Wayne Shorter, 1933 - 2023

When you’re first getting into jazz, it’s natural to start with the works everyone already knows, or think they know. A record like Kind of Blue, Time Out, Getz/Gilberto, or Head Hunters should theoretically have a lower barrier to entry because you’ve probably already heard some of it. The familiarity makes it a little less imposing.

But familiarity has its own drawbacks. Because while you don’t need to understand music theory to appreciate jazz, you do need to listen. You need to be capable of suspending your preconceived notions about jazz so that you can hear the music itself. And it’s not easy to hear a track like “Take Five” with fresh ears, unburdened by the ossified significance its central riff has accreted over the decades. It’s the same challenge confronting anyone who wants to really hear Sgt. Pepper’s or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.1

So when people occasionally ask me where to start when it comes to jazz, my recommendations tend to run at a slight distance from the most well-trod path. I suggest artists that jazz heads consider part of the canon, but who non-heads might not recognize. And Wayne Shorter, who died last Thursday at 89, is always somewhere near the top of the list.

In my amateur opinion, Shorter was one of the greatest saxophone players of all time. Not the greatest — that honor probably belongs John Coltrane — but certainly my personal favorite. And while that may sound like a backhanded compliment, I bring up Coltrane for a reason. I think the contrast between the two is illuminating.

Coltrane was something of a maximalist, both in his compositions2 and his playing style. On records like A Love Supreme, the emotional intensity can be overwhelming — even exhausting. It sounds in that session like Coltrane was burning all the fuel he had, and then some. A Love Supreme is unquestionably the work of a genius, but it’s also something you need to be in the mood for. And when I’m not in the mood, Coltrane can strike me as just a little too unrelenting, a little too busy.

I’m rarely not in the mood for Shorter. He was also a genius, but a genius of a different register. Where much of Coltrane’s best work sounds like a desperate, fervent prayer, Shorter’s original compositions are more like incantations. He was a dark wizard, inviting you into his magical realm. His music was mysterious and a little dangerous, but also playful.3

Like a lot of people, I first discovered Shorter-as-bandleader through his 1966 record Speak No Evil. The lineup on Speak No Evil is comprised entirely of jazz legends — in addition to Shorter on sax and Herbie Hancock on keys, you’ve got Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Ron Carter on bass, Elvin Jones on drums, and Rudy Van Gelder as producer — but what really makes the record a classic is Shorter’s compositions. Like much of his best work, they’re strange and witchy, angular and abstract, and still somehow powerfully alluring. And, like I said, they’re playful. For an example, check out the closer to Side A:

But Speak No Evil only displays one side to Shorter’s talent. If all we had were his bandleader sessions from the 1960s, he would still be one of my favorites; instead, we have a much larger body of work that proved Shorter to be an uncanny improviser and one of jazz’s great experimental scientists.

Around the same time Shorter was leading sessions like Speak No Evil, he was serving as sideman in the second great Miles Davis quintet, once again alongside Hancock and Carter (with the incandescent Tony Williams on drums). One of the records this quintet produced is called E.S.P., and I’m not the first one to point out how fitting a title that is.4 The way the band maneuvered around hairpin tempo changes without a single misstep does seem to indicate an almost supernatural correspondence between Davis and his sidemen. Case in point, the quintet’s transmogrification of an earlier Davis classic:

(The original version of “So What” is, of course, the opening track on Kind of Blue — featuring John Coltrane.)

It should be noted that many of the most indelible recordings from the second great quintet were written by Shorter. “Footprints,” for example:

While my favorite Shorter material all comes from this era, he’s probably just as well known for his pioneering jazz fusion work, most notably with the Weather Report. That stuff doesn’t isn’t quite to my taste, but I can’t help be awed at Shorter’s commitment to exploring different sounds and different genres. Compare what he was up to on Speak No Evil with this Steely Dan-esque track recorded just 11 years later:

And that tireless exploration continued well into Shorter’s ninth decade. In 2018, he released Emanon, a triple album featuring contributions from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and accompanied by a sci-fi graphic novel. That one is maybe a little uneven, but I still find some of the orchestra-supported tracks to be superb. To me, they seem to offer something of a precedent for Pharoah Sanders’s later work with Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra on 2021’s magnificent Promises.

I could go on — I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of Shorter’s astonishingly rich discography.5 But you get the idea. If you’re a newcomer to jazz and you want to go deeper, Wayne Shorter’s work is a great place to start. I guarantee you that he’ll give you something you haven’t heard before. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll be hypnotized.

So with that, here’s just one more — another one of my favorites.

Rest in peace.