Thursday passed away saxophone The American who made a change in the sound of jazz in the sixties, at the age of 89.
His media agent, Alice Kingsley, said he died in Los Angeles, without giving a cause of death.
American trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was the first to comment on the death of Shorter, who is about 30 years older than him, noting that he “was improving everything he touched.”
Shorter rose to fame as a tenor saxophonist in drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the late 1950s, before joining trumpeter Miles Davis’s quintet in the 1960s.
Shorter wrote a number of the band’s most famous songs. Davis hailed him as, for the band, “the brainchild, the conceptualizer of a wide range of musical ideas that we’ve presented”.
Shorter also led his own band to produce a handful of albums in the 1960s. He also co-founded the Weather Report band in 1969 at about the time he was beginning to focus on playing the soprano saxophone.
Shorter co-wrote the opera (Iphigenia) with singer Esperanza Spalding, which premieres in 2021. Shorter won 12 Grammy Awards, the last of which was last month.
FRANCE 24/AFP/Reuters
