The late, revered saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter led the Wayne Shorter Quartet from 2000-2018, the longest tenure of his storied bands and the only one to bear his name as leader. Over that period, the ensemble comprised of pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade was by any measure one of the leading small groups in jazz. They released several recordings, four of which were live. Now we have a fifth. Celebration, Volume 1 is the first in a series of archival releases that Shorter curated before he passed away in 2023.
This performance was captured at the Stockholm Jazz Festival in Sweden in October 2014 and presented mostly familiar material heard on other recordings such as “Zero Gravity,” “Smilin’ Through,” “Orbits,” “Lotus,” and “She Moves Through The Fair.” Yet, the palpable energy, childlike, playful spirit, risk-taking, mood shifting, and riveting interplay among the four members shine more brightly than on those past recordings, shifting from the pensive to the spirited, at times instantaneously.
As you probably know, Shorter had to quit playing in 2018 due to a debilitating illness, but his never-quit spirit yielded 2018’s Grammy-winning 3-LP Emanon (two LPs of which are live, the other orchestral) and his collaboration with Esperanza Spalding for the 2021 opera Iphigenia. Shorter’s widow, Carolina, explains in the liners how the idea for a series of curated recordings was born. “In the fall of 2022, Rob Griffin started sending a lot of unreleased music for Wayne to sort through. He started listening around the clock. I’d be doing something around the house, talking on the phone, doing work and he’d yell ‘Carolina! You’ve got to come and hear this shit! Listen to this, Carolina! They’re really going OUT!!” In one sense, that’s Shorter’s modesty coming through, giving credit to his colleagues first when, in fact, this performance contains some of his most heated, inspired playing heard with this unit.
The track list contains no fewer than five versions of “Zero Gravity,” including “Zero Gravity to the 90th Dimension,” the source for the last sentence in the previous quote. Shorter was so impressed with these performances that he wanted to change some of the titles, for example, “She Flew Through the Fair” instead of “She Moved Through the Fair,” but Carolina’s judgment presumably prevailed there and on the album title, which at one point Shorter wanted to name “Unidentified Flying Objects,” thinking of the notes the musicians were playing. These ten tracks amount to 96 minutes of listening, with a couple as brief as two-three minutes and two in the twenty-minute range (“Lotus” and “She Moves Through the Fair”).
At times, Shorter sounds like he is leading, while in other moments, he remains rather poised, riding the wave, until his rhythm section inspires him to take a bolder path. There is a spirit of exploration, like they are bushwhacking carefully through a forest, excited to reach a meadow or clearing finally. Perhaps these earthbound descriptions are misplaced given the emphasis on Shorter’s well-known predilection for comic book characters, superheroes, and cosmology. If you’ve seen the documentary Zero Gravity, you understand.
The lone pieces not composed by Shorter are Arthur Penn’s “Smilin’ Through’ and “Edge of the World” from War Games. The former is released as a single but on the album, it’s a seamless segue from the opening “Zero Gravity to the Fifteenth Dimension,” which opens Side A. Listening to individual tracks does not do this album justice as several moments just peak to beautiful, jaw-dropping intensity. The improvisations are unpredictable, even though rhythmically complex pieces such as the sequence On Side B – “Zero Gravity to the 11th Dimension,” “Zero Gravity to the 12th Dimension,” and “Zero Gravity – Unbound,” which bear intriguing tones of mystery and a remarkably tight and at times loosely relaxed rhythm section. They seem to serve up one grand preamble to “Orbits” where they build slowly only to unleash explosive torrents of sound in the last third of the piece. Similar exciting sequences occur in “Lotus” and “She Moves Through the Fair.” You’ve likely heard many of these before, but arguably not with this thrilling edge. The Wayne Shorter Quartet is a unique force. Stay tuned for more in this series.
