Shorter, Wayne

WAYNE SHORTER

Born: Newark, New Jersey, 25 August 1933

Genre: Jazz, Fusion

Best-selling album since 1990: Footprints Live! (2002)

Hit songs since 1990: "Aung San Suu Kyi"

Tenor and soprano saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Wayne Shorter is enjoying a December bloom. Long considered an aficionados' darling, contributing significantly but with an unusual degree of self-effacement to high-profile pop and rock projects as well as at least three of the most renown ensembles in jazz, as he attains "elder statesman" status he has emerged as the front man of his own quartet, supported by exciting, much younger virtuosos.

A musical prodigy whose older brother Alan (died 1988) was a jazz trumpeter with a more marginal career, Shorter began his professional life in 1956 with a stint in pianist Horace Silver's band, before being drafted into the army, which he served by playing in musical units stationed in New Jersey. Following discharge, Shorter joined trumpeter Maynard Ferguson's big band, where he met pianist Joe Zawinul, with whom he founded Weather Report, the foremost electric jazz-fusion ensemble, in 1970.

Prior to Weather Report, though, Shorter established himself as a memorable composer in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (from 1959 to 1963), penning bluesy "hard-bop" themes that have earned status as standards in the mainstream jazz repertoire. Then he joined Miles Davis's innovative mid-1960s quintet with pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams. During that band's transition from a relatively straight-ahead outfit to an iconoclastic, electrified ensemble, Shorter contributed pieces characterized by spare or fragmentary motifs, sometimes spinning through cycles or offset by silence.

During Davis's occasional down times, Shorter recorded a series of outstanding, mostly acoustic albums of his original compositions on the Blue Note label. His writing in that context investigates unusual harmonic relationships within common song formats. Throughout the 1960s Shorter also honed his saxophone sound, resulting in timbres lighter than those of John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins on tenor, and swooning and squealing on the soprano, which he first used in 1968. He won Down Beat magazine polls in the soprano saxophone category for thirteen consecutive years, beginning in 1969.

In Weather Report, Shorter's sax rode over Zawinul's multiple electric keyboards parts, aggressive trap drums, African-Caribbean-South American percussion, and the virtuosic electric bass of Jaco Pastorius. Even before he left the band in 1985 he pursued his own projects, collaborating with Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento on Native Dancer (1974), with the studio rock/pop duo Steely Dan on Aja (1976), with singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell, and with Latin-oriented rock guitarist Carlos Santana. Shorter and Santana co-led a band that toured internationally in the late 1980s and produced one album featuring them both.

Shorter shared a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition (other than Jazz) for the track "Call Sheet Blues" (1987), which he co-created for the film Round Midnight (1986), and in which he appeared. He released three albums during the late 1980s that intrigued musicians more than critics or the general public, as electric jazz had fallen out of favor. A Nirichen Buddhist since 1970, Shorter seemed unphased by the uncertain reception that his music met.

However, in the 1990s Shorter gained new momentum, winning Grammies for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance, Individual or Group in 1994 for his participation in A Tribute to Miles (1994); for Best Contemporary Jazz Performance, Instrumental in 1996 for High Life (1996), in which he played soprano sax against elaborate MIDI scores; for Best Instrumental Composition (Other Than Jazz) in 1997 for "Aung San Suu Kyi," dedicated to the Burmese human rights Nobel laureate, from a duet album (1+1, 1997) with Herbie Hancock; and for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist in 1999 for "In Walked Wayne," on trombonist J. J. Johnson's album Heroes (1998).

In 2001 Shorter convened his first touring quartet ever, with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade, all born after 1959. His first in-concert album, Footprints Live! (2002), topped many critics' Top 10 lists, won a 2003 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, and received rave reviews. Shorter's follow-up, Alegría (2003), was recorded in advance of the Footprints Live! tour. His first all-acoustic album since 1967, it features an orchestral array of percussion, brass, wood-winds, and strings as well as his young quartet. The program comprises a Celtic folk song, a piece by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and revisions of some 1960s compositions, as well as the inimitable tension of Shorter's alternately shy and aggressive saxophone sound.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

High Life (Verve, 1995); 1+1 (Verve, 1997); Footprints Live! (Verve, 2002); Alegría (Verve, 2003). With Various Artists: A Tribute to Miles (Qwest/Warner Bros., 1994); Herbie Hancock, Gershwin's World (Verve, 1998). Soundtracks: Round Midnight (Columbia, 1986); The Fugitive Soundtrack (Nonesuch, 1993); Glengarry Glen Ross: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture (Elektra, 1992).

WEBSITE:

www.imnworld.com/shorter.html.

howard mandel