With Wayne Shorter’s
cooperation, writer Michelle Mercer has put together a hip and solid book,
entitled Footprints, taking its name
from one of Shorter’s most famous compositions.
Shorter himself was interviewed extensively for the book. Between the
lines, readers will see that, if anything, Mercer succeeds in helping us
understand the complex personality of a jazz legend who is, shall we say, far out.
Now in his seventies, Shorter has been in the midst of a
career renaissance. Behind his so-called
comeback might be a moment in 1991, when Shorter paid a visit to his longtime
friend and creative collaborator Miles Davis.
Davis said what would be the trumpeter’s final words to his friend. “You
know,” he told Shorter, “you need to be more exposed.” From that point, you might say, Shorter has
tried to find his way back to his jazz roots of composition, an eclectic
interest in world music, and acoustic playing.
And that has made all the difference.
This fall’s release of a two-CD career overview, also entitled Footprints, is another part of this
process of Shorter’s genuinely humble approach to staking his claim as being a
living legend.
Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933, Wayne Shorter was on
the fast track to becoming a jazz legend, it seems from the very start. Raised
in a family that cultivated his interest in visual art, movies, literature, and
music, Shorter was always confident in his creative abilities. Growing up in Newark and studying music at
New York University also meant that Shorter was as close to the most innovative
music of the day – bebop – in his formative years. In a sense, having his formative years
coincide with those of bebop encourages in Shorter an ongoing drive in his
music for finding new realms of music to explore.
By the late 50s, Shorter was playing tenor and
contributing his own compositions to Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and from
there he moved to the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-60s – a band
which featured, as most will know, not only Shorter, but Herbie Hancock, Ron
Carter, and Tony Williams. With Shorter
writing for the group and serving, in Davis’s words, as the “intellectual
musical catalyst,” the Quintet experimented with what they called anti-music, that is, improvisation with the idea of taking apart the structure of the
song. Listen to the Shorter composition,
“Dolores,” on Miles Smiles and you’ll
hear a hint of things to come. Much of
what the Quintet began exploring in those few memorable years led to Davis’s
work on Bitches Brew and afterwards,
as well as Shorter’s next group, the fusion conglomerate Weather Report. When
any discussion of jazz history gets to fusion – mercy, things get
uncomfortable. Fusion, as this book
presents it, was a by-product of money, ego, and technology that, in the end,
led to the dissipation of the talents of many jazz musicians. Fortunately, Shorter did manage to play with
his old Quintet buddies (along with Freddie Hubbard) in VSOP during those
years. But, Mercer’s biography is
charitable when dealing with Shorter’s years among the stadiums, synthesizers,
and studio services -- although he was always writing his own music, and,
occasionally, recording. It hasn’t been
until recently that Shorter has found musicians – those relative youngsters in
his current Quartet – who seem technically and creatively capable of keeping up
with him in a live and acoustic setting.
Wayne, some of us have wanted to ask, where have you been?
Of
course, Shorter had just been getting on with his life, and there’s plenty of
material other than music in this biography. We learn of Shorter’s interest in
Buddhism, of his love of movies, and of his personal struggles and family
tragedies. But for Shorter, it seems,
the footprints of his life never stayed far from the path of music. The music, in the end, always led him back
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