Wayne’s World

Text: Tom R. Schulz, 01.08.2023
English translation: Clive Williams

Digression is essential to any good conversation, just as unplanned detours are part of any good road trip. But how is it if the digression turns into a guiding principle, an end in its own right? Any journalist who had the inspiring but also irritating pleasure of interviewing the great sax player Wayne Shorter, who died this year at the age of 89, will probably recall his fascinating avoidance of any linear conversation more than what he actually said. For artists who regularly submit to interviews, the Q-&-A routine is often tedious, and in his own charming way, Shorter refused to go along with it. In the meantime there are videos online showing respectful interviewers dropping their crib sheet and letting themselves be carried away to Wayne’s World, a place where the shortest connection between two thoughts is guaranteed to lead via a tangle of associations and tangents. Pursuing these associations always seemed to be designed to reflect Wayne’s own existence in the here and now rather than to supply the interviewer with a simple answer that had, in many cases, been prepared in advance.

Wayne’s World – no lesser figure than Miles Davis appreciated that this was a totally individual world when he hired Shorter as John Coltrane’s successful on tenor; he went on to become world-famous in the Miles Davis Quintet in the sixties.  The mysterious beauty of Shorter’s verbal flights of fancy, thoughtful in their volatility, was the equivalent of the highly individual curves of his melodies, underlaid with chord progressions and all manner of rhythmic refinements as rich as they were mysterious. After conventional hard-bop beginnings, Shorter (b. 1933 in Newark, New Jersey) soon found his way to his own special style: if it followed any principle, it was the principle of lyrical unpredictability.

Shorter grew up in modest circumstances during the Great Depression, and only started to take a serious interest in music at the age of 15. His mother and his grandmother combined their savings to buy the evidently talented boy a clarinet: they paid 90 $ for a used instrument that the music-shop owner had assembled from parts of several old clarinets. And yet young Wayne saw this clarinet as a magic wand with whose help he could transform the outside world – into Wayne’s World.

When he was 15, sitting in the upper circle of the local theatre, he first heard tenor saxophonist Lester Young in concert: this was such an awakening that he still knew what Young had been wearing decades later. Three years on, Shorter was not only playing tenor himself, he was also writing music for orchestra for the first time. And it wasn’t long before he embarked on an opera for which he had written the libretto; however, this project never progressed beyond the overture and the first act. When he discovered years later that the subject he had chosen bore a strong resemblance to »West Side Story«, which came out in 1957, he abandoned the plan.

So Shorter actually came full circle, albeit taking a circuitous route, when he focused his creative energy on an opera project again in the last years of his life. The work was entitled »… (Iphigenia)«, with a libretto written by the amazingly accomplished bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding. She also appeared in the first performances of the ambitious US production at the end of 2021. Described by the Washington Post as »an adventurous new opera, not only in terms of typography«, »… (Iphigenia)« with its décor by architect Frank Gehry was at least a succes d’estime. Shorter himself didn’t appear as an instrumentalist, but the other three members of his 20-year-old  and internationally feted quartet did: pianist Danilo Perez, John Patitucci on bass and percussionist Brian Blade. They were accompanied by an official opera orchestra of course.

Among all the musicians who found their own personality in the orbit of Miles Davis in the 60s and 70s and became stars in their own right, Wayne Shorter remained the most versatile and productive into old age. But the experiences he had with Miles stayed with him as a point of reference right up to the end. Some of the instructions that the magical trumpeter whispered to him on stage in his husky voice have the quality of a Zen statement: »Don’t play any music that sounds like music«, or »Play your horn as if you didn’t know how«.

Shorter made a significant contribution to the singular status of the Miles Davis Quintet, which kept the same line-up for a good four years: in addition to Miles himself and Shorter, there was Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter on bass and  Tony Williams on percussion. As a composer, he supplied memorable songs such as »E.S.P.«, »Nefertiti«, »Iris« and »Prince of Darkness«, which differed clearly in terms of both form and content from the hard bop that had been the band’s repertoire thitherto. And he also gained a lot in stature as a soloist alongside Miles. Live recordings made in December 1965 in the Chicago jazz club Plugged Nickel show to what extent Wayne Shorter was able to become a source of inspiration for the entire band thanks to his constant  flow of ideas. Shorter once said that he often felt as if he was playing a cello or a viola.

Parallel to his work with Miles’s quintet, Wayne released a series of solo albums on the Blue Note label which contained some of the loveliest and most sophisticated entries in the big book of jazz standards: »Speak No Evil«, »Infant Eyes«, »Footprints«, »Adam’s Apple« and »Juju«. The less well-known album »The All Seeing Eye« (1966) is full of visionary power and imagination, focusing as it does on creation, death and the Devil and on the eternal questions where do we come from and where are we going? A record that sounds just as up-to-date and relevant now as it did nearly 60 years ago.