Wayne Shorter: The Final Mission

Every good story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Depending on how one figures it, Wayne Shorter's recording history has upwards of half a dozen important chapters. They tell a tale of superheroes, of monsters and demons and, ultimately, of the sight of a new dawn. Just three of the chapters cover the story's beginning, middle and end. The first concerns Shorter's own-name Blue Note albums of the middle to late 1960s; the middle one his years with Weather Report; and the last chapter his new millennial quartet albums. These final pages start with Footprints Live! (Verve, 2002) and finish with Live At The Detroit Jazz Festival (Candid, 2022), seven albums in all, recorded by two separate quartets. The albums were the platform for Shorter's final mission, to conjure the music of the spheres and liberate the multiverse. It is the series of albums considered here.

Rewind to 2000. Shorter is planning the mission. He shares his plans with his wife, Carolina Shorter, and a young musician he is mentoring, Esperanza Spalding. (We will encounter Carolina and Spalding again later.) At the time, Shorter is three years short of entering his eighth decade on Earth—a planet of origin which at times seemed unlikely, though Shorter made less fuss about it than did Sun Ra. The plan involves Shorter doing what he has resisted doing throughout his career: forming his own acoustic band, not just for an album project but as an ongoing touring and recording unit. For his bandmates he chooses (pictured left to right above) pianist Danilo Pérez, drummer Brian Blade and bassist John Patitucci.

Given the number and length of missions Shorter had flown by the start of the 2000s, some observers expected the quartet to be essentially a supportive cushion on which he could navigate a graceful fade. It became instead the vehicle for his Indian summer. With the band, Shorter reached heights at least as elevated as any he had reached in earlier years. Indeed, there are those who believe that the quartet albums contain the finest music Shorter every recorded.

Please note: The seven albums considered below are presented in chronological order of their recording dates.

The Starship Fires Its Engines, Sets A Course And Lifts Off

Wayne Shorter
Footprints Live!
Verve
Recorded 2001 / Released 2002

Although it shows clear signs of heading beyond Earth orbit, Footprints Live!, the Wayne Shorter Quartet's first album is, with hindsight, a relatively cautious one. But it is by any standards an outstanding chunk of jazz and the lukewarm reviews it received in some quarters are inexplicable. The curmudgeon at The Penguin Guide To Jazz, for example, wrote, "Perez is not the ideal piano-player for this very demanding material." Que? But the starship's shields repel such minor irritants and the vehicle proceeds on course. So shall we.

The Quartet had been together for only a year or so when Footprints Live! was recorded on tour in Europe. The material is mostly pieces Shorter had written years, even decades earlier, and had previously recorded, either as a sideman with Miles Davis and/or on his own albums—"Sanctuary," "Masqualero," Jean Sibelius' "Valse Triste," "Footprints," "Atlantis," "JuJu." But the treatments are way further out than before. Shorter continued to revisit older compositions on subsequent albums, but as the Quartet matured he wrote new material specially for it. Further forward still, the two-disc Celebration Volume 1, recorded in 2014 but not released until 2024, mostly consists of spontaneous improvisations attributed to the group collectively.

On Footprints Live!, Shorter mainly plays tenor saxophone. While he never abandoned the instrument, later albums find him playing more or less equal amounts of tenor and soprano. But lovers of Shorter's tenor playing, which is where many of us came in, can take heart. By the new millennium, Shorter's soprano playing was qualitatively different from that on, say, his early Weather Report recordings. By the mid 2000s, he was serving up real heat on the diminutive horn, playing with a passion akin to that of the famously fierce Sidney Bechet, albeit in a different style. Shorter's soprano had become as visceral as hot tenor. It could also be, when appropriate, gentle and pastoral.

