Wayne's Worlds

Making footprints: 70-year-old saxophonist Wayne Shorter is jazz's man of the year.

Composer/saxophonist Wayne Shorter takes off again.

by Nate Chinen

2004 has already been an auspicious year for the study of space. The year’s first few hours found Saturn in its closest orbit in 30 years. A few days later, NASA’s Spirit rover reached the surface of Mars, beaming back color images. President Bush announced intentions for a permanent base on the moon. And astronomers located a ring-shaped region near our galaxy’s center comprised of 20 billion star systems that meet the prerequisites of sustaining life.

None of this could have gone unnoticed by Wayne Shorter, jazz’s unanimous choice for Man of the Year. The 70-year-old saxophonist/composer has been a space and science-fiction enthusiast since his early days in Newark, N.J. In a press release for last year’s Alegría (Verve), he even drew an atmospheric parallel: "If you get into an aircraft and go a certain distance from the Earth and turn on a sound device, you’d hear all different cultures and sounds going on at the same time. That’s something like what I’m trying to do on Alegría; there is presence yet not intrusion, consonance yet not complete unity."

Shorter’s first all-acoustic studio album since 1967 is less of an enigma than his Zen-like description implies. But the album does suggest a mélange, and its message deepens and clarifies with repeated listenings. Shorter’s solos are as capriciously elliptical as ever: He issues his phrases in spiraling, asymmetrical arcs that occasionally trail off, skyrocket-like, into the void. The happy surprise comes with the orchestration, which ranges from duet to 14-piece orchestra -- the latter evoking Gil Evans in its use of bass clarinet, flute and alto horns. The track list similarly spans the globe, from Brazilian neo-baroque (Heitor Villa-Lobos’ "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5," scored for seven cellos, percussion and bass) to Anglo medieval (the anonymous "12th Century Carol"). More revealing, perhaps, is how Shorter transforms several of his own compositions. "Orbits," the stunning opener on Miles Davis’ Miles Smiles, has here been reincarnated as a slow-groove emissary from the Third Stream, complete with woodwind cushion.

The white-hot core of Alegría is an ensemble that has, by now, earned status as one of the most impressive small groups in jazz. But at the time of the session, the quartet -- Shorter, pianist Danílo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade -- had never once rehearsed. The promise of this rhythm section is evident on much of the album. (Several tracks substitute Brad Mehldau and Terri Lyne Carrington on piano and drums, respectively.) And when Shorter took the quartet on the road, the resulting disc -- 2002’s Footprints Live! (Verve) -- set the stage for a triumphant return.

If Alegría serves as an apotheosis of Shorter’s voice, Footprints emphasizes the elastic durability of his vision. The quartet’s repertoire hits signposts from nearly every era of the saxophonist’s compositional career: mid-’60s Blue Note expressionism ("JuJu"), Miles Davis Quintet modalism ("Footprints"), Miles Davis Fillmore fusion ("Masquelero") and contemporary folk fables ("Aung San Suu Kyi"). The visionary world-funk of Weather Report, which Shorter co-founded with Joe Zawinul, looms as an invisible but palpable presence: Perez, Patitucci and Blade are themselves masters of a school of organic fusion that Weather Report presaged.

In concert, Shorter’s sidemen -- bandleaders in their own right -- approach his songs with an almost religious reverence. Yet the group invests even its straight-swinging passages with tightrope tensions. And their revisions often push so hard against the parameters that they flirt with freeform abandon. Given such risk-taking playmates, Shorter simply gets more playful: Sporadically quoting sci-fi movie themes, he cracks himself up onstage, along with the rest of the band. Still, the two recent albums depict Shorter at musically garrulous moments; just as often, he’s pensive and terse, only pecking at a theme. He may have learned this from Davis, who perfected the technique during Shorter’s tenure with the group: See The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 (Columbia/Legacy), a week’s worth of nightclub sets containing some of Shorter’s fieriest solos on record, along with some of Davis’ most maddening evasions.

The Wayne Shorter of this millennium is no greater than the one before, but that doesn’t diminish the warmth of his hero’s welcome. Converts of his Verve exploits will find countless other points of entry to the catalog. Last year saw the release of a Classic Blue Note Recordings compilation, sampling chestnuts from Shorter’s ’60s solo career as well as highlights of his tenure with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. In 2001, Mosaic Records released The Complete Vee Jay Lee Morgan-Wayne Shorter Sessions, featuring some formative early work. Columbia/Legacy has restored some key titles in the Weather Report discography, along with the never-issued Live and Unreleased. And of course there’s The Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-’68: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings -- as much a testament to Shorter’s compositional brilliance as to Davis’ conceptual genius.

But of course, it’s the touring quartet that quickens the pulse today, highlighting the continuing relevance of Shorter’s accomplishments. One can almost imagine the saxophonist quoting NASA chief Sean O’Keefe: "We’re back."

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