Credit: Wayne Shorter / Press

Jazz legend Wayne Shorter dead at 89

Thu 2 March 2023 18:52, UK

Jazz saxophone legend Wayne Shorter, who pioneered the fusion genre through his work with Weather Report, has passed away at the age of 89. Publicist Cem Kurosman, who works at the iconic Blue Note Records, the same label on which Shorter had recorded some of his most influential work, confirmed the saxophonist’s death.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Shorter made his first major impression on the world of jazz by joining Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers as a saxophonist, music director, and composer. After half a decade with Blakey, Shorter was recruited by Miles Davis to replace John Coltrane in his band. That group, which also contained Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums, became known as Davis’ Second Great Quintet.

“Wayne is a real composer. He writes scores, writes the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound,” Davis claimed about Shorter in his 1990 autobiography. “Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didn’t work, then he broke them, but with musical sense; he understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your own satisfaction and taste.”

“The master writer to me, in that group, was Wayne Shorter,” Hancock claimed in 1989. “He still is a master. Wayne was one of the few people who brought music to Miles that didn’t get changed.”

After the original iteration of the Second Great Quintet disbanded in 1968, Shorter continued to contribute to Davis’ albums, which included classics like 1969’s In a Silent Way and 1970’s Bitches Brew. Through Davis, Shorter was reunited with an old friend: Austrian pianist Joe Zawinul. After the duo played together on Bitches Brew, Shorter and Zawinul formed the initial lineup for Weather Report in 1970.

For the next 15 years, Shorter and Zawinul were the only two consistent members of Weather Report. Along the way, the pair recruited giants in the jazz world, including bassist Jaco Pastorius and percussionist Don Alias. The pair also recruited a number of musicians who had played in the rock genre, including former Sly and the Family Stone drummer Greg Errico, bassist Alphonso Johnson, Frank Zappa and Genesis drummer Chester Thompson, and session icon Omar Hakim.

After Weather Report broke up in 1986, Shorter devoted his life to his solo career, which frequently incorporated elements of his adopted religion, Nichiren Buddhism. “We have a phrase [in Buddhism]: hom nim yoh,” Shorter told NPR in 2013. “It means ‘From this moment forward is the first day of my life.’ So put 100 per cent into the moment that you’re in because the present moment is the only time when you can change the past and the future.”

Across more than 60 years in music, Shorter contributed to over 100 records, including Steely Dan’s Aja, Joni Mitchell’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence, and The Rolling Stones’ Bridges to Babylon. Shorter is survived by his daughter, Miyako.