Wayne Shorter: Portrait of an Artist (Jun. 2002)
Wayne Shorter might just as easily have become an illustrator or a philosopher as one of jazz's living legends. By his own admission, he was not even into music until he turned 15.
«Film scores - what we called soundtracks‚ or background‚ - are the earliest recollections of music staying inside of me,» Shorter recalled during a June 2002 interview. «Films I saw at the Capitol Theater in Newark like Captive Wild Woman, or the music behind Bela Lugosi when he played Igor in Son of Frankenstein . Or The Wolfman, that music behind Lon Chaney when he changed into the werewolf. It seemed like those composers had carte blanche. Someone wasn't leaning over their shoulders saying, `We need a hit song.‚ That stuff got me curious about sound.» Then there was the radio. «A bell really rang when I heard Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Max Roach and all those guys.» Soon Shorter was soaking up movies and stage shows at the Adams Theater, right around the corner from Newark's Arts High School where he majored in fine arts. Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Jimmy Lunceford, Illinois Jacquet, Andy Kirk and Gillespie were among the bands he encountered. «It was like sight and sound, getting to me. I played hooky a lot in my third year of high school. They caught me after 56 absences, because I would go to one class, skip the next and go to the theater, come back to another class, skip the next. When the Vice Principal asked me, `Where do you go when you play hooky?‚ I said the Adams Theater, where the bands were playing. `Oh, do you like music?‚ So they called the music teacher and put me in his class. They said it was mostly for disciplinary purposes, because he was a disciplinarian.»
It only took a week for Shorter to realize a new life direction. «We were listening to Mozart's 40th Symphony when the teacher stopped the record and said that music was going to go in three directions. He held up `The Rite of Spring‚ by Stravinsky, and he held up a record by Yma Sumac, Xtabay, from Peru, and the third record he held up was by Charlie Parker. And I said to myself, `That‚s the stuff on the radio.» Shorter started playing the clarinet at 15, and moved on to the tenor saxophone. Instead of joining the school's dance band («They were wearing uniforms, and playing the bunny hop,» he explains), he and his trumpet-playing brother Alan began charting their own iconoclastic course. «Alan played alto sax for a while, and painted Doc Strange on the side of his saxophone case. People used to call us Strange and Weird, so I put Mr. Weird on the side of my clarinet case. My brother would play his horn with gloves on and wear galoshes when the sun was shining. When we played stuff like `Emanon‚ or `Godchild‚ or `Jeru,‚ we'd turn the chairs around and put newspapers on the music stands, making fun of people who read music and couldn't play by ear.»
Music was not the only subject to capture Shorter's attention. He found the world of fantasy and science fiction equally absorbing, and cites such books as Drinking Midnight Wine, Water Babies (which would become the title of a piece he wrote for Miles Davis), Occam's Razor and Dune among his major high school passions. During his college years at NYU, when one professor suggested he should become a philosopher, Shorter also became absorbed in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. «I really dig science fiction, or science reality,» he admits. «Stephen Hawkings sent some lectures on quantum physics to me, and he opens one with the limerick `There once was a lady from Wight/who could travel much faster than light/She took off one day/in a relative way/and arrived on the previous night.‚ When I saw that, I said, `That‚s my man!‚ I seem to attract that kind of thing now, but I was seeking it when I was 16.» Amidst all these interests, Shorter chose to pursue music. «To me, music has a sense of velocity,» he says. «There‚s also a sense of mystery, but then everything in life is mysterious. Music is another kind of meal, another dimension; not just a language but another miracle. Playing music reflects what's happening and what's not happening, and what some people wish could happen.»
This attitude put Shorter on a road of originality as both saxophonist and composer that is documented in this overview of his Blue Note recordings as a leader and sideman. «The safe, comfort zone is loaded with applications,» he says; «that arena is filled. But you have to know the difference between what you're told and what you find out for yourself. To be original, to me, means to celebrate something so hard that you want to give it a present. The more original you get, the deeper the confirmation of eternity. To celebrate one's self, selflessly. Don't ask me what religion I practice. Life is the damn religion, and the reason for life is happening right now.» Shorter's celebration began in earnest when he became a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in late 1959. His tenure with the immortal drummer/leader, represented here by the first seven tracks on disc two (including one under the leadership of fellow Messenger Freddie Hubbard), lasted over four years, and introduced the jazz world to a tenor saxophonist who had found his own identity amidst the towering influences of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and a composer who somehow sustained an elevated lyricism amidst challenging notions of harmony and form. There was a searching, other-worldly quality surrounding Shorter's music from the outset, evoked directly through song titles such as „Children of the Night." «I was thinking about Bela Lugosi in Dracula when I wrote `Children of the Night,‚» he confirms. «But the children also became astronauts, going out into the unknown.»
The year 1964 was pivotal in Shorter's career for two reasons. In April, he recorded his first album as a leader for Blue Note, an affiliation that would extend over seven years and eleven albums. Disc one of this collection samples the brilliant music Shorter created under his own name in this period, and is filled with melodies that have become jazz classics. The writing and playing reveal his unique blend of power and concision, his totally personal lyricism, a curiosity about other cultures, and (with the introduction of soprano sax and electric instruments on „Super Nova") his insistence on moving forward.That last, exploratory bent was only reinforced when Shorter joined the Miles Davis quintet in the summer of 1964. «I had the most fun, and learned the most, playing with Miles Davis,» he says of his seven years with the charismatic trumpeter, «and John Coltrane told me that he did, too. As a source, Miles was like that place Captain Marvel would visit to get his `shazam‚ stuff together. And Miles was a buddy, too.» The power of Miles Davis as a source of inspiration for others also involves the contributions Shorter made to the Davis legacy. „Footprints", heard here in its original quartet version, became Shorter's most popular composition after Davis recorded it later in 1966, and both „Limbo" and „Nefertiti" on disc two also attained classic status after Davis cut them in 1967.
After his Davis tenure, Shorter and Josef Zawinul spent 15 years together as co-leaders of Weather Report, a band that both at the time and in retrospect was seen as the standard against which all other fusion efforts would be judged. Weather Report disbanded in 1985, and Shorter continued to record and tour under his own name, in electric contexts for much of the period until 2001, when he assembled a new quartet featuring Danilo Perez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade that represents his first acoustic foray since his Blue Note years. The new band has renewed Shorter's passion for music making. «I'm ready to kick ass,» he proclaimed during our conversation. «I'm going to be 70 next year, and until I go through that red door at the end of that tunnel, I'm going to the end of the line, celebrating all humanity and the eternity that we all possess. I want to celebrate everyone's eternity, which means that I'm going to celebrate life‚s adventure.»
Wayne Shorter is loathe to be sidetracked by details. «I don‚t get serious about a minor third [chord], or a Rico Number 4 [saxophone reed], or a Mark VI [Selmer saxophone]. It's not about `me and my horn, me and my little saxophone.‚ It's about `How do you use it?‚ You can hide behind your horn, like actors hide behind a character; but it's never too late to come out from behind the horn.» This is one lesson that Wayne Shorter has taken to heart from the outset. Some of the most glorious proof is contained in this audio portrait.
Diese Ausführungen sind die "liner notes" für die CD: Wayne Shorter, «The Classic Blue Note Recordings»