IMN : Updates for Wayne Shorter

Jazz legend Wayne Shorter to Perform at UNC/Greeley Jazz Festival

IMN

April 12th, 2012

from greeleytribune.com

Jazz legend Wayne Shorter to perform at UNC/Greeley Jazz Festival
By: Dan England

When Wayne Shorter comes to the UNC/Greeley Jazz Festival on April 20 as one of the most iconic artists to perform during the three-day event in recent memory, don’t expect a greatest-hits tour.

Yes, Shorter is 78, and he’s a jazz legend — someone who had as much influence on the music as anyone still living. Some, in fact, call him the greatest living jazz composer, and yet Dana Landry, director of jazz studies at the University of Northern Colorado, believes it’s his playing that makes him stand out.

At his age, with an established, hall-of-fame reputation, well, that’s exactly a time when many artists choose to make some money touring rather than innovating. Michelle Mercer of Colorado Springs, Shorter’s biographer, wanted to write about him not only because he was a fascinating character, but because she saw a chance to document a huge chunk of the recent history of jazz and American music.

To read the full article click here

Human, Danger

IMN

March 12th, 2012

from npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme

Human, Danger
By Patrick Jarenwattananon

The new Esperanza Spalding album, Radio Music Society, comes out next Tuesday, but you can hear it all now via NPR Music’s First Listen series. The tune in the video above, Wayne Shorter’s “Endangered Species,” is covered on the record.

If you were looking for an overall aesthetic to Radio Music Society, you might start here. Shorter’s 1980s and ’90s albums — “Endangered Species” is from 1985’s Atlantis — have been maligned a bit among those in the know. But this performance from Frankfurt in 1988 shows off the color effects of the heavy synths and bass guitar, the intensity of musicianship and the intricacies of the composition. He’s filtering a lot of interesting stuff through the trappings of 1980s pop music.

To read the full article click here

Confirmed Tourdates As Of October 21st, 2011

IMN

June 23rd, 2012: Broadway Theatre Saskatoon, SK, CANADA [Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring Brian Blade, John Patitucci and Danilo Perez]
June 24th, 2012: Francis Winspear Centre For Music Edmonton, AB, CANADA [Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring Brian Blade, John Patitucci and Danilo Perez ]
June 26th, 2012: Vogue Theatre Vancouver, BC, CANADA [Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring Brian Blade, John Patitucci and Danilo Perez]
June 27th, 2012: Royal Theatre Victoria, BC, CANADA [Wayne Shorter Quartet, featuring Brian Blade, John Patritucci & Danilo Perez]
June 29th, 2012: Maisonneuve Theatre de la Place des Arts Montreal, QC, CANADA [Wayne Shorter Quartet, featuring Brian Blade, John Patitucci & Danilo Perez]
June 30th, 2012: Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center Westhampton Beach, NY USA [Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring Brian Blade, John Patitucci and Danilo Perez]
July 7th, 2012: Ghent Jazz Festival Ghent, Belgium [Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring Danilo Perez, John Patitucci and Jorge Rossy]
July 10th, 2012: Royal Theatre Copenhagen, Denmark [Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring Danilo Perez, John Patitucci and Jorge Rossy]
July 13th, 2012: Bard Fortress Municipality of Bard, ITALY [Wayne Shorter Quartet]
July 21st, 2012: Audi Jazzforum Neckarsulm Neckarsulm, Germany [Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring Danilo Perez, John Patitucci and Jorge Rossy]
September 20th, 2012: Walt Chapel - Wake Forest University Winston Salem, NC USA [Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring Danilo Perez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade]
November 1st, 2012: Birmingham Town Hall Birmingham, UK [Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring Brian Blade, John Patitucci and Danilo Perez]
November 3rd, 2012: Salle Pleyel Paris, France [Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring Brian Blade, John Patitucci and Danilo Perez]

LIVE REVIEW: Wayne Shorter Quartet, Barbican

IMN

October 10th, 2011

_from www.artsdesk.com

Wayne Shorter Quartet, Barbican
Legendary saxophonist in autumnal mood, but as brilliant and inventive as ever

By:Peter Culshaw

Wayne Shorter’s current band do strange things with time – it seems to stretch and bend like in some subatomic experiment featuring rogue neutrinos. Their nifty time signatures would fuse any computer. The nature of the music itself seems outside time, both echoing that modern jazz annus mirabilis 1959 and being futuristic at the same time.
Shorter enjoys quoting his old cohort Miles Davis’s more enigmatic comments like, “Do you ever get fed up of making music that sounds like music?” What Shorter and his band do is at any rate not like anyone else’s music – they use a huge palette of colours, shiveringly chromatic, atonal and rough at times – at others sweet and mournful, notably when Shorter plays his soprano sax as though summoning up the spirit world.

