Of course, Shorter’s mould-breaking early sixties albums – Speak No Evil, Juju, Adam’s Apple and Nightdreamer – were always going to be a tough act to follow, but nothing he has produced since then, including this new beginning on the Verve label, even remotely approaches the comprehensive genius of those recordings. Those familiar with Shorter’s mid-eighties Columbia trilogy will find few surprises in High Life, beyond, perhaps, bafflement at the mediocrity of it all, this thrown into sharp relief by Shorter’s unearthly brilliance on the recently issued Complete Plugged Nickel set.
The problem, it needs to be said, is not that this is fusion, but that is signally lacks any sign of life, either on the writing or soloing front. Where the Blue Notes harnessed a mastery of all musical elements to a highly original concept, this, like the Columbias, is largely one-dimensional. Shorter’s very personal sense of harmony was always one of his strengths, but where in the Blue Notes it was brought alive by a comparable command of rhythm and texture, here it’s about all there is. Too often, it seems as if Shorter set up a mid-tempo snare backbeat on his sequencer and then wrote various exercises in harmonic progression. The harmony is distributed in a contrapuntal way among the instruments, but you’ll look hard for the sort of dynamic variety which distinguished, say, Speak No Evil. The same goes for texture and tone: little variation from track to track and hardly any within individual tracks.
So, more mystery from the master of the art, though not of the kind we have come to expect. Maybe it’s all an elaborate joke. On the plus side, Shorter has some good solos on soprano (not his most expressive instrument), there is some space and subtlety on Virgo Rising and the drummer, somehow, stays awake throughout.
Discography
Children Of The Night; At The Fair; Maya; On The Milky Way Express; Pandora Awakened; Virgo Rising; High Life; Midnight In Carlotta’s Hair; Black Swan (In Memory Of Susan Portlynn Romeo) (54.37)
Collective personnel: Shorter (ss, as, ts, bar); Rachel Z (p, syn, sequencing); David Gilmore (elg); Marcus Miller (elb, bcl, prog); Lenny Castro, Airto Moreira, Munyungo Jackson, Kevin Ricard (pc); Will Calhoun, Terri Lyne Carrington (d). Plus orchestral horns, strings and woodwinds. North Hollywood c. 1995.
(Verve 529 224-2)
