Wayne Shorter Gets the Lincoln Center Treatment

courtesy of Jazz at Lincoln Center

At the end of this past January, Blue Engine Records released a two-CD album entitled The Music of Wayne Shorter. The ten tracks (five on each CD) document three nights of performances (May 14–16) by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO), led by Winton Marsalis, at the Frederick P. Rose Hall. All of these selections originated in much more intimate combo settings, covering Shorter’s early work as a leader on Blue Note recordings and then moving into his time with Weather Report. Nine different members of JLCO, including Marsalis himself, shared the task of arranging Shorter’s compositions for large ensemble. (Only reed player Sherman Irby was responsible for two arrangements of “Hammer Head” and “Contemplation;” and he only gave himself a solo in “Hammer Head.”)

I must confess that I greeted this release with a certain degree of skepticism. For most of my music-listening life, I have thought of Shorter as the sort of musician that could fit himself into a wide variety of different combo situations. Then Emanon was released by Blue Note Records in the fall of 2018; and there was Shorter mixing his own quartet up with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble of 34 classical musicians that has performed without a conductor ever since it was formed in 1972. However, because that album was created as a companion piece for a graphic novel inspired by Shorter’s music, I tended to treat his venture into a seriously large ensemble as an outlier.

That said, it is important to note that Shorter not only performs with JLCO on this album but also takes his own highly personal solos on all ten of the tracks. Marsalis clearly appreciated that the best way to present Shorter’s music was to let Shorter play it his way. This involved thoroughly engaging personal takes on both tenor and soprano saxophone. Any of the solos by other JLCO players fit right in with the “rhetorical framework” established by both the charts and Shorter’s personal approaches to improvisation. In other words, any fears I had that the “Lincoln Center aesthetic” might apply too much polish in too many of the wrong places, was dispersed during the first track and remained dispersed for the entire album.

The overall result is a survey of music from the past in a rhetoric that secures it very much in the immediate present. To provide any further details would go against the grain of the punch line to Christian McBride’s notes for the album:

To describe each song’s orchestral highlights would be, I feel, antithetical to Wayne’s modus operandi of daring to experience the unknown. I encourage you to listen yourself and, of course, to use a little imagination.