Saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s quartet delivered only a fitfully satisfying set Sunday night at Berklee Performance Center. Shorter himself turned in a desultory performance, and his all-star unit, with pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade (his first acoustic quartet in many years), never seemed to jell as a band.
Playing tenor and soprano, Shorter confined himself to cueing tunes or sections of tunes through most of the first half of the continuous 75-minute set. The concert opened with deliberately fragmented exchanges of phrases among the rhythm section into which Shorter eventually inserted himself. The theme he played was melancholy, elliptical, suspending itself in the characteristic manner of his writing; spacious and pensive, it gave the group room to ebb and flow. But Shorter himself never stepped forward himself to solo.
And indeed the emphasis was on the ensemble most of the night. Shorter often sounded lackluster, and his solos, still with their oblique melodic tangents and extended harmonies, often lacked energy. He did catch fire as the concert progressed, and eventually he did take a couple of more-extended solos. On one number (no titles were announced), a piping staccato soprano-sax duet with Pérez opened into a more flowing solo under which the group established a rhythmic push-pull effect. And on Shorter’s old Miles Davis–quintet classic "Footprints," his tenor gathered some steam as it dipped and glided at odd angles to the rest of the playing
Much of the time Pérez, Patitucci, and Blade sounded like three brilliant individuals looking for a group focus. Pérez shouldered most of the burden, fleshing out Shorter’s cryptic writing and soloing, playing harmonically daring obbligatos behind the saxophonist, interjecting dark, rich chords, and at times even seeming to cue entrances. Blade was a major factor in the music’s shape. He danced around the beat imaginatively, implying the tempo sometimes, stating it at others. His sense of dynamics was especially dramatic — he can explode with volleys of tom-tom riffs or subside into whisper-soft cymbal washes. Patitucci varied his accompaniment with cello-like arco and virtuosic pizzicato lines that interlaced with Shorter in a nice duet about three-quarters of the way through the set. But the pieces didn’t always fit together, and the music often wandered to little effect.
When these four players all came together — and there were moments when they did — you got a frustratingly brief glimpse of what they can do. There were hints of a unique take on the elastic rhythms, elusive melodies, and ensemble cohesiveness that have marked Shorter’s career. But the new Wayne Shorter quartet still seems like a work in progress.