Shorter’s instrumental contributions to key bands like Miles Davis’s, Art Blakey’s and Weather Report would be enough to give him legendary status in jazz circles, but much more than that, he is probably the most consistently creative composer in jazz. Many of Miles’s best-known tunes were by him, like “Prince of Darkness”, “ESP”, “Footprints”, “Sanctuary” and “Nefertiti”, and he has been composing prolifically ever since.

Although he’s 78, last night’s concert, a sold-out highlight of this year’s London Jazz Festival, was all new material, to me anyway, except for what sounded like a version of “Atlantis” as an encore and a quote from Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”. At that age, you might be expecting some diminution of powers, but the clarity and range of his sax playing is as forceful as ever. Perhaps, though, from the off there was a more autumnal, wistful feel to the concert than other times I’ve seen him

To read the full article click here

LIVE REVIEW: Wayne Shorter Pushes the Limits of Jazz, Music at Herbst Theatre

IMN

October 3rd, 2011

_from blogs.sfweekly.com

Wayne Shorter Pushes the Limits of Jazz, Music at Herbst Theatre
By: Dean Schaffer

Stripped of his pen, notebook, and incredibly necessary glasses, the concert reviewer can’t help but feel out of his element, totally unprepared to eventually write a proper piece on the merits of a show.

But with Wayne Shorter at Herbst Theatre last night, this reviewer in particular isn’t sure that any number of pens, notebooks, or prescription eyewear could have prepared him for the task. Not in the slightest.

Now 78 years old, Shorter took the stage with Danilo Perez on piano, John Patitucci on bass, and Brian Blade on drums. As Shorter’s tenor sax warmed the room — a beautiful, refined concert hall that seemed like the closest thing to a natural habitat for the group’s music — the first piece stretched past the 10 minute mark. Then 25. Then 40, before finally sputtering to a last gasp and allowing the audience to unleash a thunderous applause.

Along the way, Shorter’s group unleashed a tidal wave of challenging sound; at one point, his melody alluded to a line from Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” In some ways, his quartet’s sound seemed to pick up where that classic piece left off, with discordant parts wailing in seemingly isolated derangement but then uniting to create something that challenged the audience’s ears but still managed to reward them immensely.

To read the full article click here

Entrevista a Wayne Shorter antes de su concierto en Buenos Aires, Argentina

IMN

June 8th, 2011

www.clarin.com

By: Marcos Mayer

Wayne Shorter: “Para hacer jazz, hay que romper las reglas”

Entrevista. El ex Weather Report y compinche de Miles Davis Vuelve aquí con su cuarteto. Su concepto místico de la improvisación. Su admiración por Obama.

De vez en cuando, las leyendas llegan en avión. Cuando Wayne Shorter se baje en Ezeiza junto a los integrantes de su cuarteto para presentarse el jueves en el Gran Rex, traerá en su equipaje, aunque no precise pasarlos por la aduana, cincuenta años de jazz y del mejor pop, que lo tuvieron como partícipe necesario. Entre muchas presencias memorables, fue el saxo tenor y soprano del quinteto de Miles Davis (en lo que probablemente sea su mejor época), fue cofundador junto al tecladista Joe Zawinul del grupo más potente que haya dado el jazz rock, Weather Report, el único que, casi en contradicción con su nombre, ha logrado superar las inclemencias del tiempo. Además ha sido invitado a tocar con Joni Mitchell – quien ha contado que asistió al momento en que Davis le pasaba la herencia -, Steely Dan y Milton Nascimento, entre otros.

Este notable saxofonista nació en Newark, una ciudad cercana a Nueva York, hace casi 80 años. Su rostro, casi sin arrugas, parece desmentir tajantemente esa edad. Lo mismo ocurre con su música, que no detiene su búsqueda y frente a la cual su entusiasmo parece realmente infatigable.

To read the full article, click here

The Shorter, The Hotter

IMN

March 22nd, 2011

From Tonight – IOL

The Shorter, The Hotter
By Evan Milton

A music interview often begins by referencing musicians the subject has played with. Wayne Shorter, however, is the kind of living legend that other artists reference.

He was born in New Jersey in 1933, and started playing clarinet at 16 before switching to saxophone, going on to win multiple Grammy Awards (six, at last count, with 13 nominations) and earn honorary doctorates from New York University and the Berklee College of Music, among others.

