This week on Jazz Spectrum – August 26, 2023

By Fritz Byers

Two days ago, I posted a short piece about Wayne Shorter.  You’ll find it just below in the blog thread.  

Each set of this week’s show, except the two dedicated to the Song of the Week (“Good Morning Heartache”), begins with Wayne and a world-class band performing one of his compositions.  Each but the last of these tracks is taken from Wayne’s matchless series of Blue Note recordings in the 1960s, which, to borrow Nate Chinen’s apt phrase, constitutes one of the great winning streaks in jazz.  And in each of these sets, Wayne’s work is followed by another of his compositions, performed by others. 

When Wayne passed in March of this year, with the adept help of Jazz Spectrum contributor Kim Kleinman we spent two weeks surveying Wayne’s musical accomplishments – concentrating the first week on Wayne’s own recordings, and devoting the second week to what you might call covers, although that common terms misses the ingenuity of the tribute versions.  We think this is a nice way to enter Wayne’s world.  (You can find the set lists for those two shows, March 11 and 18, 2023 on the site at the link under the current playlist.)

I’ve avoided duplicating any of the tracks you heard in March.  That’s surprisingly easy, which is a statement about, among other things, Wayne’s composing brilliance.  The opening track of this week’s show, “Lost” from The Soothsayer, is far from a greatest, or even familiar hit, but it is to my ears a marvelous example of Wayne’s work – tuneful, engaging, and a lush setting for improvisation.  The opening measures are an intricate theme statement, a mystifyingly harmonized line that weaves Wayne’s tenor with James Spaulding’s alto and Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet, against McCoy Tyner’s strong chordal centering.  And then you’ll hear a typically immaculate solo from Wayne.  

I can’t say that I’d ever really studied this tune until this week, but now I can’t get enough of it.  (By the way, on Jazz Spectrum Overnight this week, you’ll hear the tune done to great effect by the piano trio led by Art Hirahara, a track taken from a recent compilation on the reliable Posi-Tone label, titled Shorter Moments – Citizen Wayne; it comprises eleven of Wayne’s tunes, presented by an array of current stars, including a growing favorite, the tenor saxophonist Diego Rivera, who appears several times here as part of a group called Blue Moods.)

The set list for this week’s Jazz Spectrum, which you can find on this site, tells you what else you can expect this week.  Each of Wayne’s performances, and each of the covers, warrants at least a few sentences.  But you’ll find your own joys.  Before I go, let me urge you not to miss “Capricorn” at the start of the fourth set – this piece, from Wayne’s 1969 release Super Nova, is an early reflection of the ways Wayne absorbed Miles Davis’s venture into rock and electronic music, which resulted in Miles’s epochal release, In a Silent Way.  Of course, Wayne assimilated all that and then produced something unmistakably his own.  The implications of what you’ll hear in “Capricorn” would lead, in short order, to Wayne’s formation of the pathbreaking band Weather Report.

And if you’re still up, you’ll hear as the show’s closer a live 2016 recording of Wayne and the Footprints trio performing one of his late splendors, “The Three Marias.”