The saxophonist who shaped decades of modern jazz

Wayne Shorter 1933–2023

Wayne Shorter’s playing was instantly recognizable. With a low-gloss tone on tenor saxophone and a brightness on soprano, the jazz musician and composer won 12 Grammy Awards in a career that spanned more than 50 years. He was a major force in several of the greatest jazz groups of the 20th century: In the 1950s he played in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, in the 1960s he joined the freewheeling second Miles Davis Quintet, and in 1970 he co-founded the jazz fusion band Weather Report. He also played on 10 Joni Mitchell albums and collaborated with

Steely Dan.Through all these projects, he never let tradition box him in. “The word ‘jazz,’ to me,” he said, “only means ‘I dare you.’”

Born in Newark, N.J., young Shorter “was captivated by bebop” he heard on the radio, said The Guardian. He started playing the clarinet at 15, but soon switched to saxophone and studied music education at New

York University. Playing in the city’s jazz scene during college, he earned the nickname the Newark Flash. After two years in the Army, he returned to NewYork and never stopped performing.

Shorter founded a quartet in 2000 and by his final years had “entered a phase of late eminence,” said The New York Times.The loss of his 14-year-old daughter in 1985 led him to Buddhism, a faith that solaced him when his wife died in a plane crash in 1996. He won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement

Award in 2015, followed by a Kennedy Center Honor in 2017. A lifelong lover of comic books and science fiction, he maintained his sense of play to the end. “Don’t throw away your childish dreams,” he said in 2012. “You have to be strong enough to protect them.”