Interview with Wayne Shorter
„Right now we're in a place called zero-gravity. Ha-ha! I mean every night is going to be different, double-gravity, double-zero-gravity, triple-zero-gravity, quadruple ...", sagt Wayne Shoter in diesem Artikel, der im Vorfeld seines Auftritts am Jazzfestival Montréal 2006 erschien.
Not so long ago jazz buffs wondered what was happening with Wayne Shorter. Or not happening. The tenor and soprano saxophonist had carved a spare, serpentine and sometimes coolly torrid style through influential sojourns with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (1959-1964), Miles Davis (1964-1970) and Weather Report (1970-1985). But on his own he seemed to drift through a series of meandering duets, reunions, and undistinguished special projects, as if he still couldn't shake Report leader Joe Zawinul's electronic shadow.
When Shorter emerged early in the millennium, it was almost like out of a dream, in an acoustic quartet of musicians half his age (pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Pattatucci, drummer Brian Blade), named the Footprints band (after the 1960s classic he recorded with Davis). With its leader oscillating between velvet and sandpaper tones, the group is hailed by many as the finest foursome working in jazz today, and Shorter is revered by musicians as arguably the music's greatest living composer. At a time when most musicians his age (73) are coasting, Shorter is in, well, another space.
He is a musician who expresses himself, in interviews and on stage, through a series a seeming non-sequiteurs that somehow all come together. Watching and hearing the alchemy unfold with the Footprints band has become a quasi-religious experience for many fans. The late-life renaissance has Shorter grappling with words.
"I feel like it's sort of, I don't know what the word is – not magical – listen, we just played a fundraiser at Carnegie Hall for the Thelonious Monk Institute, together with a tribute to Herbie (Hancock) & Friends, Marcus Miller, Michael Brecker, Gonzalo Rubalcaba. When we left the concert hall the side door exit was jammed with people in their 20s, 30s and teens. It was like the old 78 rpm days (the '40s), of signing, shaking hands, whatever. It started initially in Europe and now it's happening with young people in the U.S.
"It reminds me when, back in the 60s, Lee Morgan and myself and others kind of thought that what we were doing would dissipate over the years, be forgotten. We thought there wasn't a snowball-in-hell's chance that people would be born with the curiosity and desire to reach for, to have the same aspirations as – uh, going against the popular grain, I guess is what I mean."
Ask him about playing with musicians half his age and, in a roundabout way punctuated by outbursts of demonic laughter, he manages to discombobulate the question.
"Well actually, you see, we don't have any rehearsals. They all have their own bands, we can't just say 'Let's get together and rehease next week.' The closest we come is maybe faxing each other a piece of music and saying, 'Put that in your suitcase.' So when we're asked for a set-list the general answer is 'We don't know.' Right now we're in a place called zero-gravity. Ha-ha! I mean every night is going to be different, double-gravity, double-zero-gravity, triple-zero-gravity, quadruple ..." He cracks up.
"This means that whoever plays the first motifs or notes or something like that – I don't like the word notes – this is where we say, when you're not worried about your musical foundation and not tryin' to be puttin' your best foot forward – 'The only thing we have is to let yourself be vulnerable so that what's greater than all this is trust. In the present moment it reflects in whatever we're playing!" (He roars the last three words like a lion, then bellows with laughter.) "And then we draw on what we wish to reflect on what's going on in the world today, we're trying in many ways to flash out there, that there is no college course for The Unexpected 101. Ha, ha!"
Got that?
"At every turn there's something that emerges that's different. In other words, you can't hang on to your neighbour in a comfort zone, you have to do your own research and homework – according to your investigative powers and not the lazy one-foot-in-the-past neighborhood mentality isolationism."
Apropos isolationists, many in the music world are as skeptical about a classical-jazz fusion as they were about jazz-rock.
"It's the same as 'Oh the Asians and Arabs are overrunning the neighbourhood! I'm moving out!'" The quartet has worked in Europe with the Lyon Symphony Orchestra, and then what Shorter calls the "real deal," with the L.A. Philharmonic at the new Disney Hall. "I'm not even going to use the word 'eclectic.' I'd rather call it 'creative endeavour.' I'm even trying to write an opera. The quartet is involved in many of these things seamlessly, where the sense of invasion (between genres) is non-exisistent. But we're not reaching for perfection either. I like music with flaws in it. It's in the flaw that's so imperfect that it's perfect.
"The guys call each other 'the family,' we don't call it the band. It's like, 'Hey, when's the family gettin' together?' In other words, we're going to go for it, there's nuthin' to lose. Meet it head on, engage it. Don't try to convert the devil, make the devil your ally."
All of which reminds Shorter of why he got into jazz in the first place: "One word: the creative process. It's the same thing that turns on Dr. Stephen Hawking to his involvement with the whole universe. He had to start with the question, 'What the heck is this creation?' More than what it is, it's the adventure of pursuing it and you ask about eternity and all that and ask, 'What is life?' Well, it's one big eternal adventure when you encounter this creative mystery."
2006