“How will we rehearse tomorrow? How will we face the unknown without a formula, without a script? & rdquor; Wayne Shorter wondered during an interview with this newspaper in 2014. “You have to dare to be vulnerable & rdquor;. It wasn’t just about music. He talked about how to live. He was 81 years old, he was discovering astrophysics and he predicted that if science and art went hand in hand we would see “a tsunami of ideas & rdquor; That would change our way of thinking. And Wayne Shorter, tenor and soprano saxophone, composer and one of the jazz compasses of the last half century, always looked forward.. He died Thursday in Los Angeles at 89, leaving behind one of the most imposing legacies in modern jazz.
Great composer, unmistakable improviser, member of one of the most influential groups of all time, a pioneer of jazz rock and a reference for several generations of musicians, Wayne Shorter was an innovator. Born in Newark, New Jersey, where he grew up with his brother Alan, a trumpeter, Wayne rose to prominence in the early ’60s as a saxophonist and composer in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. From there Miles Davis took him to complete a capital group, the quintet with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams that between 1964 and 1969 marked the future of jazz. In the Miles Davis Quintet, he was the most brilliant sound architect and composer. Shorter composed some of the most enduring jazz pieces of the last 50 years., especially those he recorded during the 60s on records for the Blue Note label – ‘Speak no evil’, ‘The all seeing eye’-. Intriguing, full of mystery, many of Shorter’s compositions entered the jazz repertoire to stay and are today standards, such as ‘Footprints’, ‘Juju’ or ‘Adam’s apple’. He was the last to achieve something like this.
With his next big project, Shorter reached an even wider audience. Together with the Austrian keyboardist Josef Zawinul, with whom he coincided working with Miles Davis, in 1971 he launched Weather Report, which brought the fusion of jazz with rock and other music to large stadiums. For 15 years the band toured the whole world -during a visit to Barcelona Shorter was inspired to write the eloquent ‘Plaza Real’- and recorded albums that even made it onto the charts. After the dissolution of Weather Report, Shorter resumed his solo career with albums in which he explored electronic sounds but which did not have the critical recognition or echo of his previous projects.
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Interested in what was happening beyond jazz, he collaborated with Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell and Milton Nascimento, with whom he recorded ‘Native dancer’ in 1974. It was a bold approach to Brazilian music, which he discovered through his second wife, who was born in Portugal and raised in Angola. Shorter’s life suffered tragic upheavals. In 1985 her 14-year-old daughter died. Shorter found refuge in Buddhism, which marked his way of seeing the world from now on. And in 1996, his wife and his niece died in a plane crash.
Soon after, he recorded a duet album with Herbie Hancock, ‘1+1’, which marked a turning point and his return to acoustic music. His artistic renaissance was one of the most notorious in jazz: in 2000, close to turning 70, he put together a quartet with the pianist Danilo Pérez, the drummer Brian Blade and the double bassist John Pattitucci that once again marked the pace of jazz of his time and ended up being the longest-lived group of his career. On record, but especially live, they were electrifying: Shorter proposed minimal ideas, almost haikus, and the band took them into unknown territories. Fascinated from childhood by science fiction and pop culture -He earned the nickname Mr. Weird (“Mr. Weird & rdquor;), which he proudly wore-, at the end of his career he embarked on projects of enormous ambition. In 2018 he published “Emanon”, a triple album in which an orchestra participates and which was accompanied by a comic drawn by himself. And even more: with the singer and double bass player Esperanza Spalding he wrote an opera, “Iphigenia & rdquor ;, which premiered in 2021. His curiosity had no limits. “I think we are born with a kind of mandate that they take from us as soon as we are born& rdquor ;, he said in 2014, days before what would be a memorable concert at l’Auditori in Barcelona. “But like the turtles that reach the sea at birth, some of us manage to immerse ourselves in the ocean of exploration that is life & rdquor ;.