With 'Emanon,' Jazz Elder Wayne Shorter Grandly Sweeps The Stars

Wayne Shorter likes to tell a story about going to see Charlie Parker, the mercurial titan of bebop, sometime around 1951. Shorter was 18 at the time — a saxophonist, like Parker, and a bop obsessive already gigging around his hometown of Newark, N.J. He headed across the river into Manhattan, where Parker, colloquially known as Bird, was headlining at Birdland, the club named in Parker's honor.

What stuck with Shorter most about that evening was a passing quote in one of Parker's solos: a scrap of melody from , the Stravinsky ballet. It was just the sort of detail, brisk and specific, that