ACS & Wayne Shorter: kindred spirits

Terri Lyne Carrington, drummer for ACS, chats
with members of the audience after the concert.

Last week at the ACS concert in Springfield, one of the musicians announced between tunes that they had played many dates with Wayne Shorter throughout his 80th birthday year. Maybe Wayne's aesthetic rubbed off, or Wayne chose them because they're kindred spirits. Not only did they play a number of his tunes; they also abstracted almost everything they played, just like Wayne.

Was ACS playing "egghead" jazz?

For several pieces, I heard only a few notes of the melody, somewhere in the middle of the piece. Of course, this approach is one of the major complaints of jazz haters and jazz purists alike, but I love it, and I hardly ever hear it live anymore. I like hearing things that I can't imagine or that seem impossible.

If so, I'm an egghead, too. 
Allen: I was surprised to hear her play so little in this standard piano trio format. Of course, that made everything she played very important. I was most looking forward to hearing her because I've followed her music for 20 years, starting with Robert Altman's "Jazz '34," the jam session companion to his film "Kansas City." She portrayed Mary Lou Williams, as shown in the video below. A decade later, Allen made an album with Jack DeJohnette and Dave Holland, "The Life of a Song" (right), a standard piano trio work, very intense as you can imagine given the lineup. ACS played one of her pieces from that album, "Unconditional Love," which has a Latin beat.

Carrington: She also took a minimal approach. I think she could have been happy with just a high hat and a snare drum — and not necessarily the whole drum, just the rim.

Spalding: I expected her to have that facility, but I was shocked at her ability to generate so much vitality without grandstanding.

Fussing about Wayne Shorter

Because I don't spend a lot of time on the Internet except for stuff I really need, I have managed to miss the entire F*** Wayne Shorter fuss from earlier this year. A young saxophonist named Alex Hoffman propagated a social media utterance with this title. Typically, the post blew up and made him infamous. 

The online jazz writer Jonah Jonathan gave Hoffman an hourlong soapbox on Jonathan's platform, the Jazz Musician's Voice, In the intervierw, Hoffman rambles in a constipated tone about his aesthetic values and how Shorter falls short of them. The blather is available on YouTube under the title, Alex Hoffman: Why I think Wayne Shorter Sucks. Hoffman objects to the fact that members of Shorter's quartet occasionally yell at high points in their performance, and that Shorter uses harmony that Hoffman finds offensive.

Other people, such as Larry Blumenfeld, quickly came to Shorter's defense, as if he needed any.

This conflict between convention and innovation is not new in jazz or any other realm of art. But, seriously, Shorter's iconic Blue Note sides are half a century old now. And why do we need to hear another version of Giant Steps, just because somebody mastered it? 

Sad to see that innovation in jazz must come from a guy who's celebrating his 80th birthday this year. There are others, of course: Darcy James Argue, for one.

Post-Wayne Shorter concert stroll in Chicago

  

After the Wayne Shorter concert
earlier this month, we walked along
Michigan Avenue and found giant
boxes of radiant color, along with
a separate tower showing a
close-cropped face that changes
expression. Apparently this installation
has been in existence for nearly a
decade in Millennium Park.
Well, it was new to us. We also
noticed other glowing structures
farther up the street.

Now I like Wayne Shorter's new stuff

After expressing mixed feelings about Wayne Shorter's new album, Without a Net, I've decided that I not only like it, I also like everything he's done since teaming up with Danilo Perez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade.

In this spirit, I have made plans to hear the quartet this summer in Chicago. No time like the present, and they'll never get any closer to Springfield.

I like the way Shorter integrates bits of lyricism, bombast and actual swing. He's one of the few players I'm hearing today who's trying to do something different that appeals to me. It's weird and unsettling that a dedicated jazz listener has to turn to a near-octogenarian for innovation.

I've always expected something new from jazz, even as I listened mostly to mainstream music. But I need to enjoy the innovations.

Different but dull: At this blog we've explored the disappointing "egghead" style of contemporary innovation. 

