Wayne Shorter: The Eternal Quest
Wayne Shorter, quite likely the greatest small-group jazz composer since Thelonious Monk, was also one of the most influential tenor and soprano saxophonists in the post-John Coltrane period from the mid-1960s onward. His death last week on March 2, 2023, at the age of 89, marks the end of a musical life that spanned a panoply of styles and configurations, from hard bop to electronic fusion and funk to Brazilian and Caribbean to orchestral and the avant-garde. Yet no matter the style or imaginary constraints of genre, all of his music was suffused with an idiosyncratic melding of sounds and sensibilities that seemed to reach down deep into the rhizomatic roots of the earth and extend all the way to the infinite expanse of the cosmos.
As Duke Ellington would say of great artists of his day, Wayne Shorter is and will remain “beyond category.” After a tenure with Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Shorter joined what became known as the second great Miles Davis quintet. Miles’ thought on Shorter as a writer of music: "Wayne is a real composer. He writes scores, writes the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound. . . . Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didn't work, then he broke them, but with musical sense; he understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your own satisfaction and taste."
As a jazz critic and journalist since the mid-1990s, I’ve been fortunate to meet and interview legends whose legacies in American improvisational music will, I predict, be spoken of with the same reverence as the greatest musicians in the European concert tradition. Wayne Shorter, no doubt, is in the upper reaches of such jazz grandmasters, not only for his unique instrumental style and compositions, but for his perspectival brilliance, as the interview below, originally published a decade ago at Integral Life, demonstrates.
Just as his music will live on in recordings and memories as fine art, and in stories such as this one on his operatic collaboration with Esperanza Spalding, may his words and spiritual essence continue to illuminate metaphysical and aesthetic depths that reverberate far beyond the prosaic into the realm of profound truth, goodness, and beauty.
Interviewing Wayne
The experience of interviewing Wayne Shorter was an adventure. I once wrote that Wayne “can take you around the world in 80 minutes of conversation. High-wire discussions spiral through music, comic books, science, film and philosophy in a seeming blink. As with his saxophone playing, Shorter is highly associative, with one phrase or idea leading to another, sometimes directly, at others in sideways patterns or leaps of discursive thought or sounds.”
If you come at him with some commonplace, same-old-same-old, he might riff abstractions and make your head spin. Yet when you get abstract, he can bring you down to earth by mentioning his times with the legends of jazz or your grandma’s folk wisdom.
I entered the conversation knowing that Wayne, like Herbie Hancock, was a long-time Buddhist. I left the interview realizing that Wayne’s also a mystic and metaphysician.
Start being the director, actor, producer of the movie of your own life. This is a challenge. I believe that life is the ultimate adventure. The single moment is the DNA of eternity.
—Wayne Shorter
Greg Thomas: What inspired you to become a professional musician?
Wayne Shorter: I had no inclination to be a musician. I was an art major in high school. I would have comic books all over the place when I grew up. Then it hit me, in hindsight. What got me about Charlie Parker, Miles, and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk was that they represented superheroes to me.
GT: Music and the other arts are ways to tap into creativity, which I feel is a spark of wisdom and impulse to infinity. You’ve often said that you don’t believe in beginnings or endings. Why?
WS: I more than believe that there’s no such thing as a beginning or end. Those words, to me, are artificial and temporary word tools to get us from one place to another. But the ultimate of it all is . . . I’ve been reading Dr. Stephen Hawking’s book, The Grand Design. It’s very, very interesting when he stated that the universe created itself.
That’s why I think creating something is a challenge. Jazz is something that’s done in the moment. How do you rehearse being in the moment? Being in the moment is one of the processes that frees us from being fearful of the unknown. A lot of people are afraid of the unknown, which is why we have “conservatives” and “liberals.”
The conservative attaches itself to business, commercial gains, ’cause you have to have a status quo, a formula to live within. “Do not disturb” is on the door. No changes.
I like that line in the first Jurassic Park movie, where the Jeff Goldblum character says: “Life finds a way.”
From dating to business, a lot of people are speaking from planning and strategy, but now’s the time to speak to each other as we play music—by being in the moment. If you’re in the moment, that’s when you’re going to undress yourself.
GT: Become vulnerable, open.
WS: You’ll take off the b.s. layers that we’ve been conditioned to. And get free from being hijacked from the cradle.
All parents do the best that they can. I’m not saying that parents are hijackers because they’ve been hijacked [too.] But without being hijacked, how do you know you’ve been hijacked? Do you know what I mean, salt and pepper?
