and Jack DeJohnette and Joe Chambers on drums. Vitous would go on to found, along with Shorter and Zawinul, Weather Report in 1970.
The funny thing is, even though I hated these albums, I kept them. Years later, I actually grew to appreciate them. Now I like them. Back then, I just wasn’t in a place where that music could find my soul.
After graduating from NYU in 1956, and then two years in the army, Wayne Shorter got his start as a frontman alongside Lee Morgan in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. In 1960, he made his debut as a leader on the Vee-Jay label with Introducing Wayne Shorter:
In 1964, he would go on to make his debut on the Blue Note label, recording three seminal albums. These albums, all recorded in 1964, were intensely personal art that reflected his appreciation for three jazz titans: Night Dreamer is in the style of a Blakey album, Juju is a Coltrane album, and Speak No Evil is a Davis album. These explicit references help explain why this trilogy is so beloved among musicians, who revel in how Shorter puts his own imprint on these major influences.
While Wayne Shorter established himself in the world of jazz with those 1960s Blue Note releases, I’d like to focus on the wonderful music he produced in his post-Weather Report years - from 1987 on.
In 1987, Wayne Shorter won his second Grammy for the tune he composed called Call Street Blues from The Other Side of Round Music:
This is a fantastic song with a great quartet. Joining Shorter is Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums.
High Life, released in 1996, was the first album Wayne Shorter had recorded as a leader for seven years. It was also his recording debut for Verve Records. The album won the Grammy Award in 1996 for Best Contemporary Jazz Performance, one of three Grammys Shorter won for this album.
Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters, a collection of Joni Mitchell compositions, won Album of the Year at the 2008 Grammy Awards, beating out competition from Kanye West, Amy Winehouse, and others. It was an astonishing feat for a jazz recording, paralleled only by Stan Getz and João Gilberto for Getz/Gilberto in 1965.
Hancock and Shorter are longtime friends of Mitchell's, and both had previously collaborated with Mitchell on her 1979 album Mingus and continue to work with her.
In 2000, Shorter formed his 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 modern takes on his tunes going back to the 1960s. For example, Shorter’s Orbits appeared on 2014 Without a Net, his first album for Blue Note after a 43-year gap - since Odyssey of Iska was released in 1971. Orbits was first released in 1966 on Miles Davis’ Miles Smiles.
Orbits won the 2014 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo.
Recorded in 2016 on the Blue Note label, Emanon is a title taken from a Dizzy Gillespie and Milton Shaw composition Noname spelled backward. Emanon was accompanied by a 74-page graphic novel created by Shorter together with writer Monica Sly and artist Randy DuBurke, whose career includes work for DC Comics.
From Emanon, here is the live quartet version of Prometheus Unbound:
Emanon won the 2019 Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. As ambitious as this project was, Shorter’s most ambitious project was yet to come.
In 2018, Shorter retired from his nearly 70-year performing career due to health issues. However, he has continued working as a composer, creating a "new operatic work" titled (Iphigenia), which fulfills an operatic ambition he first harbored in the 1950s, as a music education major at NYU.
(Iphigenia) premiered in November 2021 at the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston.
Earlier this fall, he spoke with NPR's All Things Considered about the circuitous life of his opera.
As for Shorter, he says you won't find any "shoulda, coulda, woulda" in his operatic debut. "Life itself is the greatest opera," he adds," and to discover where you're going in all that, you have the right to do this discovering."
Interestingly, by some cosmic twist of fate, (Iphigenia) was the second major jazz opera to reach audiences in the second half of 2021. The first was Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which had a triumphant run at The Metropolitan Opera - the Met's first performance of an opera by a Black composer. The spectacular success of Fire Shut Up in My Bones just led The Met to announce it will also stage Champion, Blanchard's first operatic effort, in the spring of 2023. Champion was first premiered in 2013
Champion tells the true story of Emile Griffith, the resourceful Virgin Islands native who moves to New York to become a hat maker but ends up the welterweight boxing champion of the world throughout the 1960s. He also happens to be gay.
I don’t think it’s possible to talk about Jazz Opera and not first pay homage to the historic all-black African jazz opera, King Kong, which premiered at the Great Hall at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa on February 2, 1959.
I encourage you to read more about King Kong here:
King Kong’s narrative follows the life story of 1950s heavyweight boxer Ezekiel Dlamini, a Zulu from Vryheid, who was better known by his ring name “King Kong”. The similarities between this 1959 jazz opera and Blanchard’s Champion cannot go unnoticed and provide an important starting point for the American jazz opera movement - a movement looking to shed traditions of European opera, mainly by encouraging improvisation within the music.
Another important early precursor to this new and exciting trend in jazz opera is Anthony Davis’ 1985 X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X:
Here is a fascinating and short interview with Anthony Davis speaking about his opera X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X
America has a history of fantastic black opera singers from William Warfield to Jesse Norman who have made their mark in the world of opera, and I think it’s high time that black opera composers like Anthony Davis and Terrance Blanchard, and now Wayne Shorter, join them. The time is long past due for this necessary evolution in opera.
Unfortunately, I wanted to provide the link to the 2018 Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Wayne Shorter and the hauntingly beautiful performance of Shorter’s Aurora; however, it has been removed by YouTube. If you ever get the chance, watch that performance by Renée Fleming.
According to Shorter’s comments to R.J. DeLuke in a 2013 All About Jazz interview: “But when you write something, it’s not for anyone when you write it. You just hold onto it until somebody wants to record it. I started it when I was 19, around 1952. Just starting NYU, because I worked for a year before I went to college. I continued it and finished it in 2009, this piece called Aurora. She (Fleming) did it with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. You never know. You just do things. There’s no mystery.”
Here’s one more for the road. Early this summer, I went to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. One of the highlights of the festival was hearing Terrance Blanchard playing songs from his album Absence, which pays tribute to the influential octogenarian composer in a project that reconsiders a handful of Wayne Shorter's works.
Wayne Shorter’s musical journey is incredibly vast, which is why I only wanted to feature his post Weather Report recordings. A separate edition could easily cover his early Blue Note recordings and Weather Report, which we’ll save for another leg of our journey….
Next week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in to explore the deep and wide waters of bassist Charlie Haden.
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Until then, keep on walking….
Tyler, love this line , “Back then, I Just wasn’t in a place where that music could find my soul.” Such an insight…there have been many jazz songs, styles, or artists that I didn’t like at first, but over time I learned to appreciate the music. That includes tunes that you have introduced to me. Thx!