American saxophonist Wayne Shorter, author of some of jazz's most acclaimed compositions and whose melancholy playing changed the sound of jazz in the 1960s before exploring rock-fusion, died Thursday at age 89. according to US media reports.
“I like to define my music as 'abstraction with a heart,'” Shorter said in an interview with this newspaper in 2014.
Shorter's agent, Alisse Kingsley, confirmed his death to
The New York Times
and
The
Washington Post
, without citing the cause.
Shorter grew up playing tenor saxophone with drummer Art Blakey and his band Jazz Messengers in the late 1950s and joined trumpeter Miles Davis's highly influential 1960s quintet, along with pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams.
Wayne Shorter performing at the Marciac Jazz festival, France, on August 13, 2005. LIONEL BONAVENTURE (AFP)
Shorter wrote some of the group's most famous songs, such as
ESP
and
Nefertiti
.
Davis hailed him as "the ideal person in his band, the conceptualizer of many of the musical ideas we did," who also "understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend to them."
Hancock also praised Shorter's songwriting.
“The master songwriter in that group was, for me, Wayne Shorter,” the keyboardist said.
"Wayne was one of the few people who brought music to Miles Davis who didn't change."
Shorter led his own band to produce a series of albums in the 1960s including
Juju
,
Speak No Evil
and
Adam's Apple
, which featured one of jazz's
greatest
standards :
Footprints
.
“The most important thing I had to grow musically at that time was what was happening in the world, what I was witnessing socially, politically, philosophically… The question I have always asked myself when creating is: what is missing? in humanity?
The world is governed by the popular, and that road is always crowded, full of people who are not going anywhere.
I chose to take the road less traveled, because that is the path of the explorer, ”he said in an interview with EL PAÍS on the occasion of his performance at the San Sebastián Jazz Festival in 2017.
He co-founded the jazz fusion band Weather Report in 1969, around the time he began to focus his playing on the soprano sax.
The band recorded one of the best-selling jazz records of all time,
Heavy Weather
, in 1977. Other hit records included Native Dancer featuring Brazilian musicians, such as singer Milton Nascimento, who mixed jazz, rock, and funk with rhythms. Brazilians.
Wayne Shorter at the 51st edition of the Jazz a Juan festival in southern France on July 15, 2011.SEBASTIEN NOGIER (AFP)
He was always aware of the social movements in defense of the rights of blacks.
“There is a huge force trying to push us back and reverse all the progress we have made in human relations.
But this struggle has been around for a long time, and it extends to music: bebop
.
by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, for example, was also a social movement, and in the 40s many radio stations refused to play that music.
Today everything is pigeonholed: rock'n'roll, R&B, folk music that is not folk music… Basically, this is also a way to prevent people from different cultures from interacting”, he explained to this newspaper.
In that interview he cited some of his greatest influences: Picasso, Pollock, Stravinski, Manuel De Falla, Mary Shelley, Maya Angelou or the writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón, of whom he declared himself an absolute fan.
He did not mention current musicians: "The truth is that I do not listen to music."
He preferred to be inspired by looking out the window or reading the news.
In 2000, Shorter formed his first permanent acoustic group with pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade, spawning four albums of live recordings.
Shorter co-wrote an opera
Iphigenia
with the singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding that premiered in 2021. In his concerts he did not like to cover himself, although his illustrious past accompanied him wherever he went: “It is something that I neither can nor want to avoid.
My music is a celebration of the future based on history.
You have to understand that without Lester Young, without Charlie Parker, without Miles Davis, neither you nor I would be here.
Young people today do not know what a typewriter is, or who Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot or Humphrey Bogart were.
In no way will they be wondering what a car is, an animal? ”, As he declared to this newspaper.
The greatest tragedy of his life was the death in 1985 of a daughter he had with his second wife Ana María Patricio.
Patricio herself died in a TWA plane that exploded shortly after takeoff from New York in 1996.