Wayne Shorter
Alegría
Verve
Recorded 2002 / Released 2003

On Alegría , the Quartet's only studio album, recorded a year after Footprints Live!, Shorter continues to reimagine choice pieces from his back-catalogue. In other respects Alegría rings some changes, the most important of which is augmenting the Quartet on six of the ten tracks. Some of the pleasure derived from Alegría comes from Shorter's fresh-hued woodwind and brass arrangements for the augmented, nonet (or larger) lineups. The unadorned Quartet is featured on Shorter's newly composed opener, "Sacajawea," and on radical reconstructions of his earlier "Angola" and "Capricorn," the album's closer. It seems probable that Shorter opened and closed the album with the Quartet to signal that it would be the main event going forward (as it proved to be).

Aside from "Sacajawea," "Angola" and "Capricorn II," and a reimagined "Orbits," all but one of the remaining tracks are covers or arrangements of traditional material: Leroy Anderson's "Serenate," Milka Himel and Joso Spralja's "Vendiende Alegría," Heitor Vila-Lobos' "Bachianas Brasileiras," and the traditional "She Moves Through The Fair" and "12th Century Carol."

The album's producer and conductor, Robert Sadin, arranged one track, "Bachianas Brasileiras," for a cello septet. Shorter's quietly extraordinary tenor solo, played in counterpoint with Charles Curtis' lead cello and later in overdubbed counterpoint with itself, is among the highlights of the album. Another treasure is the nonet version of "Orbits," where Shorter, again on tenor, engages in sustained vocalization across the range of the instrument. Sometimes it as though he is channeling his approach to the title track of Adam's Apple (Blue Note, 1966), refracted through a seasoned and more vibrant prism.

Peruvian guest percussionist Alex Acuña deserves a name check here. He is a delight on the four tracks on which he plays.

The Intrepid Travelers Enter Deep Space And Encounter Many Wonders

Wayne Shorter Quartet
Beyond The Sound Barrier
Verve
Recorded 2002-04 / Released 2005

Exalted though the Quartet's first two albums are, Beyond The Sound Barrier, recorded on tour in Europe, North America and Asia, is the first to go beyond the edge of the solar system, into uncharted territory, and send love bombs back. Listening to it, one feels like one is cruising through space on Starship Shorter, watching an unfolding panorama of quasars, suns, star systems and new life-forms pass by. Another metaphor might be being onboard one of those deep-sea explorations where strange but beautiful sea creatures drift in and out of the submersible's spotlight. Way up high or deep down below, it is a trip alright.

This is the first album to revolve around Shorter compositions written specially for the Quartet: "As Far As The Eye Can See," "Adventures Aboard The Golden Mean" and the title track.

It is also the first Quartet album fully to let go of jazz's traditional theme/solos/theme performance paradigm. Every track is in essence a collective improvisation in which no one player is more important than another. In part this is down to Shorter's judicious choice of bandmates, in part it is a result of his longstanding rejection of the idea of the bandleader as alpha male. Shorter encouraged his musicians to roam free, confident they would stay on message (which they do). In this he emulated some of the most evolved bandleaders who came before him—one thinks immediately of John Coltrane, Shorter's elder by seven years.

Shorter knew the traditional alpha model all too well, having worked for two of its most full-on practitioners in the 1960s, Art Blakey and Miles Davis. With the Quartet, as he had done earlier in his career, Shorter proved that you do not have to act like an alpha to be a stone auteur.

Wayne Shorter Quartet
Without A Net
Blue Note
Recorded 2010-11 / Released 2013

There is a six year gap between the recording of Beyond The Sound Barrier and that of Without A Net, most of it recorded on tour in Europe. And there is an eight year gap between the release of the two albums. The reason for the hiatus is unclear. The Quartet had in the meantime continued touring, Shorter had continued writing new material, and each of the four musicians had recorded in other contexts. Is it significant that Without A Net marked Shorter's return to his onetime home label, Blue Note? It seems unlikely, given that Verve and Blue Note were owned by the same corporate. Did it have anything to do with Don Was succeeding Bruce Lundvall as president of Blue Note in 2012? Again, unlikely.

One of the people who might be able to provide an answer is Carolina Shorter, and perhaps she will in the sleeve notes for future volumes of the Celebration series (see below). Carolina was closely involved in her husband's music making and business affairs. She is the first person to get a name check in Shorter's "thanks and appreciation" list on Without A Net. Second on the list are "Life forms everywhere" and the roll call ultimately concludes with "Aliens throughout the Universe."