Same but exciting: Many great players are thriving in the mainstream. Tom Harrell has produced five albums with the same quintet with only small variations in concept; all are brilliant and more is better. Sonny Rollins, who's 82, seems to want to improve on his own mainstream work every time out. But I also want something different.

Different and exciting: I can't find much of that. I admire Rudresh Mahanthappa, but his continuous blowtorch approach is hard to take. I miss George Adams. He had a vocabulary on tenor that combined screeching Ayler-like leaps with Gospel and warm swing. At the very moment when his caterwauling became unpleasant, he pulled back into a groove.

I think Shorter is doing the same thing in a more expressionist way. Much of his playing is not about chops; it's about extremes of emotion ("Myrrh" on the new album is a succinct example of this). For me, this is a different and exciting approach. I like players with chops (see "same but exciting"), but I'm willing to give up chops in return for something new and appealing.

In contrast to Rollins, Shorter, 79, seems to feel that he has no obligation to verify his chops. If he wants to unleash an ear-splitting dissonant trill, he's going to do it, even though it does not require six-hour daily practice sessions to pull off. And just when your eardrums are about to rupture, he'll pull up and play a line from Mendelssohn.

Appreciating Wayne Shorter's intentionally confounding music

Wayne Shorter publicity photo from his website. Credit: Robert Ascroft

For more than a decade, saxophonist Wayne Shorter has led a quartet of Danilo Perez (piano), John Patitucci (bass) and Brian Blade (drums). This unit has always promised a lot of fiery interplay along with Shorter's singular virtuosity. The band has delivered on the interplay, but Shorter has been criticized for cryptic, hesitant playing in which he cuts off promising passages just as they seem to be gathering momentum.

Lots of barking has broken out among critics about the band's third album, "Without a Net," recently released after an eight-year recording gap. More than ever, detractors have attacked Shorter for his strange noodles and shouts. Others say he's now playing boldly and coherently — less wandering, more purpose.

Many tunes on the new album are simply blasé, but there are several I really like:

• "Pegasus," a chamber piece with the Imani Winds, somehow explains the blasé aesthetic and makes it much more enjoyable.
• "Orbits" captures the energy of the earlier years of the quartet.
• "Myrrh" begins quietly and ends with sustained screams from Shorter's soprano. The emotional intensity of this piece exceeds anything that current creative leaders in jazz — authors of deliberately ponderous and dreary sounds — would ever allow themselves to play.

I saw that Howard Mandel criticized Shorter for not taking control of his quartet with stronger playing. Such objections are useless. Maybe these mysterious detours and blind alleys are exercises derived from Buddhism, which Shorter practices. We aren't supposed to enjoy the music as conventional propulsive jazz with a 4-4 triplet pulse. The music is supposed to be occasionally or mostly confounding, with a breakthrough of enjoyment now and then. 

By the way, April is Jazz Appreciation Month, as declared by the Smithsonian Institution since 2002. This post and as many others as I can find time for this month are dedicated to appreciating jazz.

Doug Talley’s total Wayne immersion

Doug Talley, from his online press materials

One of my summer music highlights was a trip to Kansas City to hear saxophonist Doug Talley’s program of Wayne Shorter’s Blue Note tunes. I’d heard it three summers ago, and ever since, I’d been craving another visit to the Wayne spa.

Before the first hearing, I remember feeling skeptical about the prospect of this repertory concept, and I was also intrigued. But after the first few tunes, the total immersion in the glorious melodies and mysterious structures created a soothing state of enlightenment. And the band was great, with all players confronting the music on their own terms.

This time, the quintet played at the American Jazz Museum’s Blue Room, probably the most prestigious venue in the city for serious listening. Talley’s group includes Joe Parisi (trumpet), Wayne Hawkins (piano), Tim Brewer (bass) and Keith Kavanaugh (drums).

It was a weird experience, appreciating the master’s body of work and the musicians’ individual talents all at once. Shorter loomed as the sixth man on stage.

