Wayne Shorter

Musician

• Born: August 25, 1933
• Birthplace: Newark, New Jersey
• Died: March 2, 2023
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Jazz musician and composer

A significant jazz saxophone player and composer, Shorter performed with and contributed works for many notable groups, including Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis’s quintet during the 1960s, and the jazz-rock fusion group Weather Report during the 1970s. He also headlined several of his own groups. Many of his compositions have become jazz standards.

Areas of achievement: Music: composition; Music: jazz

Early Life

Wayne Shorter was the second son born to Joseph Shorter, a welder at a Singer sewing-machine factory, and Louise Shorter, who worked at a furrier in Newark, New Jersey. Although the family was not well off, Louise sought to foster creativity in Shorter and his brother Alan by providing watercolors and clay for them to play with as children. The boys acted out film scenes, and Shorter was an avid reader of comic books. His artistic talents resulted in acceptance into Newark’s Arts High School. Shorter did not begin to consider studying music until he heard on the radio a new style of jazz called bebop. When he reached the age of fifteen, his mother bought him a clarinet and arranged for him to take lessons. The next year, he started a double major in music and art and joined a local bebop band after switching to the tenor saxophone.

Shorter went on to New York University (NYU), majoring in music education, but spent his time outside school listening to jazz at clubs in New York City and performing at clubs in Newark. He graduated from NYU in 1956 and was drafted into the Army. He served for two years at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and performed in the Army band.

Shorter returned to performing when he left the service. His first big break came in 1959, when he was asked to join Maynard Ferguson’s big band. He only stayed with the group for four weeks; while on tour at the Toronto Jazz Festival, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers asked Shorter to join the smaller group, which was a much better fit for his musical talents.

Life’s Work

Joining the Jazz Messengers, a group that performed in a hard-bop style, began a stretch of twenty-five years in which Shorter was a major contributor to groups on the forefront of innovation in jazz music. In addition to his musicianship, his formal musical training and creative thinking made him an important composer of jazz charts. He was a member of the Jazz Messengers until 1964, when he joined Miles Davis’s second classic quintet, which also included the drummer Tony Williams, Ron Carter on bass, and Herbie Hancock on piano. At first, the group mostly performed older standards popularized by Davis during the 1950s. Shorter’s compositional talents soon had an impact, however, and many of the group’s albums from the late 1960s contain classic Shorter works such as “Footprints,” “Orbits,” “Sanctuary,” and “Nefertiti.” When Davis began experimenting with electronic music in 1969, most of the band members left, but Shorter stayed on for another year. He switched to the soprano saxophone, which could be heard better over electronic instruments.

In 1970, after leaving Davis, Shorter teamed with pianist Joe Zawinul and bassist Miroslav Vitous to form the jazz-rock fusion group Weather Report. The group’s popularity quickly grew. After their most successful album, Heavy Weather, was released in 1976, they performed in stadiums and at large music festivals. While Shorter continued to be an important part of the group until it disbanded in 1985, his playing talents were often overshadowed by the dense, amplified sound produced by other members of the group.

After leaving Weather Report, Shorter released the album Atlantis (1985), on which he played both tenor and soprano saxophones. Unlike much of his previous work, the emphasis was on composition rather than improvisation. It was followed by Phantom Navigator (1987) and Joy Ryder (1988). Shorter then took another hiatus from recording solo albums, but he remained active on other fronts. He contributed to record by various other artists as well as the soundtrack of James Foley's 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross. (In an earlier foray into film, he had appeared in Bertrand Tavernier's 1986 movie 'Round Midnight, which starred the acclaimed saxophonist Dexter Gordon.) In 1992, a year after Miles Davis's death, a group of musicians who had reached their artistic maturity under Davis's leadership—Shorter, Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and the trumpeter Wallace Roney—formed the Miles Davis Tribute Band, which toured the United States, Europe, and Asia. The quintet won a Grammy Award for A Tribute to Miles, their 1994 collection of reworkings of Davis's music.

Shorter's next solo album was High Life (1995). It went on to win a Grammy Award for best contemporary jazz album. In 1997 Shorter and Herbie Hancock released the collaborative album 1+1. After several more years away from recording, Shorter then came out with the first live album officially under his own name, Footprints Live! (2002). Other albums from this period included Alegría (2003) and Beyond the Sound Barrier (2005), both of which won Grammy Awards. Another extended period with no releases followed, although Shorter continued to tour. His next album finally came in 2013, with the live cut Without a Net.

Shorter earned many awards and other recognitions throughout his career. He received an honorary doctorate from NYU in 2010, a lifetime achievement award from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in 2013, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. In 2016 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2017 he won the Polar Music Prize. He was presented with a Kennedy Center Honor Award in 2018. That year he also released the album Emanon, which was complemented by a science-fiction graphic novel developed with author Monica Sly and illustrator Randy DuBurke that featured a Shorter-like character as the hero. However, the acclaimed musician's health also began to decline in his mid-eighties, interrupting his touring efforts. Still, Shorter continued to write music, including work on an opera.

Shorter’s personal life was marked by difficulties and tragedies. He married his first wife, Irene Nakagami, in 1961, and their daughter, Miyako, was born soon after. The couple separated in 1966, the same year Shorter’s father was killed in an automobile accident. He married his second wife, Ana Maria Patricio, in 1969, and their daughter, Iska, was born the same year. Three months later, an adverse reaction to a vaccination caused the child to stop breathing. She survived but suffered brain damage and later died at the age of fourteen. In 1996, Ana Maria died in the crash of TransWorld Airlines Flight 800. Shorter’s Buddhist beliefs helped him cope with the tragedies. He married his third wife, Carolina Dos Santos, in 1999.

Significance

Shorter is considered a major figure in music history and one of the greatest jazz composers and improvisers of all time. However, as many of his early albums as a headliner were uneven or esoteric and did not connect with a broad audience, he never gained the widespread popularity of some of his peers. His return to performing with acoustic instruments at the beginning of the twenty-first century garnered him more praise from critics than he had received in decades. Many of his compositions have become jazz standards, performed by groups around the world. His substantial body of recordings made him one of the most important saxophone players of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Bibliography

Ginell, Richard S. "Wayne Shorter." AllMusic, www.allmusic.com/artist/wayne-shorter-mn0000250435/biography. Accessed 23 July 2021.

Mercer, Michelle. Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Ratliff, Ben. “Behold, the Sea! Wayne Shorter.” The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music. New York: Times, 2008.

"Wayne Shorter On Jazz: 'How Do You Rehearse the Unknown?'" NPR Music. NPR, 2 Feb. 2013. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.

Zwerin, Michael. “Wayne Shorter: Beyond a Smile on a Face.” The Parisian Jazz Chronicles: An Improvisational Memoir. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Print.