Shorter's cosmology had not changed since the previous album. The Quartet is digging deeper than before, and ranging wider, and flying higher. The music is multidimensional and multitemporal now. At times it is extraordinarily intense, particularly on the final three tracks, "Flying Down To Rio," "Zero Gravity To The 10th Power" and "(The Notes) Unidentified Flying Objects." "Orbits" is revisited again, but most of the material is newly written. The longest track, "Pegasus" (23:06), where the Quartet is augmented by the Imani Winds quintet, is a harbinger of the orchestral tracks on 2018's Emanon (see below).

Without A Net might well have gone down as the Quartet's finest album. But then, eleven years later, along came the posthumous release Celebration Volume 1...

Warp Drive To The Max, Starship Shorter Goes Intergalactic

Wayne Shorter
Celebration Volume 1
Blue Note
Recorded 2014 / Released 2024

Recorded at the Stockholm Jazz Festival in 2014, during a particularly productive period, which perhaps explains why it was not released in 2015, Celebration Volume 1 is the first in a series of previously unavailable recordings we can look forward to. A double album, which includes a mind-bending performance of "Orbits," most of the material on Celebration Volume 1 consists of compositions spontaneously created onstage by the Quartet and titled "Zero Gravity To The 15th [or whatever] Dimension." The album is high up there among Shorter's all-time masterpieces.

Everybody say wow. Very wow.

In her liner notes, Carolina Shorter says that her husband, auditioning tapes at home in 2022 and later in hospital in 2023, originally intended the Celebration series be called Unidentified Flying Objects (incidentally the title of the closing track on Without A Net). Wayne, explains Carolina, was thinking of the notes the Quartet played as being UFOs. "It was only in the last 10 days of his life," she writes, "that he realized he was not going to be around to see [the series] to fruition. He started feeling the urgency of celebrating life and decided to change the name of the collection to Celebration."

The two discs' total playing time is 89 minutes. By cosmic coincidence, or maybe intention, that is one minute for each year of Shorter's life.

Only rarely do the stars align so perfectly that a posthumous album can be recommended to newbies as the place to start with an artist. Like "rarely performed operas," there is often good reason for history passing them by. But there are exceptions, and Celebration Volume 1 would be a fine place to start with the Quartet.

Wayne Shorter
Emanon
Blue Note
Recorded 2016 / Released 2018

This large-format three-disc box set, which comes with a bound-in 76-page graphic novel, is remarkable on two interconnected levels, the spiritual and the musical. The first CD, with the Quartet in tandem with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, was studio recorded in New York in 2016. The second and third CDs, both Quartet only, were recorded live at London's Barbican Centre in 2016.

First, the spiritual aspect. Shorter became a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism around 1973, and the feet-on-the-ground, socially-engaged philosophy guided the rest of his life. Emanon is the closest Shorter came explicitly to setting out his beliefs on a musical platform. He does this through the plot of the graphic novel, in which the titular superhero overcomes the forces of darkness (or possibly orangeness, then rampant), in the package's dedication to Daisaku Ikeda (a revered figure in Nichiren Buddhism), and in the semiology of the titles of the four pieces—"Pegasus," "Prometheus Unbound," "Lotus," "The Three Marias"—which make up the 51:02-minute suite.

Unlike a better known strand of Japanese Buddhism, Zen, which teaches withdrawal from the material world, Nichiren advocates involvement with it, with the aim of bettering society, and by doing so, progressing toward spiritual enlightenment. In her Foreword to the graphic novel, Esperanza Spalding, like Wayne and Carolina Shorter, a Nichiren practitioner, writes about how the story's hero awakens the citizens of the universe, or as she puts it, the multi-verse, to their dormant imaginative and revolutionary powers.

