In 20th century music, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter form a kind of holy trinity, nearly unrivaled in the scope of their impact and influence across genres. And while Miles is the indisputable icon and Herbie (still vital and active at age 85) reached the pinnacles of both jazz innovation and pop success, Wayne was every bit their equal, a perpetual vanguardist throughout his six-decade-plus career.
Shorter’s discography divides neatly into five categories, each corresponding to a period in which he led the way in jazz and sometimes beyond it. There’s his time with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, his starmaking platform as a composer and soloist; his incredibly fertile years as bandleader for Blue Note, peaking in the mid-’60s; his overlapping tenure in Miles’s so-called second great quintet, in which he served as the band’s primary composer; his lengthy ’70s and ’80s stint in Weather Report, the prominent jazz fusion outfit; and his final chapter leading one of the definitive bands in 21st century jazz so far, with players decades his junior. (It’s worth noting that, from the late ’70s on, he led a parallel life working as an occasional sideman to major names in rock and pop, though the choicest evidence appears more on isolated tracks, such as Steely Dan’s “Aja” or Joni Mitchell’s “Paprika Plains,” than full albums.)
Beginning in 1959, Shorter’s five-year stint with Blakey’s Messengers revealed him as a daring soloist, and a prolific and highly effective composer. Recorded in 1961 but not released until 1970, Roots & Herbs is a Shorter album in all but name: He wrote every tune, including rousing swingers like “Look at the Birdie,” the perfect launchpads for a potent lineup that also featured trumpeter Lee Morgan. The band would reach even greater heights with a later configuration including trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, trombonist Curtis Fuller and pianist Cedar Walton. The title track to 1965’s The Freedom Rider shows Shorter rising up to meet the challenge of the expanded band, penning a moody, majestic postbop classic.
If the Shorter-era Messengers were all about muscular drive, the Miles band that featured him often seemed to float. The standout pieces on classic albums such as Miles Smiles, Sorcerer and Nefertiti are all Shorter originals, including the waltzing “Footprints,” the murmuring “Masqualero” and the lilting “Nefertiti.”
Shorter’s own contemporary albums zeroed in on various sounds: the sublimely relaxed Speak No Evil, for example, versus the more hard-swinging JuJu. (Only four months separated these 1964 sessions, with Shorter first appearing live with Miles during the same interim.) Less-celebrated but equally accomplished titles such as The All-Seeing Eye, The Soothsayer and Schizophrenia featured rich orchestrations for lineups featuring three or more horns.
Shorter was just one of several strong musical voices in the ever-evolving Weather Report, but his compositional contributions were essential to the group’s colorful blend. Standout mid-period albums Mysterious Traveler and Black Market are good places to hear him operating in modes both funky (“Mysterious Traveler,” “Elegant People”) and reflective (“Blackthorn Rose,” “Three Clowns”).
Shorter was mostly quiet as a bandleader during the Weather Report years, but there is at least one brilliant exception: Native Dancer, a joyous and lushly ambitious collaboration with the great Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento that contained some of the most cinematic music of his career. He continued to explore new terrain after Weather Report’s breakup, exploring an elaborate synth-pop-jazz hybrid on dated but worthwhile efforts such as Phantom Navigator.
A lovely and intimate acoustic collaboration with his dear friend Herbie Hancock, 1+1, set the stage for a grand reemergence at the dawn of the 21st century with a new quartet — featuring pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade — that would become his longest-running working band. On paper it seemed like a retrospective venture, revisiting pieces from throughout Shorter’s career, including a healthy spread of ’60s compositions, but in practice, as heard on its debut, Footprints Live!, it was a thrillingly volatile band, more committed to risky spontaneity than any prior Shorter venture.
The group blossomed beautifully during the next decade plus, as heard on other live albums including Without a Net, which featured the quartet at its freest and most fearless — as well as a marvelously intricate chamber-jazz hybrid on “Pegasus,” a collaboration with wind quintet Imani Winds — and Celebration Vol. 1, a 2014 challenging set that Shorter approved for release before his death in 2023.
Shorter spent his final years hard at work on the opera Iphigenia, a collaboration with Esperanza Spalding, and though no official recording has emerged, Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival — which documents a 2017 performance by Shorter, Spalding, pianist Leo Genovese and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington — commemorates his continued hunger for new connections and adventures.