Wayne Shorter

Wayne Shorter

WAYNE'S REIGN

With Footprints: Live! the Master Saxophonist Returns to his Roots
Back in the 1980s, Jack DeJohnette entitled a song, "Where or Wayne" that may very well have been referring to his one time band-mate, saxophonist Wayne Shorter. With acoustic dates few and far between, Shorter, a persuasive player and composer, has buried his horn deep in fusion territory for decades following his stints with Art Blakey and Miles Davis in the '60s. As admirable as his playing with Weather Report and later his own ensembles was, there seemed to be a reluctance on Shorter's part to step forward and be heard clearly above the voltage. Ironically, the greater his influence grew among jazz's younger players, the further Shorter retreated into the mix. On the unplugged Footprints: Live! the only thing electric is the playing from Shorter and his crack ensemble. Fronting an acoustic quartet (pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade) and playing tenor saxophone in addition to his customary soprano, Shorter sounds ready to astonish yet another new generation of players and listeners. Ted Panken spoke to the rejuvenated icon about his return.

Barnes & Noble.com: Can you talk about what you're trying to do with this particular band, this group of really strong musical personalities from another generation?

Wayne Shorter: Actually, what we're doing is playing music with the attitude that there is no such thing as beginning or end. For instance, when I go to the bookstore, one kind of book I hate to buy is a short story. In reality, there is no such thing as a short story, with a beginning and an end. And I equate that with tunes, songs, stuff like that. For instance, Beethoven's nine symphonies, to me, they're all one, and they continue and continue and continue and continue. I keep saying jazz is no category. It's an attitude.

B&N.com: Your band reflects that "Jazz is no category" comment. Each musician seems perfectly comfortable accessing almost anything they know at any time and orchestrating it together.

WS: Oh yeah. When we finished playing at one concert, some classical people came by and said this was getting into what a string quartet does, where if someone is playing a solo and someone else comes in, it's not an interruption. It's a character doing dialogue, and in such a way where you make sure it doesn't sound like Dixieland or something else. Joe Zawinul and I used to talk about that when we had Weather Report and were doing dialogues together. In other words, be vulnerable in expressing yourself. Don't let the rules of what something is supposed to be in music bear false witness to the celebration that you're celebrating and the story that you're telling and the affirmation and confirmation that you're confirming. The combination of the guys, the way they are and what they know and how they throw it out there with an attitude that the detail and complexity and orchestration and taking chances is, in fact, an adventure, not an experiment. You go out into the unknown and say, "What are we going to do?" It takes courage to go out there all together and be vulnerable. But John, Danilo, and Brian take with them the foundation, the best stuff you have that you know from your past, your past music, and that's like a flashlight into the darkness.

B&N.com: Is that why you're able to approach all this rather older repertoire with such a fresh attitude?

WS: Yeah. Like I said, it's not finished. Finished is artificial.

B&N.com: Did you ever feel trapped in what you were doing during your career?

WS: Here's what I felt. That the people, the masses were trapped, and I was trying to save them! Hah-hah! I was trying to get a rope and put it around the barred windows, like in the old westerns, pull the wall down, and let them out of jail. But a lot of people don't want to be gotten out of jail. They've been in there too long. If you get in jail long enough, you think it's heaven. With the hits! [laughs] With the hit parade, all those hits for 75 years, controlled by radio and controlled by what I call the gatekeepers.

B&N.com: It's my impression that you're playing a lot more tenor than you have done in recent years.

WS: Oh yes. I have the tenor I was looking for. It was given to me as a birthday present. It's a Selmer, and it's called the Super Balance Action, which was made somewhere in the late '40s or '50s. My saxophone doctor showed me my serial number. He said it's made in the same year as John Coltrane's horn. The sound that I want from that horn is still developing. It's the mouthpiece and everything. I'm working on it. I'm getting there now.

B&N.com: Do you have a different relationship with the tenor saxophone than you do with the soprano saxophone?

WS: Yes. The reason why I have two is to be two different people. To orchestrate. The tenor is more like the cello, the celli, the sound of the cello family. The soprano is more like the violin, or the flute and the violin and the clarinet. I try to see the soprano as being like a fanfare, like what trumpets do sometimes, so you can get an open sound. I don't like the nanny-goat sound that a lot of soprano saxophones spew forth on records and everything.

B&N.com: How is this quartet a different ensemble than other bands you brought out in the late '80s and mid-'90s?

WS: There are no rehearsals. Anything we discover at a sound check -- which is only a short moment, when you have a sound check -- can be elaborated and elucidated upon during a concert, and later on examined and then readied for recording. But there is no studio we go into where we have four-hour rehearsals to get something ready. When we're not working, they're doing their tours as bandleaders. It's almost like when you're at university; they do their homework without being told, like in high school. So we're like university and beyond. Beyond the street! [laughs]

B&N.com: How much music did you sift through in selecting the choices that wound up on the record?

WS: We did a summer tour through many cities, and I went through everything we did. Rob Griffin, who engineered the record, engineered everything himself with his own equipment. I would say if we had an assigned producer to do this, it wouldn't sound like this. It would have been the very obvious "something here and something there," "take out that," "this is going to go over people's heads," "people are not ready for this," "no, we need some insurance here."

B&N.com: Another aspect of this band is that it's all acoustic, and it's been years since you presented your own music in an all-acoustic format.

WS: I like whatever it takes to make music, and electricity doesn't perturb me. Because we can't live without electricity. We have an electrical charge in our cells. If we don't get that charge, we're dead.