Rogue Philosopher

HE PLAYED AND WROTE for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet, and fusion supergroup Weather Report. He was John Coltrane’s jamming partner, later became Joni Mitchell’s key collaborator, and played that blazing solo on the title track of Steely Dan’s Aja. By last year, he had racked up twenty-five solo releases, including landmarks like 1965’s Speak No Evil and, thirty years later, High Life. In December, he was feted as a 2018 Kennedy Center honoree (along with fellow Buddhist and musician Philip Glass), and this year will see the release of the documentary Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity.

If anyone could rest on their laurels, it would be him.

But that’s not the way of Wayne Shorter, a creator and communicator so unconventional that even as a fledgling bebop player in the 1950s, he was known among his peers as “Mr. Weird.” Being unusual works for him.

So it’s no big surprise that, instead of just another new album, he’s released a triple album. And it comes with a graphic novel. Which he helped write.

Titled —“no name,” backwards, in homage to a Dizzy Gillespie song—the physical-only release is a sprawling, lively work that marries jazz and classical instrumentation, showcasing Shorter’s considerable gifts for improvisation and composition. If it isn’t a masterwork, I don’t know what is. And that’s not just me: has received rave reviews from , , , , the , the  , and on and on. And at the center of it all is a Buddhist superhero of sorts.