Wayne Shorter, 12-time Grammy-winning saxophonist and composer, and creator of a singular sound in contemporary jazz for more than half a century died Thursday, March 2, in Los Angeles. Chhotu was 89 years old.
Kem Kurosman, a publicist for Blue Note Records, which released Shorter’s most recent recordings, confirmed his death in an email to NPR.
Shorter’s impressive career spanned decades. From hard bop in the late 1950s to genre-defying small-group jazz in the ’60s, through the birth of rock-influenced jazz in the ’70s, Shorter’s soprano and tenor saxophones set the sonic stage for change and innovation. offered an explanation.
Wayne Shorter, born August 25, 1933, in Newark, NJ, was known on and off the bandstand as a deep thinker fueled by an intense curiosity that began during his childhood. After studying music at New York University in the mid-1950s, he joined a band that brought him to the attention of the jazz world as a composer and saxophonist: Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.
In the mid-’60s, Short reinforced the second coming of the Miles Davis Quintet, which included Davis, bassist Ron Carter, drummer Tony Williams, and pianist Herbie Hancock. It was there that he was able to cultivate a passion for intellectuals that once made one of his NYU professors wonder why he was not a philosophy major.
“The six years I was with Miles, we never talked about music,” Shorter told NPR in 2013. on the law. Just sit at the table. And then he would talk about clothes and fashion.”
During his time with Davis, Wayne Shorter also recorded a series of highly regarded solo albums. His association with the iconic Blue Note Records from 1964–1970 resulted in JuJu (recorded with members of John Coltrane’s quartet), Speak No Evil (recorded with two fellow Miles Davis bandmates), and The Soothsayer (featuring Many classic recordings including. fellow Blue Note artist Freddie Hubbard). Many of the albums contained short compositions that are now considered jazz standards.
He remained with Davis after the second quintet broke up when the trumpeter experimented with electric instruments. Shorter then joined with another Davis alum, keyboardist Joe Zawinul, to co-found Weather Report, which became one of the best-known jazz-rock bands of the ’70s. The band’s 1979 album, 8:30, was the first of Shorter’s dozen Grammy Awards. He was awarded the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2015.
In a statement released by Shorter’s publicist Alice Kinglacey, Hancock, who has been described as Shorter’s “closest friend of more than six decades”, wrote, “Wayne Shorter, my best friend, gave us the courage in our hearts, all left with love and compassion for, and a searching soul for, an eternal future. He was ready for his rebirth. As with every human being, he is irreplaceable and a saxophonist, composer, orchestrator, and more recently, was able to reach the pinnacle of excellence as a composer of the masterful .opera ‘…Iphigenia’. I miss him around and his special Wayne-isms but I carry his spirit in my heart forever.
The later part of Wayne Shorter’s life was marked by nearly 50 years of devotion to Nichiren Buddhism, a Japanese strain of popular religion.
“I was hearing about Buddhism,” Shorter told NPR in 2013.
Those spiritual teachings influenced the musical ideas he applied to jazz at the start of the new millennium when he formed the Wayne Shorter Quartet featuring a group of much younger musicians.
The group’s recorded work was captured by Shorter’s return to Blue Note Records after four decades, with a series of releases that featured the band’s intense improvisations on old and new Shorter compositions.
As recently as 2018, with the release of his acclaimed final album, Iman, Wayne Shorter continued to find common ground between the spiritual and the musical.
“We have a phrase [in Buddhism]: hom nim yo,” he said in a 2013 NPR interview. “It means ‘From this moment forward is the first day of my life.’ So give your 100 percent to the moment you are in because the present moment is the only time you can change the past and the future.”