Last week, New Music USA announced that its Next Jazz Legacy (NJL) program received a $1.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its mentorship program for another three years. Co-founded by drummer and NEA Jazz Master Terri Lyne Carrington and co-presented by the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, which Carrington created and runs, NJL aims to expand opportunities for women in jazz by pairing aspiring artists with experienced musicians.
What caught my eye in the press release announcing NJL’s latest grant was that “the late Wayne Shorter” was listed among the expansive network of mentors.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Shorter since his death on March 2, 2023, at the age of 89. If his slim solo discography led to a period when his work was undervalued — he released only four albums under his own name between 1976 and 1996 — the pervasively influential tenor and soprano saxophonist and epochal composer reclaimed his singular status as a musical seeker with his long-running final quartet. And considering the way that Shorter’s influence as an artist and human being continues to manifest widely around the world, his posthumous inclusion in NJL’s list seems entirely apropos.
A child prodigy who as a young teenager recorded with jazz masters Kenny Barron, Buster Williams, and George Coleman, Carrington came into Shorter’s orbit when she joined his band at age 21. More than a mentor, he was “one of my biggest influences, musically, spiritually, and in life,” the drummer said. “He embodies the idea that there’s no separation between life and music — Buddhist principle, the oneness between the person and environment, the cause of serving humanity [being at] the forefront of everything you do.”
Shorter’s presence will be particularly palpable around the San Francisco Bay Area over the next week as the musicians from his quartet — pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade — present “Legacy of Wayne Shorter,” a series of concerts around the region with special guest saxophonist Mark Turner. The run starts on Oct. 28 in Santa Cruz with a sold-out show at Kuumbwa Jazz Center and continues on Oct. 30 when Stanford Live presents the project at Bing Concert Hall.
The SFJAZZ Center, which served as Shorter’s Bay Area home base after opening in 2013, hosts the “Legacy” quartet for two concerts in Miner Auditorium, Oct. 31 – Nov. 1. (A famous cinephile who loved sci-fi and old-school monster movies, Shorter would have appreciated the Halloween date.) The series concludes on Nov. 3 with a concert put on by Healdsburg Jazz at the Raven Performing Arts Theater.
Often hired as one of jazz’s most formidable rhythm section tandems, Blade and Patitucci return to SFJAZZ on Nov. 9 with keyboardist Jon Cowherd (a founding member of Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band) as part of a double bill with trumpeter Ingrid Jensen’s quartet. Blade, Patitucci, and Pérez have also performed as the trio Children of the Light (a name that riffs on the Shorter tune “Children of the Night”).
With his quartet, Shorter played his last concerts in September 2019, and for his bandmates, “the main thing is to preserve and extend the musical philosophy of exploration, storytelling, and fearlessness in the face of the unknown that we learned from Wayne,” said Patitucci, who graduated from Danville’s Monte Vista High School and studied classical bass at San Francisco State University for a year before moving to Southern California in 1978. “We use material from his library [of compositions], ‘Sanctuary,’ ‘Orbits,’ and ‘Lost.’ There’s an idea on how to approach [the piece] ‘Miyako’ so we really have a chance to continue the mission that we practiced with him.”
On his first album as a leader, 1960’s Introducing Wayne Shorter, and in his reputation-making tenure with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (lasting from November 1959 to September 1964), Shorter established himself as an unusually cogent composer with a gift for crafting memorable melodic lines. The jazz scene was rife with prolific artists writing ingenious pieces, from Horace Silver and Randy Weston to contemporaneous Jazz Messenger Cedar Walton and former Messenger Benny Golson (who died last month at the age of 95). But Shorter kept changing and exploring, creating a body of work for the Miles Davis Quintet — and with his own albums on Blue Note Records — that recalibrated jazz’s ongoing dialogue between freedom and order.
“Herbie and Chick, they looked up to Wayne,” said Patitucci, referring to pianists Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, the latter of whom was Shorter’s bandmate in the Miles Davis Quintet in the mid-1960s. “Simply put, [Shorter is] the most undisputable genius I’ve ever played music with. Then you think about it, and he’s an unbelievable saxophonist, too. When you heard Wayne play and leave space, he became like the Miles of the saxophone. I had a chance to expand everything playing with Chick, improvising through chord changes. But being able to hear Wayne do that with just one note, it changed me.”
