Wayne Shorter died yesterday at the age of 89. I don’t claim to be a world authority, but I spun a lot of his records when I was doing overnights at Philadelphia’s WRTI. Here’s Shorter on tenor sax, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. All legends.
Miles Davis said of Shorter, “Wayne is a real composer. He writes scores, writes the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound. …Wayne 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.”
Shorter on working with Davis:
E.S.P.
R.I.P. Wayne Shorter