Wayne Shorter

The great comeback. After several years submerged in the Weather Report collective and the various Blue Note transitional records, Native Dancer is Shorter's fully realized statement as a solo artist, and the partnership with Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento turns out to be one of the most inspired collaborations in 1970s jazz. The two musicians have a natural sympathy that is immediately audible: Nascimento's voice and Shorter's soprano saxophone occupy similar tonal space, and they wind around each other throughout the album with an ease that suggests they have been playing together for years.

Herbie Hancock returns from the Blue Note years, now playing electric piano alongside acoustic, and his contribution is as sensitive and imaginative as ever. Wagner Tiso adds organ and piano textures that deepen the Brazilian harmonic palette, while Dave McDaniel's bass has a warmth and elasticity that suits the rhythmic elements. Airto Moreira's percussion is the glue that holds the various elements together without ever being obtrusive. The compositions are shared between Shorter and Nascimento, with one tune from Hancock, and the blend is seamless.

Native Dancer did not fit neatly into any category when it was released, and it still doesn't. It is too jazz-rooted to be Brazilian pop, too Brazilian to be conventional jazz, too melodic to be fusion in the electric sense, and too sophisticated to be easy listening. What it is, is completely beautiful, and it remains the most accessible entry point into the solo Shorter discography for listeners coming from outside jazz.

Recorded in 1965 but shelved and not released until 1979, The Soothsayer should be counted among the absolute masterpieces of the Blue Note period. The sextet replaces Elvin Jones with Tony Williams, the nineteen-year-old Miles Davis drummer who was already one of the most innovative drummers in the music, and the different rhythmic approach opens up new possibilities in the ensemble. Williams's playing is lighter and more flexible than Jones's dense polyrhythms, and Shorter's writing responds to the new rhythmic environment.

The title track is a ten-minute extended composition of genuine greatness, Shorter building through multiple sections with the same structural logic he deployed on the shorter compositions of Speak No Evil and JuJu, but here expanded into a form that allows each musician extended space for development. Freddie Hubbard, at his absolute peak during this period, plays with an authority that matches anything he recorded under his own name. McCoy Tyner finds the harmonic center of even the most ambiguous passages and illuminates it.

The fact that this record sat unreleased for fourteen years is one of jazz history's genuine tragedies. It belongs alongside Speak No Evil, JuJu, and Adam's Apple as the essential Blue Note Shorter, and the presence of Tony Williams in place of Elvin Jones makes it a unique document: a glimpse of what the Blue Note period might have sounded like with a different rhythmic conception.

Another record made in 1965 and shelved for fifteen years, Etcetera is the quartet partner to The Soothsayer's sextet, and it shares the same extraordinary quality of the best Blue Note period Shorter. The quartet of Shorter, Hancock, McBee, and Chambers has a different quality from the JuJu quartet with Tyner, Workman, and Elvin Jones: where the JuJu group had a concentrated intensity, this one has a more expansive quality, the music breathing more freely in the spaces between the notes.

Herbie Hancock's playing here is remarkable for its restraint and precision. He comps behind Shorter with voicings that seem to both support and challenge, suggesting harmonic paths that Shorter may or may not take, the relationship between soloist and accompanist conducted as an ongoing conversation. Cecil McBee has a woody warmth in his bass tone that gives the quartet a physical grounding that the higher-intensity Blue Note records sometimes sacrifice.

Etcetera and The Soothsayer together function as a kind of postscript to the Blue Note acoustic period, documents of a musician at peak form working in conditions of complete creative freedom. That both were shelved and released years later only adds to their slightly uncanny quality: music made in one era, heard in another, both belonging fully to neither.

The first solo album in ten years, made while Weather Report was still a going concern, and Shorter returns with an ambitious record that incorporates the contemporary electric production values of mid-1980s jazz while showcasing his compositional ambitions. The Synclavier on the opening Endangered Species, played by Joseph Vitarelli and programmed by Michael Hoenig, gives that track a layered, orchestral texture unlike anything in Shorter's previous catalog, and the ensemble of studio musicians, including ex-Weather Report drummer Alex Acuña, executes the complex arrangements with precision.

Larry Klein's bass provides the rhythmic foundation, his approach balancing electric clarity with the more open feel that Shorter's writing demands. Jim Walker's flutes add a woodwind dimension that complements Shorter's saxophones, and the dual keyboards of Yaron Gershovsky and Michiko Hill create rich harmonic beds beneath the compositions. Ralph Humphrey drums on Endangered Species, Acuña on everything else, and the production, though occasionally giving the music a compressed, clinical quality that the acoustic Blue Note records did not have to contend with, serves the compositions well.

Atlantis is imperfect, and the mid-1980s production occasionally works against the music's deeper qualities. But it is a genuine artistic statement, not a commercial concession, and the best passages remind you that Shorter was still operating at a level above almost everyone else in jazz. The survey ends here, twenty-six years from the Vee-Jay debut session: a career of extraordinary scope and consistency.