(Shorter in Belgrade October 2010; Image from Tim Dickerson)
As you likely already know, Wayne Shorter died on March 2nd at age 89. A career as influential and productive as Shorter’s is not easy to adequately cover, so check out the obituary by Nate Chinen at The New York Times for a good look at Shorter’s brilliance. The depth and impact of Shorter’s music is breathtaking. Nobody in music surpasses Shorter’s importance as both a composer and improviser.
In the many tributes and reminiscences after Shorter’s death, author and critic Mark Stryker (@Mark_Stryker) published a Twitter thread that jumped out and inspired this post. Here’s a screenshot:
Stryker argues that Shorter’s ballads are a supreme element of his art. Composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue joined the conversation and added that Shorter’s ballads rival and arguably surpass those of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Highest praise indeed! Stryker created a playlist of these ballads, which we have duplicated in Spotify here and Apple Music here.
We’ve chosen to focus on three Shorter ballads that illustrate important eras of Shorter’s music-making. Wayne Shorter lives!
“Nefertiti”
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(album cover art from Columbia Records)
(The Miles Davis Quintet, on the album Nefertiti – Recorded on June 7th, 1967, at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, Released March 1968)
Personnel:
Miles Davis – trumpet
Wayne Shorter – tenor saxophone
Herbie Hancock – piano
Ron Carter – double bass
Tony Williams – drums
The lore surrounding the tune “Nefertiti,” and the band that recorded it, is immense. Miles Davis’ 2nd “classic quintet” created one of the essential blueprints for modern music. The album Nefertiti is the third of the Davis quintet and the last acoustic album Davis would record. Shorter’s 16-bar tune, “Nefertiti,” was the first track recorded for the album and sets the album’s loose but “locked in” feel. Herbie Hancock (who ordinarily does not do interviews about the process of music) gives a deep and illuminating interview about the recording of this song. Hancock suggested to Davis the most radical choice on “Nefertiti”: to not play solos. Instead, the band cycles through the melody over and over, each time with Shorter and Davis playing with more dissonance and the piano and drums playing with more independence. Williams’ drums are especially prominent: saxophonist Bob Belden called the performance a “drum concerto as composition.” You can’t listen to this song without dwelling on Shorter’s greatness as a composer – he sets all the elements in place that create one of the definitive performances in music. All the planets are aligned – an incredible performance of a definitive tune by a singular band.
“Ana Maria”
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(Album cover art from thejazzrecord.com)
(from Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer – Recorded September 12th, 1974; Released January 18th, 1975)
On “Ana Maria”:
Wayne Shorter – Soprano saxophone
David Amaro – acoustic guitar
Herbie Hancock – piano
Wagner Tiso – organ
Dave McDaniel – bass
Robertinho Silva – drums
Airto Moreira – percussion
There’s an epic feeling about the meeting of the music greats – I’m thinking of the majestic studios recording of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, the epic duel of Max Roach and Cecil Taylor at Town Hall, or the simpatico collaborations of David Bowie and Brian Eno. There are many other examples, but the meeting of two of the greatest – Wayne Shorter and Milton Nascimento, should be on the list. There are many reasons why the collaboration of Shorter with the Brazilian music star is special, but I think the top one is the innate lyricism both musicians share. Not just lyricism, but two complementary versions of that rare talent – Shorter bringing a terse, elliptical, evocative variant and Nascimento an effusive, naturally buoyant majesty. The combination is magic.
So it’s bizarre to think now that Shorter fans who were looking for more of “Nefertiti” were disappointed with Native Dancer when it was released in 1975. Maybe because Nascimento was a new, unfamiliar name, it was not easy to see the greatness of this album and its successful fusion of musical worlds. Native Dancer is a distinct one-off for both musicians and, from this vantage point, a timeless classic.
Don’t miss out on listening to the whole album, but turning to our focus on the ballads, Native Dancer features two remarkable examples penned by Shorter. At the midpoint of the album is Shorter’s “Diane.” Preceded by several tunes that feature Nascimento’s expansive tunesmith and singing, the terse haiku of “Diane” is a cool balm. It’s fragmented melody suggests worlds of beauty, and serves as a perfect change of direction to the album’s otherwise effusive music. The second Shorter ballad of the album, “Ava Maria,” is named after Shorter’s wife and features Shorter on soprano sax, which had supplanted the tenor as Shorter’s main axe in the 1970s.
