Integral

Among the many benefits and blessings of being a jazz journalist, and having a weekly column in the one of the nation’s largest circulation dailies—the New York Daily News—is the honor of speaking with legends of the music, artists whose mark on the jazz idiom will remain long after their physical lives come to a close. Quite a few of these artists aren’t only geniuses of music. The philosophical and spiritual

insights of guitarist Pat Martino

, for instance, were featured on this very site. The profound point of view of tenor sax icon Sonny Rollins was featured in fall 2010. Now another master beckons: Wayne Shorter. In April 2012 I interviewed Mr. Shorter for a feature story

for publication in the Daily News. He was to about to perform at Jazz at Lincoln Center with his quartet, and soon thereafter at the United Nations for the first International Jazz Day, launched by his friend, musical mate, and fellow Buddhist Herbie Hancock

. As usual in instances like this, where a master musician’s life and career, past and current, has to be whittled down to less than 1,000 words for a print newspaper piece, there was great material that ended up on the cutting room floor. Since Shorter is perhaps the greatest composer in jazz, whose legendary tenures with Art Blakey, Miles Davis, and Weather Report make him beloved by music lovers the world over, it would be shameful not to pick up the pieces, so to speak, and put them together for readers of Integral Life. To describe the experience of speaking to Shorter, I’ve written elsewhere that he “can take you around the world in 80 minutes of conversation. High-wire discussions spiral through music, comic books, science, film and philosophy in a seeming blink. “Similar to his saxophone playing, Shorter is highly associative, with one phrase or idea leading to another, sometimes directly, at others in sideways patterns or leaps of discursive thought or sounds.” Among the many things I found fascinating about speaking with Mr. Shorter, a few stand out. He’s very digressive, but if you listen and read closely, and follow his examples, there are threads that tie his points together, however oblique they may seem upon first hearing or reading them. But his technique of conversational engagement is similar to trading fours or eights in jazz. The questions provoke improvisational answers, which lead to more questions, and so on, but his multi-level mastery allows him to fill gaps in your own understanding or point you in directions you likely haven’t considered. So if you’re basic, prosaic, he might riff abstractions that make your head spin. Yet if you come from a place of abstraction, intellectual, philosophical or spiritual, he can bring you down to earth by mentioning his times with the legends of jazz or your grandma’s folk wisdom. You’ll see that the meaning and substance of his mission often touch upon Integral themes. Check out some of his compositions and playing in the You Tube clips below. First, however, I invite you to feast on the mind and perspectives of Wayne Shorter, in his own words … The following clips give a taste of Shorter’s compositional and saxophone approach. But only a little taste, since his body of work is vast. He’s one of a handful of the most influential tenor saxophone stylists of the past 50 years. The most influential of the first several decades of jazz were Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young; Shorter is singular in a select group that includes John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and, later, Michael Brecker. Shorter’s oftentimes elliptical compositions are stamped with genius. He joined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in 1959, and by the time of the first clip, recorded in 1963, he was the ensemble’s Musical Director. His compositions added another flavor to one of the most famous hard bop ensembles, which served as a finishing school for some of the biggest artists in jazz past to present, from Horace Silver, Lou Donaldson, Benny Golson, and Lee Morgan to Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, and Ralph Peterson Jr. Here’s an original by Shorter, “Children of the Night,” and his featured solo. The other personnel are Art Blakey (drums), Cedar Walton (piano), Reggie Workman (bass), Curtis Fuller (trombone), and Freddie Hubbard (trumpet). By the time Wayne Shorter joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1964, Davis was a bona fide jazz star. Six years earlier he had recorded Kind of Blue, to this day the best-selling jazz album of all time. That ensemble (which, in addition to Davis, included John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Wynton Kelly, and Jimmy Cobb) comprised what became known as Davis’s First Great Quintet. Shorter was the final piece of the puzzle for his Second Great Quintet. Miles once said about Shorter that “When he came into the band it started to grow a lot more and a whole lot faster, because Wayne is a real composer. He writes scores, writes the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound. He 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.” Here’s Shorter’s “Footprints,” with one of the most renowned rhythm sections ever in jazz: pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams, who was just 19 years old at the time. “Jazz Fusion” incorporated elements of jazz, rock and funk into a brew that defined a musical movement from the late 1960s through the 1970s, and presaged what became called “world music.” Weather Report was one of the, if not the best jazz fusion group of the time. Here are two songs, both by the keyboardist and composer Joe Zawinul, from their popular Heavy Weather (1977) album. The performances take place in Offenbach, Germany in 1978. The first, “Birdland,” was a hit, and was soon thereafter given further extension by the vocal group Manhattan Transfer with lyrics by vocalese master Jon Hendricks. The second, “A Remark That You Made,” has a gentle, yin feel. Peter Erskine holds down the drum chair. The electric bassist is Jaco Pastorious, an iconic bass god. Shorter’s soprano and tenor sax sound was the melodic glue. In a good online piece on Shorter, “Eggs Scrambled Differently: A Look at Wayne Shorter,”

Brad Jones recalls an instance in which before a Weather Report concert a young fan asks Shorter: what time is it? Time is relative, Shorter explained, and changes depending on where you are in the galaxy, and is eventually unknowable. Zawinul tells the young man: “You should know better than to ask Wayne a question like that. The time is 7:08.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Fast forward to 2010 in Vienne, France with Shorter’s current quartet, comprised of Shorter and pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade. For my description of his current ensemble and words from Wayne about each band member, see the hyperlink to my New York Daily News feature at the beginning above. Oops, sorry Wayne: no beginnings! This Shorter original is aptly titled: “Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean.” It’s a song from his 2005 recording, “Beyond the Sound Barrier.” Here’s what Shorter once said about this original composition: “The golden mean is neither captive to the right, left, east, west, north, south or the middle. It’s attached to no extreme. That’s a place to try to get to in terms of freedom of thought and choice … And I think it has nothing to do with an almighty power or nothing like that, but a place that we have inside us that’s just asleep a little bit. And I’m thinking of it like a spaceship called the Golden Mean. I picture a lot of kids on there, flying around, having a good time. And they’re going somewhere along the Golden Mean.” Members of the jazz community will say of Shorter that “He’s out there, man.” “He’s heavy, he’s deep” are other favorite sayings. Now Integral Life readers can add the expression “nondual

” to the mix of descriptions of jazz master Wayne Shorter, as we strive to fly along the Golden Mean.