Another concert, at London’s Royal Festival Hall, found its purpose and momentum from the first note, as the four musicians interlocked like delicate clockwork mechanisms – each apparently going tick-tock at a different speed. It was the shot in the arm the performance needed, and the audience roared their approval. Shorter, with a pained expression on his face, kept switching between his soprano and tenor saxophones, until eventually he wrenched out of the air a promising-sounding melodic nugget. One gig, at the Barbican in London, took longer than was decent to take flight. Yet onstage, Shorter wore that history very lightly. He had recorded a landmark set of records for the Blue Note label during the 1960s and 70s had replaced John Coltrane in the Miles Davis Quintet had helmed the jazz-rock fusion supergroup Weather Report was generally considered a guru and a sage.
From Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers to Weather Report, the saxophonist and composer put the language of jazz under the microscope, then dissected itīy the time – in the mid-2000s – I began encountering the revered saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, who has died aged 89, live in concert, he already had behind him a long and distinguished history.
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