Still Stepping Into the Unknown and Testing Fate
Wayne Shorter’s 80th Birthday and Legacy of Perpetual Flux
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Wayne Shorter, center, and members of his quartet, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums, on Friday
at Town Hall, in the centerpiece of the Blue Note Jazz Festival.
By JON PARELES
Published on June 30, 2013
The saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter turns 80 on Aug. 25, and he has started the commemorations early. On Friday night at Town Hall, in the centerpiece of the Blue Note Jazz Festival, Mr. Shorter’s longtime quartet headlined a triple bill that attested to his immense and continuing influence on jazz.
Mr. Shorter has built a legacy of perpetual flux and the revelations of the unresolved. His most admired and emulated pieces — like “Orbits,” which opened his own set in a version very different from the one that starts the quartet’s recent live album, “Without a Net” — raise questions, ponder them (sometimes ferociously) and leave them hanging in the air. The technical means involve ambiguous harmonies and melodic lines that can sound childlike but are also wily about where they won’t touch down.
While his compositions were already remarkable in the 1960s, Mr. Shorter went on to apply his questioning spirit to the shape of a performance. With Weather Report and even more so with his own groups, he took to scattering the elements of a composition along the way instead of stating them at the outset. He treats bass lines or single phrases as clues and implications, toying on the spot with tempo, crosscurrents, inflection and attack; anything can be up for grabs, yet the composition retains an identity. As with all great jazz, the musical complexities disappear into emotional richness. Mr. Shorter conveys a constant search, a willingness to step into the unknown and test fate.
The musicians Mr. Shorter has led since 2001 — Danilo Pérez on piano, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums — are his full partners. The Town Hall set was often a matter of duos or trios within the group: pristine piano chords conversing with bass lines, a few tenor-saxophone notes puffed within a developing beat, a piano or bass riff offered and joined and soon steered somewhere else entirely, sometimes with a sudden explosion from Mr. Blade.
Mr. Shorter started out with his saxophone lines tucked into the group, but was soon sailing atop it. He announced melodies, streaked ahead when the quartet shared a modal groove, intoned incantations when the groove dissolved into rippling stasis, and switched to soprano saxophone to be quizzical, pensive and, in an encore of “Joy Ryder,” tersely insistent. The music was never settled, never routine, actively present in its making.
The set was rewarding but brief; the other two groups, though excellent in their own right, each played as long as Mr. Shorter did. The trumpeter Dave Douglas and the saxophonist Joe Lovano led their quintet Sound Prints, named after Mr. Shorter’s tune “Footprints” and also including Lawrence Fields on piano, Joey Baron on drums and Linda Oh on bass. They played pieces of their own that extrapolated on Mr. Shorter’s harmonic and structural ideas (along with, notably, the trumpet-and-saxophone counterpoint of Ornette Coleman’s quartet). The music was, it seemed, more premeditated in which parameter was varied at any moment — meditation or swing, openness or density, lyricism or hustle — but all the splintered elements cohered.
The trio A.C.S. — Geri Allen on piano, Teri Lyne Carrington on drums and Esperanza Spalding on bass — played compositions by Mr. Shorter more straightforwardly, but with their own outlook. With piano rather than horns up front, Ms. Allen brought out both the angularity and the warmth of Mr. Shorter’s harmonies. Ms. Spalding dived into her instrument’s lowest register to lend resonances and shadows to those harmonies, while Ms. Carrington pushed the music with aggression and finesse.
It was this trio’s first concert as part of Mr. Shorter’s “80th Birthday Celebration” triple bill, which continues to Canada and regroups intermittently for United States shows this year. “His music is not easy to play,” Ms. Carrington said from the stage — an understatement.
