Mr. Weird - Wayne Shorter at the Wellington Jazz Festival

Thursday, 9 June 2016, 2:09 pm
Article: Howard Davis

Year after year, the Wellington Jazz Festival attracts jazz luminaries from around the globe. Last year, we were treated to the mellifluous duets of Chick Corea and Gary Burton on piano and vibraphone. This year, the opening night headliner at the Opera House was Wayne Shorter's quartet.

The 82 year-old Shorter has recorded over twenty albums as a bandleader, many of his compositions have become jazz standards, and his innovative output has earned critical praise, global recognition, and ten Grammy Awards. He's also received acclaim for his mastery of the soprano saxophone (after switching his focus from the tenor in the late 1960s), beginning an extended reign in 1970 as Down Beat's annual poll-winner on that instrument. The New York Times has described him as "probably jazz's greatest living small-group composer and a contender for greatest living improviser."

Wayne Shorter

Anyone who only knows Shorter from the jazz-fusion band Weather Report will consider him primarily a colorist, contributing short and often enigmatic brushstrokes to the group's carefully textured canvasses. They may not recognize him as the formidable heir of tenor saxophone legends Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. But scale up and repitch those brief soprano statements and the lineage becomes clear.

Shorter started his career in the late 1950s as a member of, and eventually primary composer for, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Known as 'Mr Weird' in high school, he cultivated an oblique and asymmetrical approach to bop. His five years with Blakey were marked by an aggressive synthesis of his two main models, with a tendency to break down his phrasing and solo construction into unfamiliar mathematical subdivisions.

In the 1960s, Shorter joined Miles Davis' second great quintet and moved towards a more meditative and melancholy style that increasingly relied on the soprano sax, often producing curious timbral effects and disconcerting nine-measure phrases that suggested fractured nursery rhymes. Herbie Hancock said of Shorter's tenure in the group: "The master writer to me, in that group, was Wayne Shorter. He still is a master. Wayne was one of the few people who brought music to Miles that didn't get changed." Davis himself said, "Wayne is a real composer. He writes scores, write the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound ... Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didn't work, then he broke them, but with musical sense. He understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your own satisfaction and taste."

In 1970, Shorter co-founded Weather Report with fellow Davis alumnus Joe Zawinul and continued to produce some of the most angular, adventurous, and enigmatic sounds in modern jazz. A variety of musicians made up Weather Report over the years (most notably the revolutionary bassist Jaco Pastorious) and produced a number of ground-breaking records in diverse styles, with futuristic funk, bebop, Latin jazz, and ethnic music among the most prevalent denominators.

In 2000, Shorter formed the first permanent acoustic group under his name, a quartet playing his own compositions, many of them re-workings of tunes going back to the sixties. Three albums of live recordings have been released ('Footprints Live!', 'Beyond the Sound Barrier', and 'Without A Net'), and the quartet has received great acclaim from fans and critics alike - not only for the strength and maturity of Shorter's tone, which remains at once languorous and limpid, but also for the instrumental interplay of his four consummate collaborators. At the Opera House show, Brian Blade scampered and skittered around his set of traps like a demented kid on Christmas Day; pianist Danillo Perez provided solid, chunky, modal chords a la McCoy Tyner, occasionally even reaching into the piano casing and plucking at strings; while John Pattituci clearly demonstrated why many consider him the most elegant double bassist in the US, since Ron Carter has virtually retired and Charlie Haden sadly passed away.

Wayne Shorter Quartet

Together with Shorter's emphatic and pulsating phrasing, the quartet provided a mesmerizing evening of improvisation, pushing and probing at the margins of atonality and extemporizing with sometimes feverish intensity. It was astonishing to witness an octogenarian still exploring sonic boundaries, delicately operating at the cutting edge. Avid fans should check out the excellent biography 'Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter' by Michelle Mercer, which examines the working life of musicians, as well as Shorter's personal philosophy and Buddhist beliefs.

More on Lisa Fischer's closing show coming next week - meanwhile, check out the indefatigable Hopetoun Brown on Saturday night at Meow …

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Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz