TT 408: Open Forum, and Wayne Shorter's Taste in Free Jazz

June is Bustin' Out All Over

The comments section on this post is temporarily open for all readers (usually it is for paid subscribers only). The previous threads were pretty active and interesting, so: Say what is on your mind, drop your hottest take, or ask me anything — but please keep it clean and civil.

(Many questions and comments arrive in various DMs and email inboxes. I don’t always have the bandwidth to answer, but here in the TT forum, where I’m on the hook to respond, I’ll do my best.)

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Lewis Porter recently posted some interviews with Wayne Shorter, including a link to a DownBeat Blindfold Test published in 1984. The full audio and text can be read and listened to at this link to the University of Idaho Leonard Feather Collection.

Jane Ira Bloom’s Mighty Lights is a classic record recorded in 1982 with Fred Hersch, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell. Hersch lays out on the title track.

Of course, any sax trio with Haden and Blackwell is going to be in Ornette Coleman tradition, although Bloom works against expectation by introducing “Mighty Lights” with a unison rhythm. As Ornette never used that kind of gambit, we start someplace new.

However, as the track goes on, it blissfully becomes just what it is supposed to be. If Haden and Blackwell are playing, the music will be Haden and Blackwell music. This means Ornette Coleman or Old and New Dreams, plus a few other esoteric things like Charles Brackeen’s wonderful Rhythm X.

Bloom can hang with these masters. The angular tune is really nice. She and Haden listen to each other while improvising, spontaneously creating harmony and motif. “Mighty Lights” ends up being a worthy entry in the lineage, with a lot of sing-song melody and a lot of fun folk rhythm.

I was frankly astonished at Shorter’s response in the blindfold test.

Shorter was not in a mood to award much praise that day: nothing got more than two stars. That’s not very collegial, but there’s also an argument that we should all be less guarded in public comments — although I admit I feel bad for the very young Jane Ira Bloom, who put out a great record only to have a significant musician trash it with a firm “it didn’t happen…no stars” in DownBeat.

Them’s the breaks. The more historically informative point is that Wayne Shorter cannot recognize Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell in a blindfold test.

There’s hardly anyone more distinctive than either Haden or Blackwell, and when they are playing together it is even more obvious.

Apparently Shorter never checked out much team Ornette Coleman, and now that I stop to think about it, Shorter’s composing and playing confirms this theory. Shorter’s most avant-garde sounds — the kind of thing heard on the Blue Note classic The All-Seeing Eye and in concert with his last working quartet — seems to be mostly informed by 20th-century European composers.

Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus took from Ornette Coleman’s bluesy folk fun, but Wayne Shorter did not.

For me, this is an important puzzle piece, and, considering it further, I suspect Herbie Hancock is aligned with Shorter on this topic. When borrowing from the avant-garde, Shorter and Hancock like clusters, atonal counterpoint, and theorist/composers like Olivier Messiaen. City stuff.

The wide open Texas spaces of Ornette Coleman’s “Ramblin’” or “Happy House” need not apply…

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Footnotes/ephemera:

— The most “Ornette-y” Miles Davis tracks are medium-up pianoless moments on Nefertiti, Sorcerer and Miles Smiles. Ed Blackwell played New Orleans parade rhythms to organize a chordless swing environment. Tony Williams plays Brazilian parade rhythms to organize a chordless swing environment.

— All drummers of any alignment love Ed Blackwell, I doubt Tony Williams would say of “Mighty Lights” that the drummer is just playing rudiments at a lesson.

— Ron Carter and Charlie Haden are both song and folk bassists. Carter organized avant-garde forms for Miles Davis as smoothly as Haden organized avant-garde forms for Ornette Coleman. When Dave Holland took over for Carter in the quintet with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, and Jack DeJohnette, the music lost that song and folk bass element. It was immediately more “European modernist” in ethos, and right next door to the collective chaos of Circle with Corea, Holland, Anthony Braxton, and Barry Altschul.

— Ron Carter does occasionally play rigorously “out” bass, for example on a wonderful cadenza on Shorter’s The All-Seeing Eye. “Half a Row"on Uptown Conversation with Herbie Hancock and Billy Cobham is reasonably “European modernist” a la Arnold Schoenberg or someone of that ilk. The closest Carter sounds to Charlie Haden might be “Bottom’s Up” on Etudes with Art Farmer, saxophonist Bill Evans, and Tony Williams, a fun combination of folk and avant-garde. (Ornette Coleman could have sat in on “Bottom’s Up” with no problem.)

— One of my favorite records of free music is Tony Williams’s Spring with Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, Herbie Hancock, and Gary Peacock. This is peak Gary Peacock, who organizes the music in his own fiercely lyrical fashion. However, I think Sam Rivers is perhaps the true architect of this LP, for Williams was mentored by Rivers and Rivers studied Europeans like Schoenberg and Messiaen. In what is perhaps a minority opinion, I prefer Williams/Rivers Spring to Shorter’s The All-Seeing Eye or other experimental “avant” tracks from that group/era like the aforementioned Carter “Half a Row" or Hancock’s “The Egg” on Empyrean Isles. Rivers was deeper into non-tonal systems than Shorter, Hancock, or Carter…For Rivers, atonality was not a special effect, it was a lifestyle.

— Unlike Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson was open to the Ornette Coleman lineage. He even hired Charlie Haden for a celebrated trio with Al Foster. Most of that music was on changes, but one tune, “In the Moment” from The Montreal Tapes, is open. Both Henderson and Foster sound comfortable in this space. I also adore the 1969 trio of Henderson, Carter, and DeJohnette playing free on "Foresight and Afterthought (An Impromptu Suite in Three Movements)" from Power to the People. At some point I want to write about Joe Henderson and the genres of jazz, for JoeHen seems to be the one player that could do any bag and still sound like himself.

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Again, the comments section is open for a few days. Ask me anything or simply state your piece. (It doesn’t need to be about Wayne Shorter or anything else in this post.) If you don’t chime in this time, I will host another open thread in another month or so.

Update: The comments are now closed. Thanks for reading, thanks for listening.