Wayne Shorter (1933-2023): An Appreciation

A huge tree fell in the jazz forest on Thursday, March 2, 2023, with the death of Wayne Shorter, one of the most important figures in jazz from the 1960s on. He lived to age of 89 years old, and in his spiritually radiant and self-effacing way, he lived most of those 89 years lifting up a great music form and made it even greater.

As someone who was prominent in hard bop, modern and fusion jazz, Shorter set the standard as a saxophonist and composer; indeed, many of songs became standards: “Footprints,” “Nefertiti,” “Infant Eyes,” and many more have been universally admired and endlessly covered.

Most even casually familiar with Shorter know how he went from one legendary band to another and left a mark on each of them deep enough to make them all legendary. Starting with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1959, Miles Davis’ famous Second Quintet in 1964 and the pioneering jazz-rock ensemble Weather Report in 1970, Shorter unselfishly contributed his massive talents as a reedman and a crafter of urbane, soul-stirring songs.

His career enjoyed a late-period resurgence starting in 2000 when he formed a quartet featuring pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade. It all culminated in 2018 with his sprawling opus Emanon.

My personal exposure to his music solidified and deepened my love for jazz, and he did it in so many ways.

The first entryway into his artistry came via Weather Report, as I was more into fusion than straight jazz at first. But the exposure eventually led me back to his career-defining ’60s output, both as a Blue Note Records leading light and a key figure in the career of another guy whose music I was getting heavily into, Miles Davis. It was when I embraced those records that I fully embraced all of acoustic jazz – because Wayne Shorter showed how sophisticated and quietly provocative it could be.

Below is an all-too-short list of great Shorter recordings, sorted chronologically. These are not nearly a complete tally of what I think are his best, just the first ones that come to my mind, and why they are so endearing:

1. “YES AND NO” (1964)Wayne Shorter’s rapidly ascending composing flair reached cruising altitude with 1964’s JuJu. Probably the best-known of these tracks is “Yes And No,” a song that alternates between a minor and major key, and his sax is able to effortlessly glide through the Jekyll and Hyde melody without stepping on a harmonic land mine. He always made the complex sound simple.

2. “WITCH HUNT” (1964)I love this tune so much that I would make it a ritual to make this opening track from Speak No Evil the first thing I’d play on a new CD player, going back to my first one around 1989. Admittedly, Elvin Jones is probably the most exhilarating player here, but there’s also a buzz created when Freddie Hubbard sets the room on fire with his trumpet. Shorter, as he would do following Miles, provided just the right contrast on tenor sax by soulfully putting out the fire with a thoughtful aside.

3. “EL GAUCHO” (1966)By the mid ’60s, bossa nova had ingrained itself as a Brazilian sub-genre within jazz, but Wayne Shorter had the novel idea of marrying the samba sway to a motif that takes an unusual harmonic path and no tonic, but is nonetheless very memorable by repetition and superb melodic development in his sax soloing. Come to think of it, this is structurally a precursor to the next song on this list …

4. “NEFERTITI” (1967)As mentioned earlier, this song from a Miles Davis album of the same name became one for the jazz fakebooks. That cucumber-cool pattern is so perfect (and epitomizes jazz music at its finest), that repeating it over and over with no chorus, no bridge — no solos even — is the only way to play it.

5. “PALLADIUM” (1977)As an elite composer, it might seem odd that Shorter wasn’t the dominant songwriter in Weather Report, but Joe Zawinul was no slouch, either. Nevertheless, Zawinul’s Weather Report partner added some absolute gems to the band’s original repertoire, including one that often gets overlooked because it’s on the same album that introduced to the world “Birdland” and “Teen Town.” But “Palladium” is another one of Shorter’s wonderfully wandering melodies, starting tense and after traversing various moods while hanging on to the initial theme, somehow winding up at a Caribbean carnival.

Most may not put Wayne Shorter on quite the level of a Sonny Rollins or John Coltrane, but I do. When surveying the positive and massive impact he made on jazz over the last 50 years, it’s hard for me to conclude otherwise. Mr. Gone is gone now, but his music will be with us forever.