WAYNE SHORTER
Tireless jazz innovator
(1933-2023)
“JAZZ shouldn’t have any mandates,” Wayne Shorter told NPR in 2013. “This music, it’s dealing with the unexpected. No-one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?” Shorter’s devotion to free expression, allied to an instinctive feel for harmony and matchless technique, made him a giant of improvised modern jazz.
He first came to prominence in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1959, graduating to musical director, where he honed his gift for composition. In 1964, Shorter joined Miles Davis’s ‘Second Great Quintet’, taking his place alongside pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams. Freed from the driving rhythms of Blakey’s group, he was encouraged to explore, his tenor sax pieces helping shape masterworks like ESP, Sorcerer and Miles In The Sky.
Post-Quintet, Shorter remained with Davis for In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, switching to soprano sax. Throughout the 1960s, he also released a spate of Blue Note albums under his own leadership. Among his most inspirational works were 1964’s Speak No and 1967’s , the latter featuring Shorter’s definitive “Footprints”, which quickly became a jazz standard.
