In music, saxophonist Wayne Shorter had several lives, all woven together by jazz in its different modalities, but always with a characteristic stamp: his solos guided by improvisational instinct, without being overbearing, with a particular cadence that created an atmosphere above from the path of your fingers. Still active until a few years ago, with extraordinary concerts and never stopping entering the recording studio, he won the Grammy in this latest edition (2023) in the category of ‘Best Improvised Jazz Solo’ for his song ‘Endangered species’.
This time he was competing with young musicians, shining stars of major labels, such as Melissa Aldana, who recognized in an interview with this newspaper the influence that Shorter had on her style. Like her, entire generations have had her as a reference for saxophone and jazz, along with greats like Lou Donaldson, Trane or Charlie Parker. Both for his way of composing and for his playing, Shorter is one of the most relevant jazz saxophonists of all time, also comparable to Ben Wester, Sonny Rollings or Lester Young. In these years of maturity -and there are few cases in which something like this can be affirmed, coming from where Shorter came from-, there are also many of his best concerts
Shorter burst onto the club scene with a lucky star. Born in New Jersey (United States) in 1933, at the age of 25 he joined Art Blakey’s Messengers, a mythological drummer by then and a renowned discoverer of talents. He made a career with Blakey until he entered one of Miles Davis’ quintets, another idol who knew how to feed on the new sap that entered the circuit. Neither Blakey nor Davis used to err in their judgments. And Shorter did not disappoint the great trumpet, inventor of genres and always at the forefront.
It was 1964, when he made that leap. He resisted the maestro’s outbursts more than others, and recorded, five years later, the magnificent works ‘Silent Way’ and Bitches Brew’, both within the fusion movement. He, as a soprano sax. In the training that he received, he coincided with geniuses such as Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, two other legendary figures still alive and active, with whom Shorter, from his official Instagram account, used to exchange hearts. The last message of the saxophonist, damaged but vital, with a big smile, he sent in December. He wished a Merry Christmas. This Thursday he died in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 89 years old.
wayne footprints
If there was one thing Shorter wanted to do, however, as he would demonstrate on every recording of his career, it was to follow Davis’s thirst for innovation. As usual at the time, the best talents met in the studios, in quartets and quintets, and in a couple of days each one came out with an album as a leader. Shorter recorded in this way the albums in which he appeared as a leader in titles such as ‘Introducing’ or Second Genesis ‘. With the projection that Davis inferred, he signed with Blue Note, a determining record company, and until the seventies he gave them eleven LPs like ‘JuJu’ or ‘Schizofrenia’. From that decade he played with different music houses, with titles like ‘Atlantis’, ‘High Life’ or ‘1 + 1’ with Hancock; until returning, as if he closed a circle, to the blue note, in 2018 with ‘Emanon’.
With 23 Grammy nominations and 12 awarded, various medals and honors, Shorter also had on his resume having belonged to another great group with a revolutionary vocation, in which he was a member for 15 years: Weather Report, where musicians like Jaco Pastorius passed through. In those years he collaborated with bands like Rolling Stones and participated in tributes to Mingus, Davis or Franklin.
Increasingly devoted to collaborations with large doses of improvisation and freedom, Shorter, who had already moved through be bop and hard jazz, preferred jamming with pianists like Danilo Pérez, his fixture since 2000 and with whom he did his last tours (with Patitucci as a luxury double bass player in that quartet). They rocked the stage with songs like Footprints. And he recorded live with Leo Genovese, with whom he took that last trophy, getting closer to full freedom, a free jazz within patterns and standards that he dictated and that others followed.
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