He’s been declared a “jazz master” by America’s National Endowment for the Arts. His many collaborators have included Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock and Jimmy Smith.

Shorter’s influence on modern music has been likened to that of Picasso on modern art, and Ingmar Bergman’s on contemporary film, and he’s still steaming ahead with quartet and symphonic projects that critics consider to be among the most powerful of his career.

He is as delighted and intrigued by life now as he was as a star-struck teen who climbed a fire-escape at a Norman Granz Philharmonic show to hear Stan Kenton, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and the clarinet-wielding Ilinois Jacquet. Turns out he also boasts a robust sense of humour.

He presents the interviewer with a dilemma, though. What do you ask the man who co-founded Weather Report, the group that became synonymous with the first wave of jazz fusion throughout the 1970s and early 80s, had his orchestra-meets-improvisation work with outfits like the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw described as “having a feel for melody like Puccini (but with) harmonic complexity like Ravel”? Perhaps the best place to start is with a question about what Cape Town audiences can expect to hear from one of modern jazz music’s most prolific composers.

Read the entire interview here

Wayne Shorter Pals Off on Jazz Adventure

IMN

February 10th, 2011

From the Boston Herald

Wayne Shorter, pals off on jazz adventure
By Bob Young

When reedman Wayne Shorter hired pianist Danilo Perez, bass player John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade 10 years ago as compadres in a new iteration of his quartet, he’d found the perfect kindred spirits to navigate the wild contours of his own unique Wayne’s World.

It’s a world where every improvisational exchange is an intense adventure, where the leader is as much companion as guide, and where it’s no fun to visit the same place more than once.

All of that was as clear as one of Shorter’s sharp-edged soprano sax bursts Tuesday in front of a crowded house at Berklee Performance Center.

For nearly an hour and a half — without pause — the foursome constructed an impossible-to-replicate sonic meditation filled with sudden stops and turns, furiously fast rhythmic conversations and a calm, gentle beauty that flowed as relentlessly as Shorter’s own ideas.

One of the greatest composers in jazz, the 77-year-old cornerstone of Mile Davis’ ’60s ensemble, founder of fusion pioneer Weather Report and nine-time Grammy award winner calls his current approach “de-composing.”

Read the entire review here

Why NPR's Obsessed With Wayne Shorter

IMN

February 8th, 2011

From NPR.org

Why We’re Obsessed With Wayne Shorter
By Patrick Jarenwattananon

The saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter is one of the few jazz musicians who can without a doubt be called a living legend. Many of his compositions are jazz standards; many of his records are studied endlessly. He’s one of the artists who both musicians and fans obsess over — and even at age 77, he continues to reinvent his musical personality with every performance.

So what about Wayne Shorter gives him this towering, near-mythic profile? Why did people revere this man, and why do they continue to do so?

On Tuesday, Shorter starts a brief North American tour, stopping in Boston, New York, Durham, N.C. and Toronto. On the eve of this stint, I asked Michelle Mercer, author of the biography Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter, to help explain and appraise the phenomenon that is Wayne Shorter, both then and now. (Mercer is also an occasional NPR contributor.) I sent her a few questions over e-mail:

Patrick Jarenwattananon: So if you’ve never heard of him, why is this Wayne Shorter dude worth paying attention to? I know you have a whole book on this, but … give me the roughly 150 word version?

Michelle Mercer: Here’s the encyclopedia entry: Wayne is as strong and distinctive a composer as he is a saxophonist. His storied career encompasses 50 years of jazz innovation. Wayne was weaned on bebop in the 40s and went on to break new ground in the genres of hard bop, post-bop, fusion and orchestral jazz.

But here’s why he’s really worth a listen: At 77, an age when many musicians have settled into nostalgia, Wayne is writing and playing music that can stir people up.

Read the entire interview here

Shorter Still Searching For New Sounds

IMN

February 4th, 2011

From the Star-Ledger

Saxophonist Wayne Shorter still searching for new sounds
By Alex W. Rodriguez

As an iconoclastic Newark teen, Wayne Shorter became infatuated with the sounds of bebop and formed a band called the Group — modeled after Dizzy Gillespie’s successful big band — with some of his friends.

“We didn’t do this to become outstanding virtuosos,” says Shorter, now 77 and living in West Hollywood, Calif. Instead, it was about “doing what you want to do –— and it happens to be something called bebop. You’re doing what you want to do, not what you’re told to do.”

In the six decades since he formed his initial group, he has steadfastly honored bebop’s nonconformist bent, stretching the harmonic and stylistic boundaries of jazz beyond even what his bebop idols imagined possible. Working with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the Miles Davis Quintet and Weather Report, and making his own historic records for Blue Note in the 1960s, he has left one of the largest footprints on the jazz world of any musician alive today.

