Soft killer

Wayne Shorter explains why he confounds his critics

by Jon Garelick

In the early '60s, Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) chastised Shorter for diluting his vision in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. The same was true when Shorter voyaged out with Miles Davis to invent what later became "jazz-rock fusion" and then co-founded the equally controversial (if phenomenally successful) Weather Report. Shorter's four post-Weather Report solo albums have been no less controversial, but even so it was surprising to see the vitriol evoked by his latest, High Life (Verve), on the front page of the Sunday October 15 New York Times Arts & Leisure section. Under the headline "A Jazz Generation and the Miles Davis Curse," Times critic Peter Watrous singled out Shorter as emblematic of the wayward path of fusion. Calling Shorter "arguably the most influential living jazz composer," the usually decorous Watrous went on to accuse him of spending the last 25 years "flashing bits of his grand talent, then finding the nearest drain down which to dump the rest." High Life, Watrous concluded "turns out to be a pastel failure and a waste of his enormous talent; it is as if Picasso had given up painting to design greeting cards."

True, High Life is all pretty harmonies, lush synths, pop-like melodies, familiar pop backbeats. Why, then, is it so damned listenable? Shorter starts with the familiar, all right. But High Life continually turns left when you expect it to go right. The harmonies are pretty, but they shift unpredictably. Pop melodies (especially those with a Brazilian tinge) catch your ear and then mutate before you can shout, "Hook!" Secondary themes enter with a melancholy edge (especially on the title cut) and leave a piece transformed. And always there is Shorter's remarkable soprano sax, one of the most recognizable voices in jazz, pure, keening, spinning dramatically structured solos, using space as often as volume and velocity to create drama. High Life is a style, one that applies jazz orchestral ideas to pop themes, and it's not for everyone. But it's considerably more complicated than a greeting card, and it's far less predictable than the bulk of work coming from the bright-eyed 20-year-old beboppers coming down the pike playing their version of "52nd Street Theme." It will be interesting to see how the album plays live, when Shorter comes to the Berklee Performance Center next Saturday with his seven-piece band. The line-up includes Rachel Z of Steps Ahead on keyboards (she's known in these parts as Rachel Nicholazzo, a former New England Conservatory student), guitarist David Gilmore, former Miles Davis sidemen Adam Holzman (keyboards) and Rich Patterson (bass), and former Living Colour drummer Will Calhoun. Shorter's last local appearance, at the Charles Hotel Ballroom a couple of seasons ago with a line-up that included Larry Coryell, was riveting.

And where is Shorter himself after taking a hefty broadside from the nation's journal of record? How does he feel about his drift from the mainstream jazz legacy? "The only legacy that needs to be passed on is the adventure of discovery and the thrill of romance," he says on the phone from his LA home. "You know what I mean? Not to keep passing on a prescription. A prescription to moidah," he adds with a short laugh. His conversation is full of allusions to movies, "traditional" jazz, Miles Davis, wry jokes. "You know the actor John Garfield?" he asks, referring to the '40s star. "In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, `Yes, where are you going?' And he says, `I want a ticket to nowhere.' I thought: that's it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere."

For Shorter, the bebop legacy that's become fashionable again in the past 10 years can be its own kind of trap, another formula. And as for jazz purism, he compares it to dismemberment. "You can cut the arms and legs off and talk about the torso and make everybody believe that's the whole body."

And yet, he sees no special contradiction between the work he does on his own projects (High Life is his first solo album in seven years) and the Miles Davis Tribute band, where he and fellow Davis alumni plus trumpeter re-create the mid-'60s Davis book, much of which was written by Shorter.

"I think of it as when you do different kinds of movies or different kinds of books. You have exits and entrances to areas that should remain a free passage. Without that free passage, you're gonna go along with prescription music. Something that's prescribed to you - just get it and go to the drugstore and get it filled. When we did that tribute thing, that was like a moment where we could celebrate knowing Miles. But when we celebrate, if you play in that style, you do it like you're a character actor. You're gonna play Sampson one day, and then you're gonna play Hercules the next. Or you can play God one day and the Devil the next. All these different styles can be allies rather than corralled and separate."

Shorter also refers to the dangers of following a rich but narrow legacy. "To play or write or act or do anything culturally, artistically, that alludes to a legacy, that alludes to something in its purity or tradition, you have a duty to remain in that place so that you can instruct young people who are coming up behind you. It's a duty to them. But to present yourself only in that known style, that's dangerous, because the people who are coming up behind you have to know what individualism is about and to branch off and not be corralled into an army that doesn't even follow the leader; it follows the head in front of them, blindly. If there's such a thing called duty-free music, I'm for it."

Shorter found his own way at a time when the twin giants of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins loomed over jazz, and especially over any tenor players around them. As a writer and player making his own albums at the same time he was working with Blakey, Shorter found a distinctive writing style as well as a playing style on tenor that distinguished him from his influences and eventually put him on a par with them. Just as his later soprano tone is pure, vibratoless, and ethereal, his tenor playing is nubby, full of knotted motifs, unpredictable phrasing, open space, and natural breathing room. His compositions break away from song form, either in multipart dramas like 1965's "The All Seeing Eye" or in their development of short motifs over a shifting beat with wide-open harmonies, as on 1969's "Super Nova," where Shorter, bassist Miroslav Vitous, and guitarists John McLaughlin and Sonny Sharrock mimic one another's statement of the theme - twisting it, setting it on fire. Shorter's Davis book was the text for a whole generation of young jazz players: pieces like "E.S.P.," "Orbits," and the beautiful ballad "Footprints." His tenor playing is what recommends the 1965 Live at the Plugged Nickel session. "On solo after solo he seems to be re-appraising the whole current saxophone vocabulary," write Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, and Brian Priestly in Jazz: The Essential Companion (Prentice Hall).

For Shorter, Davis's influence is inestimable, not in any particular advice, but in his ability to step aside. "Miles influenced me as a writer by leaving the doors open - he didn't even say anything. He said [and Shorter goes into the famous Davis whisper], `What you got?' He didn't say do this and do that. And I would show him what I got and he said, `We're going to record this thing.' " Shorter laughs. "He never hesitated. When he saw it, he would look at it, play it a little on the piano, and say, `You ready to record now?' Like that. He heard something immediately. The influence Miles had was to leave the damn door open. In fact, he took it off the hinges. We had free trade going on in that band."

As for finding his own voice as a player, Shorter pre-empts my suggestion of the shadows of Coltrane and Rollins. "First of all you say, `Is this too much like Charlie Parker?' Then you've got all of them covered."

Plus, Shorter set himself specific challenges. "I said to myself, `I'm gonna try to play like a violin.' Or play like a piano, not a saxophone. Then Miles said one time, `Try to play like you don't know how to play at all.' Sometimes when Miles was doing things we would say, `Miles is messing up.' He wasn't messing up. He was trying to destroy something, a learned thing or something that he had done before or repeated. It was like he was stumbling through something. And then the stumbling became beautiful, but he wasn't actually stumbling. He was and he wasn't. It was seamless. It was a seamless process going on. What he was doing was a dramatization of struggle in life: what the hell music might be for. To another degree, it's figuring out what life is for. We have so many ways to express what life is for that we have to be careful of getting hung up in the formality of something, a mold or a way of doing something, a way of doing something which is not the way of life."

Shorter pauses, gives it some thought and adds, "It's like Sunset Boulevard. Norma Desmond sitting there watching old films over and over again. And still the only real thing she did was kill somebody."