![]() But this is a profoundly introspective outness. In his 1968 book Black Music, Baraka places Shorter within the ranks of the jazz avant garde. Listening to the record, a friend remarks: “It’s like they’re whispering to each other.” In the sleevenotes, Shorter wrote: “I was thinking of misty landscapes with wild flowers and strange, dimly seen shapes – the kind of places where folklore and legends are born.” “Dance Cadaverous”, adapted from Sibelius’s Valse Triste, gleams with mysterious intimacy and utopic promise. This mood continued on Speak No Evil, his 1966 record that’s at once eerie and tender. Leaving The Messengers in 1964, Shorter recorded Night Dreamer, a record at once wistful and restless: in his words, “a paradox, like you’d have in a dream”. The first piece Shorter wrote for Blakey was entitled “Africaine” in February 1964, Shorter appeared on Lee Morgan’s Search For The New Land, its second track “Mr Kenyatta” dedicated to the newly elected president of independent Kenya. Asking “Gentlemen, are you ready to die?” he escorted the band through the crowd while carrying a copy of the Koran. ![]() A Muslim since the late 1940s, Blakey (Abdullah Ibn Buhaina) instilled a sense of cultural heritage among the younger musicians he mentored in the band.Īt a gig in colonial era Algiers, The Messengers were met by a torrent of abuse after Blakey challenged the venue’s racially exclusionary policies. ![]() Around Newark’s musical circles, recalled Amiri Baraka, Shorter developed into “a metaphorical reference: ‘.as weird as Wayne’”.Īfter studies at New York University and two years in the army, Shorter joined Maynard Ferguson’s Big Band and, subsequently, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, for whom he went on to become music director. Like Sun Ra, Shorter operated as a kind of philosopher, delighting in linguistic puns, using music and language alike to reach beyond social norms or the realms of common sense. It is a movement away from ragtime and the constrictions that were associated with ragtime like minstrel stuff. “Charles Christopher Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk took the place of Captain Marvel This was a social movement. “We stopped reading comic books,” Shorter recalled. Back then Newark was an incubator of talent, from singers Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan – who attended the same church as the Shorters – to Amiri and Amina Baraka, organist Larry Young and trombonist Grachan Moncur III. In the ‘brick city vanguard’ of Newark, New Jersey, Shorter attended Newark Arts High School after winning a city wide arts competition, all the while absorbing mambo, cha-cha, horror movie soundtracks, and “this new music called bebop”. Refusing boundaries of scale or feasibility throughout his career – which culminated in an opera completed during the covid pandemic – Shorter never did the expected. “He made a hundred people and I made about 150,” Shorter recalled. The late Wayne Shorter and his brother Alan, himself a brilliantly oblique avant garde trumpet player, once attempted to model the entire world in clay.
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