“Ana Maria” is a long-form composition with a fully drawn out and complex melodic line. As educator Ron Grottos observes, “Wayne Shorter composed it so that each A section begins the same way, but then goes off in slightly different ways. In this respect, and in its extended length, “Ana Maria” is similar to some of Cole Porter’s songs such as “So In Love” and “Begin The Beguine.” This structure gives the tune the feel of a composed improvisation. Shorter’s playing breaks free of the melodic line only in the last minute of the performance; as usual, he says a lot with just a few phases, effectively as a coda to the song. The flowing lyricism of Shorter’s playing throughout is wondrous.
“Starry Night”
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(The Wayne Shorter Quartet at the 2010 New Orleans and Heritage Festival; L-R Danilo Perez, Shorter, John Patitucci, Brian Blade; Image Rick Diamond/Getty Images)
(from Wayne Shorter’s Without A Net – Recorded live European tour and studio recordings, circa October-November 2011, released February 5th, 2013)
Wayne Shorter – soprano saxophone
Danilo Perez – piano
John Patitucci – bass
Brian Blade – drums
Shorter’s “Footprints Quartet” quartet with Perez/Patitucci/Blade is the touring band he used for the last two decades and is the rhythm section on most of his recordings from 2001 onward. It’s an incredible band, visible as “bringing avant-garde practice into the heart of the jazz mainstream,” according to Chinen in the NYT obit linked above. You can hear what makes this band special throughout the first album Shorter did his return to Blue Note, 2013’s Without A Net. This band emphasizes searching and probing music – a kind of collective quest in real time. Another thrill of listening to the Shorter live albums with this band is the palpable sense of the music existing in a specific moment. Usually, I’m not a big fan of grunts, groans, and yelps from the band, but here those exhortations make a perfect complement (and outgrowth) of the quest that the band is on. So when we hear what I think is Brian Blade exhaling “phew” several times during Shorter’s magnificent solo on “Plaza Real,” it only adds to the thrill – Blade (if it’s him) is a surrogate for the listener and rivets our attention and appreciation. Even better is the over-the-top “Oh My God!” exclaimed by somebody from the Imani Winds during “Pegasus.” Depending on your mood, it’s cheesy fun or confirms you’re listening to the heaviest thing in the world.
This searching mode of music making creates a distinctive kind of ballad, different from “Nefertiti” and “Ana Maria.” While those other songs reveal their structure and melodic material right away, “Starry Night” builds slowly in a linear rather than cyclical way. The performance starts with a piano introduction from Perez that captures the tune’s melodic material but shrouds it in a dramatic rubato. Shorter’s tenor sax enters the song two and a half minutes in – he does not sketch the melody but instead plays a beautiful counterpoint that, while brief, is ravishingly beautiful. After a contemplative piano and bass interlude, the band collectively builds the music to a dramatic crescendo. Thom Jurek captures the song’s flavor in his All Music review: “the group aesthetic is especially noticeable in the penetrating romanticism of “Starry Night,” where what appears restrained — at least initially — is actually quite exploratory and forceful.” For a terrific view into the chemistry and power of this band, check out this video of “Stary Night” performed live. One does not usually associate a ballad with the force and volume the band gets to on this tune – in both the performance on Without a Net and the one on YouTube, the ballad is used as a springboard for an exercise of dynamic interplay that is this band’s raison d’être.
Of course, we could fill many more blog posts or an entire book about the fantastic ballads that Wayne Shorter wrote and performed. Make sure you listen to the great playlist that Stryker suggested – gems from top to bottom. Some further highlights among the highlights – of course, the classic “Infant Eyes” from all-time great Speak No Evil, Shorter’s heartbreaking tribute to Billy Holiday, “Lady Day,” and the sophisticated “Dear Sir,” which Shorter contributed to Lee Morgan’s The Procrastinator . . . the beauty feels endless the more time you spend there. Wayne Shorter gave us so much music that will be there for us and future generations of listeners. The music will always be there for you.
(Shorter and Nascimento, Image from Rolling Stone, credited to Instagram)