Musically, after the full suite is performed orchestrally on the first disc, the unaugmented Quartet explore on the second and third discs the intricacies of three of the movements—"The Three Marias," "Lotus," "Prometheus Unbound"—along with Celebration Volume 1's "Adventures Aboard The Golden Mean," and "Lost And Orbits Medley" ("Orbits," first heard on Miles Davis' 1967 Columbia album Miles Smiles, is by several light years the piece Shorter most frequently returned to during his career).

We do not know how Shorter approached rehearsals with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, but we do know how he approached them with London's Philharmonia Orchestra some years earlier. In a filmed conversation with Esperanza Spalding (accessible online), Philharmonia conductor Clark Rundell, who says knowing Shorter changed his life, remembers that, as the rehearsal began, "I asked Wayne, 'Are you happy with this as a basic tempo?' And he looked at me and said, 'Well it's like this. It's like the aliens are attacking from outer space. And the parents, they're really, really, really scared. But the children, they think it's incredibly cool." And those were his tempo instructions! And of course the orchestra were like, 'This is great, ask him some more questions.'"

Rundell goes on, "I remember the promoter saying to me, 'Did you hear what happened to him at passport control?' The passport control [person] just looked at him, you know, most passport control people could do with a humour injection, and said, 'Do you have anything to declare?' And he was quiet for a minute, and then he said, 'my personal freedom.'"

A New Starship Leaves The Launch Pad And Joins The Mission

Wayne Shorter / Terri Lyne Carrington / Leo Genovese / Esperanza Spalding
Live At The Detroit Jazz Festival
Candid
Recorded 2017/ Released 2022

In September 2017, Shorter led a new quartet in a performance at the Detroit Jazz Festival in honor of Geri Allen, who had passed some two months earlier. Completing the band were bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding, pianist Leo Genovese and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. The group ran through a few tunes on the afternoon of the show and that was the extent of rehearsals. Spalding writes in her liner note, "We're building the plane as we fly it." They were building on firm foundations. Carrington had first recorded with Shorter in 1988 and with Spalding in 2009. Spalding had been mentored and championed by Shorter since the early 2000s. Genovese first recorded with Spalding in 2008.

We can only speculate about why Live At The Detroit Jazz Festival lay unreleased for five years, but it can have nothing to do with the quality of the music or its recording (it was mixed by Rob Griffin, Shorter's regular engineer at Blue Note). Shorter wrote that the 55-minute album is "going to be important" and rejoiced in the fact that the musicians represented both sexes and varying ethnicities and backgrounds. (Did he have plans for further performances?)

There are five tracks. Shorter's "Someplace Called 'Where'" (14:20), "Endangered Species" (21:43) and "Midnight In Carlotta's Hair" (6:16), Milton Nascimento's "Encontros E Despedidas" (8:380 and Geri Allen's "Drummers Song" (4:41).

In addition to playing bass throughout, Spalding sings on every track except "Drummers Song," sometimes wordlessly, sometimes with lyrics. Genovese and Carrington deliver beautiful performances, and Shorter and Spalding—separately and playing in counterpoint—several times reach heights as lofty as heard on Beyond The Sound Barrier, Without A Net, Celebration Volume 1 and Emanon.

In her liner notes for Celebration Volume 1, Carolina Shorter wrote of Wayne and Spalding, "They had the most beautiful life-to-life connection, unlike anything I've ever seen." At the time of Shorter's passing the pair were planning to work on a ballet together, but were overtaken by events. Carolina wrote that a few days before he passed, Wayne told her that the ballet would still happen but that he and Spalding "would have to create it in a different realm."

It we are lucky, Spalding will choose to extend Shorter's mission. There still be dragons, there still be tyrannies to topple.

Postscript: Mission Control Plans Further Flights

At the time of writing, a week or two after the release of Celebration Volume 1 in August 2024, information about future volumes in the series has not been made public. But we do know that Shorter's final public performance was not until early 2018 in Panama (when according to Carolina, "he played an unbelievable show and kicked everybody's ass")—meaning that a library of previously unreleased, premium grade Quartet concert performances, and possibly studio recordings, is likely to be available for release. Bring it on.

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