There’s not enough space here to talk about Shorter’s legacy as the co-founder of Weather Report or his complicated, sometimes passive relationship with keyboardist and composer Joe Zawinul, the popular fusion band’s co-pilot. But as the 50th anniversary of the release of Shorter’s 1975 album Native Dancer approaches, it’s worth noting that this recording in collaboration with Brazilian superstar Milton Nascimento is still unsurpassed as a melding of jazz and the most sophisticated Brazilian popular music. Both in his own music and as part of Weather Report, Shorter collaborated deeply with some of the most adventurous musicians in jazz and kindred traditions.
For Pérez, who was born and raised in Panama, his almost two-decade tenure with Shorter shaped every aspect of his life. The founder and director of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, which spawned a touring ensemble of alumni, the Global Messengers, Pérez experienced an ongoing series of epiphanies performing with Shorter’s quartet, “flying out, being almost out of body, way beyond feeling that the music was played well,” he said. “Wayne’s first lesson when I joined the band [came after] I asked, ‘Maestro, what songs do you want to rehearse?’ ‘Danilo, we cannot rehearse the unknown,’ Wayne said. ‘We are playing zero gravity.’ For years I was so anxious, so blocked. I did very well in ear training. This was fear training.”
While he’s been a critical force in expanding Berklee College of Music’s global reach, Pérez has also doubled down at home as the founder and artistic director of the Panama Jazz Festival, which brings a panoply of leading jazz artists to the Central American nation every January. He credits Shorter with providing initial inspiration and guidance, particularly as the festival focused on providing music education to young people without much prior access.
But Shorter’s advice could go far beyond musical matters, even if it wasn’t welcome, like when he told Pérez that he needed some balance in his life and should marry the woman he was seeing. “This was the second week after meeting this man,” Pérez recalled, noting that he and that woman did end up marrying and now have two teenage daughters. “I had all these insecurities creeping in. ‘Danilo is so worried about music. He needs more life experience.’ It felt invasive and really inappropriate. Now I can tell you, he was talking the truth.”
The musical legacy of Shorter’s quartet continues to expand as Blue Note recently released Celebration, Volume 1, the first in a series of archival albums that the saxophonist curated before his death. This live recording from 2014 captures the quartet at the Stockholm Jazz Festival playing a typically explosive set. Several Shorter pieces surface during the concert, including “Lotus” and the folk song “She Moves Through the Fair,” the latter from one of his ambitious late-career projects, Emanon (a graphic novel and three-disc package featuring the quartet and the 34-piece Orpheus Chamber Orchestra). But the majority of the album consists of free-improv passages identified as a sort of celestial constellation, with the titles of the tracks ranging from “Zero Gravity to the 11th Dimension” to “Zero Gravity to the 90th Dimension.”
“We had a hard time recognizing some things we did,” Patitucci said. “The record has those kinds of spaces where you can always hear us thinking, ‘Where do we take this?’ It feels very Buddhist — preparing the vibration, and this thing comes out of nowhere, and we go into the unknown. We call that ‘comprovisation,’ a combination of composition and improvisation. Many times, it sounds like it was orchestrated and rehearsed.”
The quartet is hardly the first group to explore this territory, which became an essential strategy in jazz’s experimental tool kit in the mid-1960s. What is unusual about the quartet is how its members reached this vista as an ensemble, traversing an extreme range of dynamics and energy, after distinguished careers playing within traditional jazz forms.
Shorter’s story continues, and not just as it’s told in his music and by his bandmates. Michelle Mercer, who wrote the 2007 biography Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter with her subject’s cooperation, continues to drop gems in her thoughtful and often revelatory Substack, Call & Response. She’s one of scores of writers who’ve migrated from magazines, newspapers, and public radio to make the website one of the best sources for English-language writing on music and culture.
In a recent post on the occasion of Bud Powell’s centennial, Mercer shared a story about the foundational bebop pianist’s late-night visit to Shorter in a Paris hotel room in 1959 after Powell had played as a guest artist with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. It was Shorter’s first trip to Europe, and the puzzling interaction stayed with the saxophonist for decades. In listening closely to the recording of the musicians’ bandstand encounter, which was released in 1961 as Paris Jam Session, Mercer hears that the “seeds of Wayne’s style and his initiation as a composer were there. Maybe Bud heard that, Wayne pushing toward the future with music that could only move forward.”
He may have left the scene, but Shorter is still pushing his compatriots into the future, coaxing them to leap into the unknown.
