The jazz saxophone superhero is dead
Wayne Shorter learned the clarinet as a teenager and then switched to the saxophone
Source: AFP/SEBASTIEN NOGIER
Alongside John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, he was the most important saxophonist in modern jazz. Wayne Shorter, who wrote music history alongside Miles Davis and as co-founder of the band Weather Report, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 89.
What kind of hilarious bloke Wayne Shorter was, you could see in a photo that was doing the rounds a year ago. The saxophonist sat there, gesticulating passionately, next to the bassist Esperanza Spalding, with whom he had co-written the opera “Iphigenia”, which celebrated its world premiere in Boston at the end of 2021 with a stage set designed by Frank Gehry. Shorter, the grizzled composer and grand seigneur of jazz, wore a T-shirt. Based on the famous Beatles shirts, only names were written on it: Miles, Herbie, Ron, Tony & Wayne. The men behind the legendary second Miles Davis quintet.
Just how appropriate it was to wear that shirt and cross-reference pop culture with a wink is now sadly revealed: the death of Wayne Shorter is, for jazz, quite comparable to the death of John Lennon. Shorter was not only a style-defining figure in two supergroups of improvised music, Miles Davis and the band Weather Report, but also the author of pieces for eternity. The “Imagine” or “Working Class Hero” for the improvisation community came from the pen of the tenor and soprano saxophonist born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933 and are called “Footprints”, “Black Nile”, “Infant Eyes” or “Nefertiti”. .
Shorter’s merit was always being there when there was something new in jazz and bringing those innovations into a universal form. For example, when in 1959, as a newcomer, he rose to become musical director with drummer grandmaster Art Blakey and shaped hard bop and then released a series of great records on the “Blue Note” label. Or when he signed up with Miles Davis in 1964 and let the trumpeter’s groundbreaking second quintet find the balance between binding and free as an “idea man” (Davis). Commercially, Shorter was most successful as a co-founder of the fusion formation Weather Report, which gave a human face to glamorous jazz rock in the 1970s.
Wayne Shorter performing with Weather Report in Juan-les-Pins in 1984
What: AFP/ERIC GAILLARD
After the dissolution of this group, which would have deserved a T-shirt of its own (Joe, Jaco, Peter & Wayne), Shorter could be heard in a wide variety of contexts: sometimes as a deeply revered soloist with his equally peculiar and coherent bird’s chirp lines in the Rolling Stones, Steely Dan or Joni Mitchell, sometimes in a sensational duo with his longtime piano buddy and Buddhist brother in faith Herbie Hancock and from the beginning of the millennium as the leader of one of the bravest formations that have taken to the stage worldwide in the name of jazz over the past two decades went. Together with pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade, he subjected his melodies to a new stress test every evening.
Dubbed “the greatest living jazz composer” by The New Yorker magazine, Shorter was ruthless in his songwriting in the service of creating sonic beauty in the moment. Shorter once revealed to the author of these lines that he does not speak of “songs” or “tunes” in his compositions. “I’m never done with my music. In a book you can write The End. But music is beyond our control.”
For his 85th birthday in 2018, Shorter once again set a striking example: A triple album with a 34-piece orchestra and concert recordings of his quartet, plus an 80-page graphic novel by artist Randy DuBurke, which results from discussions about the Big Bang theory, which Shorter had conducted with scientists from Stanford University & Cosmology Group. This confirmed once again what Miles Davis once said about the last superhero of the jazz saxophone (besides Sonny Rollins): “Wayne lives in his own world and orbits his own planet”. He has now died in Los Angeles at the age of 89. Or better: went back home, up, to the stars.