Wayne Shorter: Celebration Volume 1 (Blue Note)
Almost a quarter of a century ago – it seems like only yesterday – I enjoyed a conversation with Joe Zawinul after a Syndicate gig of his at the Bergen Jazz Festival. We got onto the subject of contemporary saxophonists. It wasn’t long before Joe advised me “ You know, Mike, Wayne always spoiled me for all the others!”
If you’re new to Shorter and wonder what all the fuss may be about, check out our editor’s excellent piece, Wayne Shorter: one of the last modernists. And relish the two-CD compilations The Classic Blue Note Records: Wayne Shorter and the subsequent and more wide-ranging Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter (on Sony Columbia and released in tandem with Michelle Mercer’s biography from 2004).
Or you could just jump in at the deep end and immerse yourself in the previously unreleased tapes which constitute the remarkable, two-CD Celebration. Beautifully recorded, this posthumous release documents a 90-minute concert at the 2014 Stockholm Jazz Festival by Shorter’s last great quartet with Danilo Perez (p), John Patitucci (b) and Brian Blade (d). It offers insight after insight into Shorter’s world: a world as oblique as it can be immediate and sensuous; as imagistic as it is poetic, as scrupulously sculpted and meditative as it may be turbo-charged and ecstatic.
From Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers to Miles Davis, Weather Report and beyond ,Wayne Shorter (1933-2023) worked with all kinds of rhythmic masters, with his famed Blue Note sessions of the 1960s featuring the likes of Elvin Jones, Joe Chambers and Tony Williams. What is especially fascinating about the finely attuned collective improvisation evident here is how comprehensively it evinces Shorter’s latter-day quest for a new take on matters of swing or groove, moving away from any overtly projected triplet feel to an almost Monk-like quality of radically displaced, seemingly abstracted yet ultimately interwoven and propulsive accents.
The result is a shape-shifting magic carpet – now arhythmic, now swung hard, high and wide – upon which all might fly. Ranging from the most delicate moments of rubato impressionism to passages of blazing yet controlled power (sample Lotus and She Moved Through The Fair) the music is nothing short of mesmeric. Shorter (ts, ss) is in the finest fettle, attentive to every detail of tone, rhythmic accent and – of course! – space. Hear the intimate and inimitable opening of the tenor-led Zero Gravity To The 15th Dimension or the extraordinary range of the tenor improvisations on the concluding, tempo-shifting and ultra-potent Fair, where all participants are in coruscating form.
In her informative liner note, Shorter’s widow Caroline suggests that more music of this quality is in the pipeline. Bravo!
Jan Lundgren & Yamandu Costa: Inner Spirits (ACT 9990-2)
In his review of this summer’s Ystad Sweden Jazz Festival, Pascal Dorban suggested that “[pianist and festival director] Jan Lundgren’s brand new duo with Brazilian seven-string guitar virtuoso Yamandu Costa proved to be one of the essential gigs of the festival”. After instancing a selection of the material in the concert – all featured here, including tributes to Richard Galliano (acn) and Paolo Fresu (t, flh), Lundgren’s colleagues in the old Mare Nostrum trio – Pascal ventured that “it seemed all the songs they played had been carved for a relaxed Scandinavian summer night where one would be sitting on the dock of Ystad’s bay, watching the ferry sail away…”
It’s a lovely image which captures perfectly the overall elegance and easy-on-the-ear reverie of this impeccably played music. At the same time, it serves to underline my sole reservation about a luminously wrought recording which I have appreciated and enjoyed more and more each time I have played it. For me at least, a title such as Inner Spirits stirs expectations of a journey somewhere beyond the sophisticated richness of the interwoven melodic, harmonic and rhythmic delights to be savoured here. I think back, for example, to a key on-the-edge left-field recording of Brazilian music like ECM’s Dança Das Cabeças from 1976 by Egberto Gismonti and Nana Vasconcelos.
There is both beauty and bite in Inner Spirits, rhythmic drive (epitomised by Lundgren’s Hannah) and affecting mood (hear Luis Bonfa’s Uma Prece and Manhã De Carnaval or Swedish troubadour Evert Taube’s Nocturne). But, unfortunately, overall I missed that crucial undertone of “something else” I had hoped I might experience.
Dal Sasso Big Band: Chick Corea’s “Three Quartets” Revisited (jazz&people JPCD824003)
Recorded in 1981 for Stretch Records, pianist Chick Corea’s Three Quartets – with Michael Brecker (ts), Eddie Gomez (b) and Steve Gadd (d) – was one of the outstanding releases of the decade. Over 40 years on, it remains a pearl of swinging, driving and most thoughtful modern jazz. Beautifully constructed and played, its atmospheric and full-on episodes both demand – and reward equally –the fullest attention (sample Quartet No. 2, with its two-part dedications to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane).
The question arises, then: why would you wish to “revisit” such a long-heralded masterpiece – inspired in good part as it was by the string quartet of classical music history – and clothe its lean and compelling muscularity in a range of big band voicings, no matter how splendid those voicings might prove to be? Sleeve-note contributor Vincent Bessieres offers the following rationale: “The timelessness of jazz is kept alive by the fire that musicians transmit from generation to generation […] For this very reason, this album can be considered, literally, as a monument.”
Dedicated to Brecker (1949-2007) and Corea (1941-2021) the vivid music is crisply arranged by band leader and flautist Christophe Dal Sasso. It certainly has plenty of fire to it, drawing upon top saxophonists Rick Margitza, Stéphane Guillaume (also soprano and flute) and David El-Malek. Pierre de Bethmann heads a fine rhythm section with Manuel Marches (b) and Karl Jannuska (d) while Thomas Savy (cl, bcl), Nicolas Folmer (t, flh), Christian Martinez (t), Denis Leloup and Jerry Edwards (tb) help deliver an arresting range of dynamically adroit voicings as stinging and punchy as they can be poised and floating.
Like the 1992 CD release of the original Three Quartets, we are also treated to versions of Corea’s Folk Song and Slippery When Wet before a fine – and recommended – recital concludes with a (largely) relaxed and swinging take on an early Corea classic, the title piece from his initial recording Tones For Joan’s Bones.
