Wayne Shorter: chapter 2, part 3 in The Landfill Chronicles
Wayne Shorter: THE LANDFILL CHRONICLES: Conversations on Music Elevated to a State of Art
By Dan Ouellette
Chapter 2: Wayne Shorter Space Cowboy
Part 3: Going Into the Unknown
QUIXOTIC JAZZ SAGE
At the Panama Jazz Festival in January 2009, Wayne Shorter, 75, speaks to a rapt audience of young jazz fans and players at a conversation/clinic. “There’s no such thing as a short story,” he says. “A short story is for marketing purposes only. Beethoven’s nine symphonies are all one.” He’s comfortably sitting in a chair in front of a packed crowd in a large rehearsal room.
This is Wayne’s crazy-like-a-fox way of summing up his own wayfaring career as a musician and composer. His quest for truth through song is no one-act play, but rather resembles an epic novel, with its ebb and flow of victory and tragedy. It’s also an affirmation that his lifelong passion for composing stretches beyond isolated tunes and albums into something more mystically akin to songlines, the sacred dreamtime music of Australia’s Aboriginals.
Attired in a black T-shirt and white suit at his Panama talk, Wayne holds court as a quixotic jazz sage who speaks with a simple clarity at one turn (“Play what you wish for, play a dream”) only to morph into a philosophical riddler around the next bend (“A lot of us have been hijacked from the cradle, so we have to break from what we’ve become attached to already”).
With his Buddha smile and mischievous twinkling eyes, Wayne reaches for parabolic metaphors (a sea turtle hatches in the sand and tries to make it to the sea without encountering a predator) and revels in posing rhetorical questions (“How large is the universe? Should we go for all the universe or not? What should it be?”). Anyone who has ever dialogued with him knows that he excels in elliptical discourse, much like he plays his tenor or soprano saxophone — lifting away from the head and launching into an interstellar trek before mysteriously landing calmly back where he started with mystical stardust in tow.
“You need to know that your life is a process,” Wayne tells the gathering that is attentive to every word. “No one can put a process into a can or box and sell it. When you’re playing music, this is a work in process, a work in progress. If you have a grasp of this, everything you say or write can be a process about always becoming more of who you are. It’s more than mastering your instrument. It’s the process of mastering your own life so that you’ll be playing your life story. You celebrate the incomprehensible phenomenon of life and give it a present: originality.”
Takeaway: that’s how Wayne’s music continues to resonate as well as evolve.
One of his most enduring tunes, “Footprints,” first recorded on his 1966 Adam’s Apple album then eight months later by the Miles Davis Quintet on Miles Smiles, has yet to be fully completed. “There’s no end-all, be-all version of that piece,” Wayne says. “Music has a way of telling what it needs, where it’s going. We like to put handcuffs on music. The music maker can get in the way. The full thrust of the creative process is started and stopped by us. But I won’t let that happen.”
THE BAND
Wayne’s quartet, comprising Danilo Pérez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade, continues to astound with its top-tier expression of intuitive alchemy. Last fall’s collaboration with the Imani Winds at the Disney Hall in Los Angeles and Carnegie Hall in New York centered on Wayne’s commissioned piece for the new-classical quintet. “Terra Incognita” will likely lead to a new album recorded in the studio in a collaborative setting of the group with the quartet.
In Panama, even though he’s not prominently displayed in the festival’s ad campaign — featuring photos of Chucho Valdés; Rubén Blades’ singer wife Luba Mason; and festival maestro and indigenous hero, Danilo Pérez — Wayne is treated as royalty. He is the guest of honor at a cocktail party at the house of U.S. Embassy Deputy Minister David Gilmour where Wayne is greeted by Ambassador Barbara Stephenson who asks him about what he’s up to. “I’m going into the unknown,” he tells her.
Along with Chucho, Wayne accepts the keys to the city by Panama City mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, who reads a proclamation, then humorously introduces Wayne by saying that he “comes from another galaxy.” Wayne is later toasted by the president of Panama, Martín Erasto Torrijos Espino, at a special luncheon in the presidential palace. He smiles, but with that kind of faraway look that one wonders, what’s going on inside his head. He’s short on ceremony, but grins and bears it cordially. He’d much rather be back in his hotel room watching a DVD of a classic film — or, as is the case of the final evening of the festival, preparing to go onstage.
At Panama’s sold-out 2,500-seat Teatro Anayansi, Wayne and his quartet are in fine form as the leader sketches on his tenor, beginning in a gentle, lyrical searching manner before John and Brian look at each other and agree to start slowly cooking rhythms. Danilo looks at Wayne and pensively stays in the tenor’s stark, dreamlike realm where a quiet, Socratic dialogue plays out. There is rhythmic exuberance that is calmed by the horn’s call to order as the quartet settles in only to incite again — four moving parts that operate as a collective with an acute sense of listening and expressing. Indeed, Wayne sails on an intergalactic improvisational journey with his bandmates combusting enthusiastically to charge the ride.
As if it were holding its breath, the crowd exhales with applause when the performance is over. It’s a standing ovation. Backstage the crew and members of the opening act — Luba, Rubén, bassist Jimmy Haslip, flautist Hubert Laws — watch in a transfixed state as Wayne returns with his soprano saxophone for the encore which flames and calms in peaks of exclamatory rhythms and valleys of pastoral melodies. Several times during the encore, Wayne watches his band, lurches back in mock surprise as group members take over with their own excursions.
THE NEW BEGINNING
Backstage, Wayne smiles when asked about the quartet, his first permanent acoustic group that has the riches of longevity suitable for telepathic communication — onstage and off. “We’re putting things together,” he says. “We still have a lot to listen to.” While he says that he likes the fact that each member has his own musical life outside his quartet, the comfort he enjoys with the group is palpable. At the presidential palace, he met up with John and Brian for the first time in Panama with warm hugs. “We call ourselves The Family,” he says. “That’s what it’s like. Whenever we’re making plans to tour or perform, we say, ‘When is The Family getting together again?’”
After the show in Panama, John comes off the stage wired, exclaiming, “That was killing. That was nasty, nasty, nasty. We played little bits of everything tonight.” The bassist, who began playing with Wayne in 1986, says that he’s been on the Wayne train longer than the other guys, but notes, “Since this part of the journey, things have really snapped into place. It’s resulted in Wayne writing gobs of music motivated by the quartet. I think it was like a new start for him. He wakes up every morning and writes with the band in mind or for orchestra — or for Imani Winds because he wanted to help further their career. He’s very motivated — and very giving and generous.”
John says that Wayne’s musical life up to the formation of the quartet in 2000 was largely in the context of bands, such as Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Miles’ quintet, Weather Report. It wasn’t until the ’80s that he began to venture out on his own. “Wayne tells the story about how Miles would say to him, ‘You’ve got to get more exposed,’” John says. “With all the other bands, even with Herbie, he never got to the level of improvisation as with the quartet. So, for him, this still stands as the beginning.”
NEXT WEEK:
Chapter 2, final part 4 — Wayne in Panama: “Looking for a Dream” — goes live on Medium next week…be ready for UFOs and orchestra for Renée Fleming
Wayne Shorter — Chapter 2, part 3 in the book-in-progress #TheLandfillChronicles on Medium. Please CLAP at the end on the left. Subscribe for free by clicking on the “Follow” button as well as the next green “Envelope” button underneath my caption on the right. You will have access to all parts of the chapter. You will also be notified by email on upcoming Wayne chapters as well as an array of such artists as #FrankZappa, #DeeDeeBridgewater, #ReginaCarter and many others — based on stories that have long been buried in the landfills.