The BSO celebrates Wayne Shorter’s symphonic legacy
Before the jazz legend died at 89 last March, he curated a concert that will reach Boston audiences this weekend
The jazz icon Wayne Shorter spent much of the last decade of his life composing an opera called “...(Iphigenia).” By the time of its premiere in Boston in 2021, he was in frail health and relied on a dedicated team of artists to help bring his vision of the Greek myth into reality. One member of that team was the conductor Clark Rundell, who’d frequently worked with Shorter’s quartet when the group teamed up with orchestras.
One day, Rundell’s assistant, Phillip Golub, went to Shorter’s house in Los Angeles to pick up some manuscript pages of the opera so the music could be typeset. Later that day, he told Rundell, “Clark, there’s an awful lot of orchestral music in that house. We need to do something about it.”
This was news to Rundell, who’d worked with Shorter and his band since 2008 and figured he knew this part of his oeuvre cold. There were pieces for the quartet and orchestra, such as “Pegasus” and “Lotus” — which were recorded on the 2018 album “Emanon” — as well as “Gaia” (written for the bassist and vocalist esperanza spalding). There was a vocal work for Renée Fleming and a clarinet concerto. What else might there be?
Nothing less than a treasure trove, as Rundell and others found out when they began going through the material in earnest. Shorter’s house contained a bevy of previously unknown orchestral manuscripts — new compositions and arrangements of older tunes, all in the composer’s beautifully precise handwriting. Rundell was awestruck, and he still sounded so when he described the moment in a recent interview.
“The closest analogy I can think of,” he said by phone from England’s Heathrow Airport, “is that it would be like walking into a house in the south of France that nobody knew Picasso lived in, and then seeing all these treasures.”
Discussions began immediately about a special orchestral program to mark Shorter’s 90th birthday. Before he died last March at 89, he curated a concert that will reach the Boston Symphony Orchestra (under Rundell’s baton) through Saturday. It includes “Gaia” and a suite of music from the opera, along with orchestral versions of works from Shorter’s earlier albums, such as “Forbidden, Plan-It!” and “Midnight in Carlotta’s Hair.” One piece, “Orbits,” goes back to Shorter’s stint as saxophonist in Miles Davis’s groundbreaking mid-1960s quintet.
All of the music is scored for orchestra and quartet. Joining spalding will be drummer Terri Lyne Carrington (who first recorded with Shorter in the 1980s), pianist Leo Genovese, and saxophonist Dayna Stephens.
By the end of his life, Shorter was widely regarded as jazz’s greatest living composer. Rundell’s experience has convinced him that his compositional voice is just as distinctive in the orchestral realm. “His writing is very opulent, very sensational, in a way,” he said of his symphonic music, citing Stravinsky and Ravel as particularly strong sources of inspiration. “His knowledge of those scores was very thorough — he’d spent an awful lot of time looking at them.”
What gives Shorter’s music its unique character, Rundell went on, is his wholly original melodic and harmonic language, something that distinguished him from other jazz luminaries even at the beginning of his career.
“The way he writes for the strings is incredibly thick and opulent, straight out of Ravel,” he said. “But Ravel would’ve been very happy to have some of those bass lines and some of those harmonies. Even he would’ve been thrilled by those.”
And like the music of any great but unfamiliar composer, Shorter’s can pose challenges for orchestras new to it. “It’s a bit like playing Handel or Purcell: He doesn’t really write tempo markings, and there are very few dynamics and articulations,” Rundell explained. “You just have to listen and learn to speak the language.” When Rundell was working with Shorter’s quartet, he would offer to come out early to work with an orchestra’s players. “If they can just have three or four hours before Wayne and the quartet get there, life is going to be a lot better. Because this stuff is really hard.”
Yet the music’s riches, he reiterated frequently, repay the effort countless times over. Conducting these works rekindles memories of his encounters with Shorter, whose idiosyncratic character was legendary in the music world. His nickname growing up was “Mr. Weird,” which he proudly painted on his saxophone case. He never offered straightforward answers to questions, even when it came to basic musical issues like tempos and dynamics. And so Rundell’s scores are full of poetic yet illuminating notes: “This should be more like water.” “This should be more like fairy land.” “The violas here are like a hedgehog coming out of the hedge.”
At the end of the interview, the conductor recalled his first time working with Shorter. Although he was already an experienced conductor, he was a bit intimidated to be working with a legend of his stature. So at one point, he asked about the tempo of a particular passage.
“‘Well, it’s like this,’” he remembered Shorter saying. “‘The aliens are attacking from outer space. And the parents, they’re really scared. But the kids — they think it’s kind of cool.’ And that was the tempo.”