It’s Wayne’s world at the BSO, and it’s excellent
Of all the nights to stay home, why did so much of the Thursday-night crowd at the Boston Symphony Orchestra choose March 21, the first performance of the orchestra’s tribute concert to jazz saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter?
Perhaps people were wary of the unfamiliar repertoire; before this week, the BSO had never performed a note of Shorter’s music. It probably didn’t help that Berklee College of Music — the alma mater of this week’s featured performers esperanza spalding, Dayna Stephens, Leo Genovese, and Terri Lyne Carrington (who also teaches there) — was on spring break. All told, a half-full hall witnessed one of the most unforgettable, extraordinary, and joyous BSO concerts I have ever experienced. If you were on the fence about attending one of the remaining performances: Don’t think, go.
As a whole, BSO audiences are sometimes wary of the new and strange, but there’s another factor in the mix when it comes to jazz. When some classical listeners think of the combination of jazz and orchestra, they assume it’s pops, or more specifically, slapdash and simplistic pops arrangements of standards. Shorter, however, was a musical polymath for whom orchestral composition and orchestration were core skills. This was immediately obvious from the first piece, an arrangement of Shorter’s 1987 fusion track “Forbidden, Plan-It!” Where the original was largely forgettable, driven by plasticky synthesizers, the orchestral version packed an electrifying punch, with Stephens’s soprano sax blazing like a solar flare.
The idea for this program itself came about in early 2022 after conductor Clark Rundell, the longtime Shorter collaborator who led this concert, found out that the composer had a trove of orchestral arrangements of his own music; the two started planning an orchestral concert program in celebration of Shorter’s 90th birthday. Shorter died last March at age 89, but the plan persisted, and Boston marks the symphonic tribute’s final stop after performances with various orchestras in North America and Europe.
On Thursday, spalding, the acclaimed bassist and vocalist who became a close friend of the composer in the decade before his death, served as combination emcee and torchbearer for the evening. Between pieces, she shared anecdotes, stories, and sprigs of Buddhist mysticism. (Like Shorter was, spalding is a practicing Nichiren Buddhist.) The amplified jazz quartet, composed of spalding, Stephens, pianist Genovese, and drummer Carrington, was placed at the front of the stage, with Rundell’s podium and the orchestra further back.
Rundell led the orchestra with wellrehearsed clarity, and the orchestral musicians sounded just as at ease as they do when playing Gershwin, Stravinsky, or any of the other 20th-century composers who incorporated flashes of jazz into their scores. Shorter wasn’t just dabbling in orchestral music — and it’s a blessing to all our ears that the arrangements of “Forbidden, Plan-It!” and “Orbits” are in the wild now. “Causeways” was Rundell’s original arrangement of a Shorter piece, and its insistent, ritualistic rhythms and craggy, wide harmonies also deserve a place in the repertoire.
Breathy, earthy vocals from spalding elevated “Midnight in Carlotta’s Hair” and the suite from Shorter’s opera “...(Iphigenia)” to the heavens. Her first salvo, as the melodic soloist in “Midnight,” was wordlessly sensuous. She then played the role of storyteller with her own libretto for the “...(Iphigenia)” suite. Deploying her three-octave range and almost alien precision of pitch, her voice danced on the border between jazz and operatic stylings. Her libretto prioritized words that sound and feel good to sing, with sentence structure of secondary importance, and she seemed to treat every syllable as a magic spell.
The evening’s final piece, “Gaia” for jazz quartet and orchestra, was written on commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, again with a libretto by spalding. It was the concert’s longest, most indulgent, and least unified selection, but hardly mediocre. Lush, fully orchestrated passages were juxtaposed with texturally sparse but rhythmically busy passages for the jazz quartet, and Rundell turned around to watch in admiration when not conducting. The effect was that of primordial currents of sound, churning and surging.
“What a world we get to live in,” spalding commented before “Gaia,” her face radiant with joy. “We”: audience, BSO musicians, Rundell, and especially spalding herself, who faced the orchestra during the final bows and hyped them up with a radiant smile and outstretched palms. This program deserves a packed house.