Talley said he’s learned a great deal not only from Shorter’s composing but also the way he interprets his work.

“When he plays his own music, I like the way he renders the melodies,” he said. “It took me a long time to enjoy his soloing on some tunes. It didn’t reach me at the time. I’d wonder, why is he doing that? Then I’d start playing the tune and I’d realize, he’s doing that because the tune asks that.”

Talley said Shorter is an acquired taste, and his songs are not easy to play.

“A lot of his tunes, you can’t just play some bebop line and expect to survive,” he said. “Typically, the melodies are simple, and the underlying chords are not. It’s almost like a puzzle, though I’m sure that’s not the way he would describe it.”

The simple elegance of the melodic lines creates an enjoyable entry point for the audience.

Talley said he was in high school when he first encountered Shorter’s music, during the Weather Report era. He listened backward to the Blue Note classics and the work with Art Blakey before that. Talley and his friends owned a few of the Blue Notes.

“We couldn’t figure out what he was doing or anything like that. It was way too complex for us at the time,” he said. The songs must be heard over time until they become a part of you, he said.

Joe Parisi, from FBCC.net

Talley’s group is usually a quartet, with Parisi frequently joining in. In addition to the Shorter program, the quartet plays non-themed performances.

The quartet, which formed in 1995, has composed and performed music for silent movies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lodger” and three Chaplin works.

Since 1984, Talley has worked as a music teacher in the Shawnee Mission School District, on the Kansas side of the K.C. metro area. His career has spanned all grade levels, currently grades 8-12.

The quartet, from left: Wayne Hawkins (piano), Tim Brewer (bass), Doug Talley (saxophones), Keith Kavanaugh (drums/cymbals). Photo from Talley's online press materials.

"JuJu" — soundtrack to blowing wind and huffing airplane

Appreciating Wayne Shorter’s Blue Note period



I associate "JuJu" by Wayne Shorter, the version on his 1964 Blue Note album by the same name, with the time I was flying through heavy weather in a prop-driven commuter plane. This experience came at a time when you could use electronic devices at any time during a flight. Back then, the most sophisticated device was a Sony Walkman. It was also at a time when pilots weren’t sealed off from passengers; I could see into the cockpit because there were no doors or partition in this little plane. As it gained altitude after takeoff, I had a pilot’s view through the windshield of the gray horizon flipping back and forth. Out my window, I saw mountains of clouds as the plane tried to climb through them toward a little hole of light. As Shorter announced the theme of "JuJu," the plane powered upward, but by McCoy Tyner’s solo, the blackening clouds seemed to have beaten the airship back downward. Just after Shorter came in again, the the plane made another attempt to break through the little hole of light, but the elements beat it downward once again. Shorter’s tumultuous solo represented not only the plane’s striving but also the atmosphere’s fierce resistance. Before Shorter was done, the plane made another attempt, this time successful, and the song faded out just as we threaded through the little hole of light into the calm air above the clouds.

Appreciating Doug Talley and Wayne Shorter

More powerful than jug Cabernet

In August 2009, I attended a performance at Jardine’s in Kansas City of the Doug Talley quintet playing the Wayne Shorter songbook. Talley, a tenor saxophonist from that city, said he’d gladly take requests, but they would be pointless, as the band intended to play just about everything Wayne ever wrote before the evening was done. The insistent delivery of one gem after another — "Yes Or No" on top of "Witch Hunt" after "Speak No Evil," "Majong," "El Gaucho," "Footprints," and beyond — knocked me loopier than the jug Cabernet I was drinking could possibly achieve. Fussy folks might dismiss Talley’s stewardship of Shorter’s music as mere "repertory" or "tribute" efforts, but it gave me a renewed appreciation for Shorter’s 60’s Blue Note period, which developed into an 18-month obsession, from which I am just emerging. I have seen in Google searches that Talley has reprised his Shorter undertaking at least twice since my revelatory experience, and maybe it’s for the best that I have missed them — I can actually listen to something else now!

Dougtalley.com
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