But the tenor saxophonist chooses not to rest on his reputation. In 2001, he recruited three young musicians to embark upon a process he calls “de-composing.” Rather than compose complex new material, Shorter relies on his bandmates to reinterpret and reinvent his vast body of work, conjuring new sounds with every performance.

“We’ve been performing without rehearsing,” says Shorter. “Unless you de-compose it these days, you can’t make new portals and doorways available.”

Read the entire interview here

REVIEW Wayne Shorter, Fleming Soar at Powell Hall

IMN

October 4th, 2010

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Fleming soars at Powell Hall
By Sarah Bryan Miller

Fleming returned to the stage for the evening’s artistic centerpiece, the world première of “Aurora,” by jazz legend Wayne Shorter.

The work is, according to Shorter, just one part of what is to be a 40-minute setting of Maya Angelou’s “The Rock Cries Out to Us Today.” “Aurora” began with its final section, and offered cinematic sweep, interesting vocal and instrumental writing and a positive message.

It’s for a big orchestra, with a supercharged brass section; Fleming, who was not placed in the sweet spot for singers (that’s on the house right side of the podium), was miked for it. The vocal writing played to her strengths.

Shorter, in attendance with his wife and another jazz icon, Herbie Hancock, took his bows from his seat in the dress circle.

Read the entire review here

Renée Fleming Teams Up with Wayne Shorter in SLSO Gala

IMN

September 27th, 2010

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Renée Fleming teams up with Wayne Shorter in SLSO Gala
By Sarah Bryan Miller

The American public seems to take just one soprano at a time to its collective heart. For many years, that soprano was Beverly Sills; these days, it’s Renée Fleming.

She’ll appear in a gala concert at Powell Symphony Hall on Oct. 2 with David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, singing some popular arias (including lots of Puccini); the aria that might be considered her leitmotif, the gorgeous “Song to the Moon,” from Dvorak’s “Rusalka”; some lighter music; and a world premiere by jazz icon Wayne Shorter. (It’s only her second appearance in St. Louis; she gave a recital at the Sheldon in 2004.)

It’s hard to put Fleming into a box; she’s a lyric soprano with coloratura tendencies who takes on all kinds of music. She’s the archetypal American opera singer who does it all — French repertoire, German repertoire, Italian repertoire, you name it — and comes up a winner. She still sings some of the musical theater tunes and jazz that she performed when she was a student. And while most singers would just offer a parade of popular favorites in a gala concert, Fleming’s doing the new Shorter piece, based on a Maya Angelou poem.

“I’ve been a fan of (Shorter’s) since I was a college student,” Fleming said in a telephone interview, “and I was so excited when I realized that David Robertson was also a fan,” when they met at a school function for their children. They discussed commissioning a piece by him for Fleming to sing in St. Louis.

Read the entire article here

Happy 10-Year Anniversary to the Wayne Shorter Quartet

IMN

September 13th, 2010

Ten years ago, on September 13, 2000, Wayne Shorter premiered his new quartet at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With help from Danilo Perez on piano, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums, Shorter has been creating some of the most powerful music of his career.

Happy Ten Years!

Happy 77th Birthday to Wayne Shorter

IMN

August 25th, 2010

IMN Wishes Wayne Shorter a Happy 77th Birthday!

Enjoy some classic clips of Wayne Shorter through the years…

New Photos of the Wayne Shorter Quartet at Middelheim

IMN

August 18th, 2010

Enjoy these photos of the Wayne Shorter Quartet at the Jazz Middelheim Festival on August 13, 2010

Wayne Shorter and Joe Lovano Help Celebrate Herbie Hancock's 70th Birthday

IMN

June 25th, 2010

from the New York Times

Old and New, and Celebrity Power, at a Birthday Party
By Nate Chinen

Herbie Hancock’s CareFusion Jazz Festival concert at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night was called “Seven Decades: The Birthday Celebration,” like a sequel in a fantasy-adventure franchise. Fittingly, it was a prestige production with an overspill of talent, but also a bit of a rehash, strangely hollow at the core.

Appearing first with some peers from the post-bop elite, Mr. Hancock, the pianist, then spent the second half plugging his latest adult-contemporary album, “The Imagine Project” (Hancock Records), which was released this week. He has done much the same thing with his festival bookings before, as recently as a couple of years ago. It hasn’t grown any less jarring; a truer title might have been “Hancock: A Tale of Two Herbies.”

Read the entire article here