This music that he embarked on a decade ago with the quartet has always confounded me, but not in a way that made me stop listening. So, the concert was something I just had to hear, hoping that somehow I would get it. However, the Mysterious Traveler sounded as inscrutable as ever. I didn't get it, but I got a questioning, pondering experience, strangely satisfying at the end.
On most of the half-dozen tunes, he sounded so terse, cryptic, that I wondered why he wouldn't have preferred silence. The first note he played was very brief and tentative, almost as if he were testing his instrument or warming up. He played that note again in the same fashion, signaling that it was actual music.
Thankfully, there were spots of thrilling swirls and cascades. It seemed like the point was to wait for these moments, not expect, as in most jazz, that one thing will build on the next into a profluent narrative. I'm probably making too much of his Buddhist faith, but the music often sounded more like meditation, with moments of insight. The best way to listen seemed to be to wait, just to wait — not to wait with anticipation.
But all of these abstract remarks only describe Wayne. There was an entire band playing expansive compositions.
Throughout the decade of the quartet and across its three albums, Danilo Perez displayed a strongly percussive and unpredictable style on piano. In this concert, he played more fluently, with complex streams of notes that sounded more like classical. However, he had a few flashpoints. On one piece halfway through the concert, he plucked the piano strings, creating a vibrating buildup of tension. Later, he erupted with spiky block chords, causing drummer Brian Blade to respond so powerfully that he almost fell off his stool.
Blade dropped percussion in bunches, sometimes seemingly trying to stoke Shorter, at others ratcheting down to a lower dynamic to enable Shorter's meandering. Bassist John Patitucci spent much of the time hunched over his bass, providing not just bass notes but a rumbling counterpoint to what Shorter was doing.
From time to time, Shorter turned to one or another musician and made little hand gestures like fidgeting or like third-base-coach signals. The recipient would respond with a nod, but the music did not necessarily change as if on cue. Shorter played in a slightly stooped posture, which, along with the cryptic passages, reminded me in sight and sound of the aging Miles Davis. Of course, Shorter has aged much more than Davis did, and the connection was there, but it stopped there. Can you name a jazz musician, or an artist of any kind, pushing so far into nether creative realms at nearly 80 years of age?
One of the more satisfying pieces was a dissonant number near the end that sounded like 20th century classical music, dirge and paint splatter. Then the band started churning with mounting bombast, launching Shorter into one of his best flights of the evening — whoosh!
Many of the pieces were very long, with long sections, each with a change in tempo or texture from the previous part. A different musician would come to the fore with each movement, but not in the way of a featured solo, as others also chimed in frequently. In these long pieces, it seemed that anything was possible.
1 comment:
Well said. Shorter has always been a cryptographer of music. Only he knows what he's doing. Which compels us to listen even harder.
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