Wayne Shorter.. A piece of jazz history is leaving us

If we had to enumerate the twenty prominent names who contributed to writing the history of jazz in the United States during the past century, then this list should include the name of saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter.

Today, Thursday, Shorter left our world at the age of eighty-nine in Los Angeles, to be one of the last big names to leave after making a wide world of jazz music for decades, along with stars such as Miles Davis (1926-1991), John Coltrane (1926-1967) and Orent. Coleman (1930-2015) and, of course, Louis Armstrong.

After his young interest in the visual arts, the boy will discover jazz music on the radio, a discovery that will lead him to follow the jazz artists in his city of Newark, New Jersey, and to attend his concerts with his brother Alan, even at the expense of his absence from his studies. With his brother, he will start playing the clarinet first, then move on to the saxophone, an instrument that he will eventually become one of the best players in the United States.

Shorter gave many concerts in the mid-1950s alongside well-known and emerging bands, and he would develop his talents during this period by apprenticing with a number of well-known names in jazz, such as Horace Silver, and then John Coltrane, whom he met and played alongside during the latter’s visit to Newark.

As for his official entry into the world of music as an independent artist, it would be in 1959, when he joined the “Jazz Messengers” band formed by percussionist Art Blakey, which was one of the most prominent bands that played jazz during the sixties in the United States. Not only did Shorter perform Blackie’s music in the band, but he began to propose works of his own, which would allow him to have more presence among his peers among musicians and performers in jazz bands in America.

With John Coltrane’s departure from the “Miles Davis Quintet” in the mid-1960s, the latter will call on Shorter to replace Coltrane as a saxophone player, an opportunity that will allow him to show his skill, and he has long been compared to Coltrane as a tenor saxophone player. A comparison that he would overcome years later, during his work in this band, when he would propose a unique style on a nearby instrument: the soprano saxophone.

After these two experiences that shaped his craft as a musician, and through which he also contributed to drawing the features of one of the most intense and important phases of jazz, Shorter would found, with Austrian pianist Joe Tsavinol, the “Weather Report” band, in 1970, and would remain active in it until the mid-1970s. The eighties, a period that will testify to his increasing desire to experiment and go to new musical spaces. A desire witnessed by his concerts with the band and several albums he made during this period, in which he combined jazz with Latin music, or took jazz into the world of orchestral composition.

During his career spanning more than half a century, Wayne Shorter has put out more than twenty albums solo or as a lead instrumentalist in a band, and has contributed to more than seventy albums with other bands and artists, most notably Miles Davis, Herbie Hanock (b. 1940), and Lee Morgan. (1938-1972), he also left many individual compositions that are considered today as individual jazz masterpieces, or what is known as “standards”, including “Nefertiti”, “Black Nile”, “Autumn”, and “Footprints”. and “Wildflower”.