Wayne Shorter
Brilliant jazz saxophonist who created new forms of improvisation with Miles Davis and others
WAYNE SHORTER, who has died aged 89, was one of the most original and adventurous jazz musicians of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Equally celebrated as a saxophonist and as a composer, he was a moving spirit in three influential bands – Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the Miles Davis Quintet and Weather Report – and leader of a series of his own ensembles.
Along with Herbie Hancock, Gil Evans and others, Shorter developed new structural and harmonic forms for jazz improvisation, eventually moving far beyond the commonly accepted boundaries of jazz itself. He was equally at home in acoustic and electronic environments.
Wayne Shorter was born in Newark, New Jersey, on August 25 1933 and began taking clarinet lessons aged 15, later switching to tenor saxophone, although his main subject at high school was art. He recalled writing his first composition at 17, a song which “didn’t sound like any of the standard song forms”.
He took a degree in Music Education at New York University and, on graduating in 1956, played with the pianist Horace Silver’s quintet before two years’ army service in a military band. He was based near home and spent his off-duty time on the New York jazz scene, where he became friendly with the great saxophonist John Coltrane. In 1959, soon after leaving the army, Shorter recorded his debut album, Meet Wayne Shorter, for the Vee-jay label.
In the same year, Coltrane, then a member of the Miles Davis Quintet, was planning to leave and form his own band. He offered Shorter his old job, saying: “The gig’s yours if you want it,” but Shorter accepted an offer from Blakey instead. Once established in the Jazz Messengers, he began composing music for the band, including such successful pieces as Lester Left Town, One By One and On the Ginza, and soon became its de facto musical director.
He toured with the Jazz Messengers for four years, towards the end of which he signed his own contract with Blue Note records and recorded three albums in quick succession: Night Dreamer, Juju and Speak No Evil. It was here that his characteristically tangential approach to the marriage of melody and harmony first became strongly evident.
In 1964 Shorter left Blakey and joined Miles Davis, completing what would come to be regarded as one of the classic jazz quintets, the other members being Davis, Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums). Both his playing and composition blossomed in these surroundings.
With Blakey, he later explained, “I wrote anything that a quintet could handle in terms of whatever modern jazz meant up to that point. [But] with Miles, I didn’t write with them in mind as a limiting factor, because they were going to do more than [merely] handle it.’
From the tough assertiveness of the Blakey days, his playing changed to cool, lean understatement. With Davis’s encouragement, he devised compositions which challenged the conventional procedures of smallband jazz, dispensing not only with chord sequences but also with set modal structures, and occasionally reversing the normal perspective by having the melody instruments playing repeated figures while the rhythm section improvised around them.
The Miles Davis albums ESP, Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, Filles de Kilimanjaro and In a Silent Way, which came out annually between 1965 and 1969, contain some of the most musically sophisticated jazz ever recorded, combining complexity with clarity and abstraction with a yearning tenderness.
Shorter left Davis in 1970 and formed Weather Report with the keyboard player and composer Joe Zawinul. From the outset, the new band made a feature of electronic sounds, and Shorter himself concentrated heavily on the soprano saxophone, which he had taken up during his time with Miles Davis.
The first album, I Sing the Body Electric, continued the abstract approach, but Weather Report soon settled down into the style known as “jazz-rock” or “fusion”, which flourished in the early 1970s. Shorter’s influence within Weather Report declined over the years, but the band proved immensely popular and he remained a member until it disbanded in 1985.
During his time with Davis and Weather Report, Shorter recorded frequently under his own name, notably the albums Adam’s Apple (1966), Native Dancer (1974) and
Atlantis (1985). He also featured on recordings by others, including Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell. His long solo on
The Barbara Song, on the 1964 album
The Individualism of Gil Evans, is among the finest of his entire career.
Shorter’s long-standing friendship with Herbie Hancock was an important element in his professional and personal life. Both men converted to Buddhism in the 1970s and they supported one another in many ways. The relationship helped to sustain Shorter when his wife, Ana Maria, died in the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in July 1996.
In 1976 Hancock formed VSOP, an occasional band devoted to exploring further the music pioneered by the Miles Davis Quintet, in which Shorter took part, and from 1997 they toured regularly as a duo, recording an album,
1+1, in 1996.
Shorter’s later recordings include a superb trio performance, The Power of Three, with the guitarist Jim Hall and pianist Michel Petrucciani; an almost entirely electronic album, Phantom Navigator (both 1986) and a return to the classic acoustic quartet format in 2005 with Beyond the Sound Barrier.
In 2016 Shorter, who won a dozen Grammys, formed a “supergroup”, Mega Nova, with Carlos Santana and Hancock. In 2018 he announced the end of his touring career due to health issues, though he released a wellreceived three-disc album on Blue Note, Emanon, which was accompanied by a graphic fantasy novel created with the writer Monica Sly and the artist Randy Duburke.
“Mr Shorter’s music has always demanded alternate routes and suggested parallel worlds – it implies a multiverse of sorts,” The Wall Street Journal noted. “This package frames such ideas with splendour, elevating his stature in unexpected ways.”
Wayne Shorter remained active into his late eighties, and in 2021 his opera
Iphigenia, with a libretto by the jazz-fusion bassist Esperanza Spalding and sets designed by the architect Frank Gehry, premiered in Boston.
In the early 1960s Shorter married Teruko Nakagami; they had a daughter but divorced. In 1970 he married Ana Maria Patricio; they had a daughter who died aged 14. Three years after Ana Maria’s death in 1996 he married her friend Carolina Dos Santos.
Wayne Shorter, born August 25 1933, died March 2 2023