Wayne Shorter

Shorter was twenty-six, a year out of the Army and newly installed in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, when he walked into the studio for his first date as a leader, and the quintet assembled around him reads like a who's-who of the late-1950s hard bop scene. Lee Morgan was burning brighter than anyone his age, Wynton Kelly had the loosest, most propulsive swing in jazz piano, and the Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb rhythm section was what Miles Davis trusted behind him every night. On paper it was almost unfair.

The record delivers what the lineup promises: hard bop played with real authority, built on Shorter compositions that already signal something different from the standard issue of the day. The tunes have an odd angularity in their melodies, harmonic movements that don't resolve where you expect them to. Kelly navigates all of it with his characteristic ease, and Morgan burns on every track, but the personality most clearly defined here is Shorter's. His tone on tenor was never smooth in the conventional sense; it had a slightly reedy dryness that cut through the ensemble like nothing else.

There is nothing yet on this record to prepare you for JuJu or Speak No Evil, but that was always going to be true of a debut. What the record establishes is a writer and player of unusual seriousness, one whose ambitions were already pointing somewhere beyond the conventions of the style he was working in.

Shorter had joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers by the time this was recorded, and the Blakey connection runs through the whole session. Blakey himself is on drums, his propulsive, polyrhythmic approach charging the music in ways that Jimmy Cobb's steadier swing on the debut had not. Cedar Walton is a revelation throughout, his harmonically sophisticated comping giving Shorter the kind of support that opens up the improvisational space rather than filling it in.

The compositions here are a step forward from the debut. The title tune and "The Albatross" have the kind of catchy, slightly bent melodies that would become a Shorter hallmark, the kind of tunes that are immediately memorable and yet resist easy categorization. Shorter himself is developing the slightly speech-like quality in his phrasing that would become one of his most distinctive characteristics, and without a trumpet in the front line, the quartet format puts his tenor in an exposed position that he handles with increasing confidence.

Second Genesis sits comfortably alongside the Blakey Messengers records from this period, which is high praise. Shorter was at this point one of the most important composers in the Messengers' book, and this session documents why: he was writing music that had the Messengers' fire while reaching toward something more harmonically complex.

The third Vee-Jay record brings in Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, and the difference in energy level from the debut is immediately apparent. Hubbard, still in his early twenties, was playing with the volcanic intensity that would define his early Blue Note work, and the combination of his fierce trumpet with Shorter's more oblique tenor creates a front line of genuine distinction. Jymie Merritt, a fellow Messenger, anchors the bottom end with authority.

The compositions continue to develop Shorter's distinctive approach. "Callaway Went That-A-Way" is the standout, a fast Shorter original whose melody keeps turning where you do not expect it, the kind of tune where the more you listen the more you find. Eddie Higgins is a somewhat underrated presence on this record, his pianism clean and intelligent without calling too much attention to itself, giving Shorter and Hubbard room to expand. Marshall Thompson keeps the pulse moving with a steady, unobtrusive swing.

This is the last of the Vee-Jay sessions, and listening to the three records together you can trace a clear development: from the polished debut through the Blakey-fueled fire of Second Genesis to the more assertive approach here. The Blue Note years were about to begin, and you can hear Shorter getting ready for them.