SAX STAR, 89, DIES
Shorter won 12 Grammys, reshaped jazz
Wayne Shorter, the influential saxophonist and composer whose music helped shape the sound of contemporary jazz, died Thursday in Los Angeles, a representative for the musician said. He was 89.
No cause of death was revealed.
The celebrated musician released more than 25 albums. During his prolific career, Shorter earned 12 Grammy awards, including a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2015.
Born in Newark in 1933, Shorter started playing the clarinet at the age of 16. He switched to tenor sax before entering New York University in 1952, according to his label, Blue Note Records.
After graduating in 1956, he played for a short time with jazz pianist Horace Silver, until he was drafted into the Army for two years. But his career took off once he was out of the military and joined two of the world’s most
celebrated jazz groups.
In 1959, Shorter joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers as a saxophonist. He remained with the group until 1963, eventually composing and becoming the ensemble’s music director.
The following year, he joined Miles Davis’ Second Great
Quintet, where he stayed until 1970.
“The master writer to me, in that group, was Wayne Shorter,” jazz great Herbie Hancock once said. “Wayne was one of the few people who brought music to Miles that didn’t get changed.”
Shorter collaborated across genres with some of the most influential names in music, including Joni Mitchell, Carlos Santana and Don Henley.
As a composer, he was best known for “carefully conceived, complex, long-limbed, endlessly winding tunes, many of which have become jazz standards yet have spawned few imitators,” Blue Note Records said.
Several of his most memorable compositions include “Speak No Evil,” “Black Nile,” “Footprints” and “Nefertiti.”
In 1998 Shorter was honored by the National Endowment for the Arts with a Jazz Master Award.
He was also recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016 for leaving “an indelible mark on the development of music for the last half-century” and received the prestigious Polar Music Prize the following year.
When he was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors Award in 2018, Shorter was described as “a genius, a trailblazer, a visionary and one of the world’s greatest composers.”