Jazz musician Wayne Shorter has died in Los Angeles at the age of 89.
Shorter was considered one of the most important and influential jazz composers and saxophonists.
Our obituary:
"You can't rehearse the unexpected!" That was Wayne Shorter's answer to the question of why his quartet only ever met on stage and never in a rehearsal room.
The saxophonist disliked routine, the professional unwinding of a program played like clockwork.
Shorter loved to take risks, his goal was originality.
This is the only thing one can give back to the gift of life, but originality, according to the musician, also dubbed the “philosopher of jazz”, in the Arte documentary “Jazzlegende Wayne Shorter”, created for his 80th birthday in 2013, is possible only prove it if you don't know what's coming next.
Wayne Shorter joined Miles Davis' quintet in 1964
With the quartet formed immediately after the turn of the millennium with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Pattitucci and drummer Brian Blade, which lasted almost 20 years, Shorter wrote his fourth - and in view of his growing curiosity about it as he got older Unprecedented - maybe even the most remarkable chapters in the jazz history books.
Wayne Shorter was born on August 25, 1933 in Newark, New Jersey.
To get to the jazz mecca of New York, all he had to do was cross the Hudson.
Nevertheless, Shorter came to music relatively late, only began to learn the clarinet at the age of 16 and switched to the tenor saxophone a little later.
With that he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1959, where he soon attracted attention not only because of his characterful, warm and yet distinctive saxophone tone, but also because of his compositions.
Although these did not leave the relatively clearly defined terrain of soul-soaked hard bop, they nevertheless attracted attention with their own refined and poetic note, which is unusual in this genre.
When Shorter switched to Miles Davis' quintet in 1964 on the recommendation of John Coltrane, he soon provided him with most of the compositions,
now, however, significantly more radically expanding the established forms.
The formation, often referred to today as the "Classic Quintet", established the modal style of playing, whose orientation towards scales gave the soloists much more freedom compared to the chord changes of bebop and kept pushing the harmonic and rhythmic boundaries.
However, the goal was not the tabula rasa of free jazz, but the more exciting question of how far you can stretch an existing form without destroying it.
Wayne Shorter died in a Los Angeles hospital
One could say that Blakey and Davis were the builders, the architect, who significantly shaped the sound of both ensembles with his construction plans, i.e. compositions, but it was Shorter who, from 1964, recorded his own music on a series of excellent albums for the legendary label Blue Note documented.
Shortly after discovering the soprano saxophone in the late 1960s, which would soon become his main instrument for a long time, Shorter co-founded Weather Report with Joe Zawinul.
Initially very experimental, the band advanced from 1973 with the integration of rock and Latin grooves as well as a lot of electronics to not only the longest-lasting (until 1986) and most creative, but also the most successful formation of the fusion era.
The worldwide success of Weather Report made Shorter known beyond jazz, he now also played prominent roles on albums by Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan.
"Footprints" is probably Wayne Shorter's most famous composition
During the period of his greatest popularity, Shorter also had to cope with private strokes of fate again and again.
His 14-year-old daughter died in 1985 and his wife died in a plane crash in 1996.
The avowed Buddhist then withdrew from the music business for a few years before celebrating a brilliant comeback with his quartet, which never rehearsed the unexpected.
Incidentally, the opening quote is atypically concise for Shorter relationships.
The frequent reader with a particular weakness for science fiction and comics was notorious among journalists for happily using questions as templates for extravagant parables that dealt more with Mozart or the universe than with profane facts.
Wayne's World was always (his) own.
"Footprints" is probably the best-known of the many Shorter compositions that have found their way into the jazz canon.
The footprints left by this great individualist are larger and more prominent than those of most of his contemporaries.
Wayne Shorter died Thursday at a Los Angeles hospital at the age of 89.
Reinhold Unger