RIP Wayne Shorter

 

It's becoming a somewhat maudlin tradition now to go on "remembrance pilgrimages" on YouTube and watch performances and interviews of musicians that have passed on. It's kind of jarring because the music that I'm working on now is not jazz so I have to shift gears and go back and reacquaint myself with listening to jazz, now with the passing of Wayne Shorter.

Jazz is viewed as being more of a vertical, harmonic phenomenon, where musicians are improvising over chord changes or grooves, but Shorter's improvisations are predominantly linear. I think that's what we like about his approach--especially on the soprano sax.

What I also realized is that there are a lot of commonalities between genres, yet require a cognitive shift. Whether that's going to influence what I'm doing now is doubtful--any more than listening to rock would influence jazz--although Miles Davis was very influenced by pop and rock.

What's is also remarkable about a lot of jazz musicians who cut their teeth in the 1950s is that they're very interested in science and eclectic in their tastes, especially physics--John Coltrane particularly--or rather they pushed the circles of the Venn diagram so that there was more of an overlap between art and science. Writing music can have the effect that you're involved in something technical because of music notation. G7(#5,#9) looks like it's part of a mathematical formula--and is to some degree, but only because jazz musicians rearranged the furniture in the Venn diagram. I said a long time ago, and is one of my Dynaxioms: "Jazz sounds like an art, but it's really more like a science ."

In another interview, Wayne Shorter was talking about our pursuit of living on other planets and moons. He was very cynical about it as I am: We are designed to live on Earth, not Mars. We can invent apparatuses to live there but the amount of effort required to make that happen can be applied more easily here, and would benefit more people than six people on Mars.

Music is a way to think about lots of other things, which don't necessarily have to be in the Venn diagram mix.

Lastly, what I admire about all pre-social media artists is that they are more able to pursue art for the sake of itself as an autotelic, or even spiritual, activity. Now everyone is in the analytics dashboard looking at their numbers.