Several years ago, jazz giant Wayne Shorter played a mesmerizing show at the long-gone George’s, on West Kinzie Street, spinning one seductive and profoundly inspired melodic line after another.
Although Shorter’s performance veered between bold musical experimentation and less daring pop fare, his most inspired moments produced unforgettably fervent, incantatory phrases. Surely no other reed player in jazz could create lines as sinuous, haunting and harmonically ambiguous as these, his most sublime improvisations attesting to the man’s enduring genius.
Since that time, however, the musical world in which Shorter works has changed drastically: Jazz neoclassicists such as Wynton Marsalis and Marcus Roberts have edged Shorter’s jazz-fusion idiom almost entirely out of the spotlight. Miles Davis, Shorter’s artistic collaborator in the ’60s and musical kindred spirit thereafter, died in 1991, at age 65.
Shorter ultimately has been marginalized, despite his heated attempts to breathe life into rock-tinged fusion.
That much was apparent throughout Shorter’s wearying show Monday night at the Park West, where the high volume and sonic frenzy of his quintet’s performance could not mask the artistic vacuum at its core.
There were moments in this show, which drew a large crowd of admirers, in which one barely could believe that an artist of Shorter’s stature was toiling on soprano and tenor saxophones. The long, bleating, repeated-pitch high notes may have roused his audience to noisy ovations, but these applause-begging gestures said precious little musically.
So too the simple, diatonic lines that defined most of Shorter’s solos, the long and pregnant silences between phrases, the startlingly simplistic harmonic undercurrents of this music.
Although Shorter stood as leader of this group, in many ways he was the follower, sharing many–if not most–of his solo lines with guitarist David Gilmore. Shorter and Gilmore threw off even the most fast-moving, mercurial themes with impressive technical precision, but the musical effect was limited. Beyond robbing these passages of any sense of spontaneity, they implied that Shorter wanted to mask his reed work underneath Gilmore’s scorching guitar lines.
Strangely enough, that may not have been a bad idea, considering that Gilmore and electric bassist Alphonso Johnson truly drove this band. Gilmore’s solos proved musically complex and bristling with the spirit of invention, surely capturing the attention even of listeners unseduced by the jazz-fusion idiom.
Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of Shorter’s show owed to the very nature of his compositions, which were drawn mostly from his recent “High Life” CD. Tunes such as “At the Fair” and “Maya” lacked the exquisite melodic contours, harmonic subtlety and fervency of expression that have marked Shorter’s work at least from the mid-’60s.
And in “Pandora Awakens,” Shorter and his band leaned so far toward the most commercial excesses of rock–complete with slashing percussion backbeat, mundane melodic hooks and blasting decibel levels–that one wondered why Shorter even took the stage. The band could have handled this fare just fine without him.
It all eerily evoked the strange and generally frustrating concerts that Miles Davis gave during the last few years of his life. Content to substitute high-volume ensemble playing for genuine instrumental interplay, Davis left many of his most ardent fans wishing he hadn’t stooped so low in the name of commerce.
Shorter appears to be heading down the same path, a pity in light of the man’s gifts.
