Wayne Shorter, 12-time Grammy winner, saxophonist and composer who spent more than half a century crafting the unique sound of modern jazz, died on Monday, March 2, in Los Angeles. Shorter was 89 years old.
Shorter is considered one of the most influential saxophonists ever. From hard bop in the late 1950s, through the genre-defying jazz of the ’60s when he played in a variety of smaller groups, all the way to the birth of jazz-rock fusion in the ’70s, Shorter’s soprano and tenor saxophones kept pushing for innovation.
Wayne Shorter, born August 25, 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, studied music at New York University, and in the mid-’50s he joined a band that put him front and center in the jazz world as both a composer and a saxophonist: Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.
In the mid-’60s, Shorter cemented his name by joining the Miles Davis Quintet. Playing alongside Miles in that lineup were bassist Ron Carter, drummer Tony Williams and pianist Herbie Hancock.
During his time with Davis, Wayne Shorter also recorded a string of highly acclaimed solo albums. His 1964–1970 run with Blue Note Records dropped a ton of records on the scene that are now considered classics, among them Juju (recorded with members of John Coltrane’s quartet), Speak No Evil (recorded with two members of Miles Davis’s band) and The Soothsayer (recorded with Freddie Hubbard). Many of these albums feature Shorter compositions that are now considered jazz standards.
After the second Miles quintet fell apart and Miles decided to experiment with electronics, Shorter stuck with Miles for a while. With keyboardist Joe Zawinul, who had also played with Davis, he co-founded Weather Report. They became one of the best-known jazz-rock fusion bands of the ’70s. The 1979 album “8:30” brought Shorter the first of his twelve Grammys. In 2015 he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the Recording Academy.
The last chapter of Wayne Shorter’s life was marked by almost 50 years of devotion to Buddhism – more precisely, the Japanese form of the religion known as Nichiren.
That shaped his music-making too. At the start of the new millennium, Shorter brought these ideas into his own band, the Wayne Shorter Quartet, where he was joined by much younger jazz up-and-comers. After returning to the Blue Note Records fold, the group recorded a series of albums.
The last album, “Emotion”, which Shorter recorded and released in 2018, continues the search for balance between spirituality and music.
