Just duet

Shorter and Hancock alone together

by Ed Hazell

Three decades ago (1964-1970, to be precise), saxophonist Wayne Shorter and pianist Herbie Hancock made jazz history in the innovative Miles Davis quintet. The two went on to rack up public and critical acclaim as pioneering jazz-rock fusionists -- Shorter with Weather Report, Hancock with Mwandishi and the Headhunters. And both have continued to be provocative forces in the realm of acoustic jazz. But in all those years they never found time to work one on one. So this reunion of two of the most widely followed musicians in modern jazz for their first-ever duet recording -- 1+1 (Verve) -- isn't just noteworthy, it's historic.

Shorter and Hancock could have succumbed to nostalgia, revisiting old material the way they did in the V.S.O.P. quintet of the mid '70s, or on 1994's Grammy-winning A Tribute to Miles (the last time they recorded together). Instead, they did exactly as they pleased. 1+1 (Verve) is a personal, deeply moving album that doesn't look back.

During their years with Davis, Hancock and Shorter developed an uncanny, even unlikely, rapport. Hancock's elastic time, dancing lines, and buoyant chords provided both sympathetic response and occasional foil for Shorter's restlessly probing solos, his use of space, and his increasingly melancholic, keening tone. Although their most innovative years may be behind them, Shorter and Hancock have the benefit of decades spent refining their art. On 1+1, they draw on that history, but the music itself lives intensely in the moment of creation.

The result retains a clarity and a distilled, often harsh, beauty that only the most experienced improvisers ever master. Time and again Shorter, who never wastes a note anyway, draws you in with the emotional weight of his soprano-sax tone (the only horn he plays on the album). It's a fat, dark-hued, generally vibratoless sound that pierces the heart.

On "Sonrisa," he enters with the tenderest of notes, which seem little more than fragile shells of sound wrapped around his breath. On "Memories of Enchantment" he makes his notes blunt and hard and jumbles them in clipped, jagged phrases. These fragmented passages in Shorter's solos are uniquely unsettling; his abruptly phrased ruminations are much more ambiguous than Coltrane's obsessive reworkings of two- and three-note motifs, which were emblematic of a spiritual quest. It's as if Shorter were posing questions for which he has no answers. Against these anguished searchings are set the almost songlike simplicity of his solo on "Visitor from Somewhere" -- one of three completely improvised duets that are the album's high points -- and the purposefulness of "Aung San Suu Kyi," where one can sense Shorter thinking his way through his solo, judging where each note should go, then pausing to look ahead to his next move.

Hancock plays an essential though somewhat subordinate role as the accompaniment and foundation for this spontaneous musical architecture. But his ability to flesh out Shorter's ideas and anticipate where his partner is headed lifts the album to the highest level of improvising empathy and interplay. Because they listen so intently to each other, they find more than enough space for individual expression. When Shorter holds a note, makes it swell and grow raspy, Hancock is free to shade it with lighter or darker chords, add a gospel tinge, or complicate it with harmonically rich chords. Shorter's deliberate pacing, and the frequent spaces between his phrases, lets Hancock accelerate or retard his own lines; he gives the music a gentle back-and-forth sway without ever losing its pulse. Time and again the two improvise in parallel, curl away from each other, converge again. On the improvised "Visitor from Nowhere," Hancock displays an uncanny ability to pick up a strand of Shorter's solo and carry it forward.

Most of the tunes on 1+1 are taken at a leisurely pace, and though that affords lots of time to act and interact, the mood is very much the same over the course of the album. The tempo rarely quickens, and the basic outline of the tunes doesn't often vary (the improvised tunes and "Diana" provide some variety). Overall, however, this is the best work from either Hancock or Shorter in years. Expectations always run high for a reunion of this sort, but here these two masters easily live up to their individual and collective legends.