GT: Yes. Relativity.
WS: It’s kind of like The China Syndrome, where people are in hellish situations, fall in love with it and become comfortable in hell, comfortable with hating somebody, because of these kinds of jive emotions.
GT: Being conditioned and getting used to it habitually.
WS: Emotions are hijacked too. That’s the way I feel.
GT: You related being in the moment to jazz. On another level, being in the moment is the now, not the past or the future. Now is the only reality.
WS: In the philosophy I’ve been involved with, the moment, now, is the only place that you can change and alter the past and determine the future. In other words, don’t let the past influence you. Alter, to me, means don’t keep living by it. Start being the director, actor, producer of the movie of your own life. This is a challenge. I believe that life is the ultimate adventure. The single moment is the DNA of eternity. Nothing will be destroyed.
GT: Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. How would you describe your mission?
Wayne’s Mission
WS: My mission is to keep myself consistently unsedated, to dispel the venom in myself, as much as I can, for as long as I live and eternally. It’s an eternal quest for me because, as I said, there ain’t no such thing as the end. If there is, that’s very suspect. It’s a trap. Then I become what I’ve been fighting.
GT: To put it in my own words: it’s an expression of being alive, conscious, and striving to be awake as opposed to sedated, dis-eased, by what we were born with as we came into human form.
WS: What we’ve been invaded with from the cradle. Allow your real person to emerge.
Because when you look at it, and you ask someone what’s your real name? They say their given name. I say no. They might say “homo sapien.” No.
Your real name is something that’s done that hasn’t been done. That’s hard to do but must be done, which validates the ultimate adventure.
GT: You’ve said life is the ultimate adventure. Can you say more?
WS: The ultimate adventure is when each entity can penetrate one another and recognize their actual mission has been covered up, when wisdom can take over instead of just knowledge. It’s not enough to just say I’m honest and truthful. Truth doesn’t mean that much unless you make some value out of the truth.
To be fearless, brave, courageous, to learn what wisdom is, and learn what the person’s real, eternal identity is. And that eternal identity is evolving all the time.
We have a phrase, “When we start to do human revolution within ourselves, that’s when great, great change takes place.” [That’s] the opposite of forced enslavement and conditioning.
GT: You become free from the inside out.
WS: Right. You get the whole cognitive mechanism of learning, and to be able to recognize, by yourself, the decisions and directions you go in, moment to moment, in the moment.
GT: That’s what I learned years ago about wisdom. That wisdom is making the right decisions and being all that you can be, in every single moment, as you course through your life.
WS: And not to be forced, or hard-nosed about it. Sometimes you gotta just relaaxx, man, and stop worrying about stuff based on how you perceive.
GT: Let it flow. But to get beyond the conditioning, and the viruses, takes a process, a part of which is meditation, to come into the realization of the true you, right?
WS: Yes, all that. It’s just simple things sometimes that a grandmother might say. Like “Stop making a mountain out of a molehill.” They were not totally hijacked, our grandparents. We need the wisdom to really listen to the stuff that they really meant.
Sometimes I would say something like this when speaking with Miles [Davis]. And Miles would be in that same zone. We’d just talk about this just a little bit, some kind of philosophical something, and he’d say, “Why don’t you play that?” I said whoa. Miles was about that.
I discovered some things about Art Blakey. He was a person I thought I knew when I was with him, but there’s a whole lot that I didn’t know. He had a lot to do with turning the road for young children in Japan.
Sometimes when we’d play there, we’d go home, and he’d stay. I later found out he was giving drum classes with young kids, in 1960, ’62, ’63. I heard recently that those students are adults now and thank Art Blakey for helping them become strong adults and contributing people today. They played in the drum and fife core. We’re on our way home but he was sitting there doing that. Never mind all his self-destruct stuff; it’s the good stuff we should focus on.
GT: Same thing with Charlie Parker.
WS: Yes.
GT: You’re supporting Herbie’s International Jazz Day efforts just as you’ve backed your pianist Danilo Perez’s global jazz work. Tell us why.
WS: Such global efforts eradicate the artificial boundaries and comfort zones that become stifling in the journey of life, comfort zones that become cancerous and epidemic, separating and alienating all manner of people from whatever their roots are. Their roots are joined.
The differences in races, ethnicities, and nationalities are like the leaves of many trees, but all of the trees in the world are finally connected together, way beneath the earth. And there’s a connection to the universe and space too; it doesn’t have to be a solid form.