Wayne Shorter's "Wayning Moments" by Don Gold

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

As the masthead states - “JazzProfiles is dedicated to “focused profiles on Jazz and its makers while also featuring the work of guest writers on Jazz.”

Don Gold was hired by Jack Tracy in 1956 to become his Associate Editor at Down Beat magazine and when Jack left to join Mercury Records in March 1958, Don succeeded him as editor.

Since the magazine was based in Chicago and staffed with writers who appreciated and understood the music, musicians and record labels with a presence in the “Windy City” often turned to the magazine for authors to compose liner notes for their LP’s.

Here’s an example of Don’s excellent writing from the annotations he wrote for one of tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s earliest recordings as a leader before he joined Blue Note Records.

The LP was recorded in Chicago in 1962 and issued as Wayne Shorter: Wayning Moments on the VeeJay label [SR 3029]. It was subsequently released on CD by Fresh Sound Records.

In all he does within the world of jazz, Wayne Shorter selects his companions with great care and discrimination. In his first Vee Jay LP - Introducing Wayne Shorter (Vee Jay LP-3006) - he was joined by such first-rate jazzmen as trumpeter Lee Morgan and the rhythm section from Miles Davis' elite unit: pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb.

In this follow-up to that worthwhile set, the tenor man is joined by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, one of the most respected of young horn men in current circulation, and a solid rhythm section of pianist Eddie Higgins, bassist James Merritt and drummer Marshall Thompson.

Shorter does not succumb to whim. A serious and sincere musician, he makes his moves judiciously. For this reason, he has turned down more jobs than he's accepted; in fact, for several periods during his career he's taken jobs outside of music rather than work with inferior musicians or play music he couldn't endorse.

After spending several years both in and out of jazz, diligently striving to find the right slot for himself in music, Wayne landed with Art Blakey's Messengers. The experience, in a setting guaranteed by Blakey to promote individuality, proved to be one of the most rewarding in Wayne's service to jazz. Since he took advantage, eagerly, of the offer to become a Messenger, he's become a firmly authoritative spokesman for the straightforward, uncluttered, basic kind of jazz his playing personifies.

Although his playing bears certain similarities to that of John Coltrane, Wayne's roots extend far beyond Coltrane into the vast mainstream tradition of tenor players. His imagination enables him to create intriguing originals, tailor-made for improvisation, and to select comparably appealing material by other composers. In this outing, four of the tunes are by Wayne: "Devil's Island", "Dead End", "Powder Keg" and "Callaway Went That-A-Way". One, "Wayning Moments", is by pianist Higgins. "Black Orpheus" is from the score for the film of that name, by Antonio Carlos Jobin and Luis Bonfa; the superb film, by the way, was a 1959 Grand Prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival. "Moon of Manakoora" was written by Frank Loesser and Alfred Newman for the 1937 movie, The Hurricane. "All Or Nothing At All", composed by Jack Lawrence and Arthur Altman in 1940, was one of the young Frank Sinatra's notable hits.

The performances given these tunes by Shorter and cohorts are not intended to shock the listener through the use of assorted avant garde techniques. This is not experimental jazz. It is as divorced from the Third Stream as the Nile is from the Mississippi. These performances are the work of jazzmen more concerned with improvisation - with freewheeling and unimpeded blowing - than creating impressive intellectual structures. Theirs is the world of the soloist. It inspires admiration only in terms of the accomplishments of the men on hand, their musicianship and their skill in transforming ideas into sound.

From the exotic view of "Black Orpheus" to the swinging gallop of "Callaway Went That-A-Way", with sizzling and balladic stops between, they tell you the way they were feeling and some of the thoughts they had the day they recorded this music. It is unadorned, but fervently probing, jazz. And in its freedom from gimmickry, it is as honest and as direct as jazz can get. As a key to the growth of the individualist in jazz, it is at the very heart of jazz.”

— DON GOLD

The following video features the Devil’s Island track from the LP.

Denny Zeitlin - "Early Wayne"

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

In many respects Jazz is one of the more difficult art forms to teach and to learn. The most effective method to learn about the music has been to listen to it. The rich history of Jazz thus becomes a stream of consciousness that is imparted from one generation to the next as a continuum as opposed to disconnected and analyzed fragments.

The same can be said of this process of transference from one musician to another: listening to how one musician plays Jazz can inform and inspire another musician’s efforts to play the music.

The most obvious example of this dynamic is when a strong player such as a Louis Armstrong or a Lester Young or an Oscar Peterson influences the style and approach of other trumpet players, tenor sax players or piano players, respectively.

But influences do not always follow a straight line in terms of the same instrument: brass players can influence reed players; reed players can influence keyboard players, and percussion instruments can shape the rhythmic approach of all instruments.

And an even less obvious and less common relationship is formed when a Jazz musician uses the compositions of another player as a platform of expression.

Such is the case with pianist Denny Zeitlin’s new CD Early Wayne [Sunnyside Records SSC 1456] on which the compositions of iconic tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter form the basis for Denny’s “explorations.”

Jazz is not about expressing information; it has more to do with what pianist Keith Jarrett has described as an "internal burning. Jazz started with someone needing to express himself... .You can't want to mean it.  You have to need it. Is there something in you that absolutely needs to get out?”

Sometimes the vehicle for this inner expression [“something that needs to get out”] is facilitated by the compositions that you feel comfortable improvising on.

This context becomes one way to listen to Denny’s solo piano explorations on Early Wayne for as he explains in the insert notes:

“I was in college in 1959 when Wayne Shorter made his recording debut as a leader and I was captivated by the originality of his sound and concept, both as a performer and as a composer. He has continued to inspire me over the ensuing decades and I’ve recorded his compositions on a number of occasions.”

In another excerpt from the insert notes to his Complete Blue Note Recordings [ECM 1575-80], pianist Keith Jarrett remarks that: “A master Jazz musician goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He/she knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness …. It is like an attempt over and over again to reveal the heart of things.”

In line with this “rendezvous” we have Denny explaining that “the idea of an entire concert of Wayne’s tunes as launching pads into improvisation occurred to me as I was preparing for an annual performance at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland, CA. The venue is perfect - a stable of marvelous pianos; an intimate concert space that attracts an attentive and adventurous audience; flawless acoustics; a staff that really cares about music. I believe that Wayne is Jazz’s greatest living composer and improviser, and for this concert I focused on his timeless early compositions.”

The ten tracks that comprise Early Wayne were recorded in performance on December 5, 2014 and each is a magnificent example of an artist displaying the ability to create Jazz at the highest level of personal expression.

Denny’s achievements with the music are a testimony to his love of what he is doing, his honesty, and of his artistic devotion to master the discipline necessary to perform what the author Ted Gioia has referred to as “The Imperfect Art.”

As the novelist Willa Cather once wrote: “Artistic growth is more than anything a refining of a sense of truthfulness. Only the stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist knows how difficult it is.”

I’ve been listening to Denny’s music in performance and on recordings for over 50 years and I view each new opportunity to do as another episode to hear his quest for truth.

In this regard, you won’t want to miss his latest efforts as reflected in the ten stunning improvisations that make up Early Wayne: Explorations of Classic Wayne Shorter Compositions.

For order information, please visit Sunnyside Records via this link.