Greeted by a standing ovation, Wayne Shorter and the band he's been playing with since 2000 took the stage on Friday night for the first of two sold out concerts at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center: Brian Blade on drums, John Patitucci on bass, Danilo Perez on piano, with Shorter on tenor and soprano saxophone. For the next hour and forty minutes the quartet performed a set evocative of familiar material from this legendary composer, some phrases from Footprints, but not quite. Accumulated and contextualized by what went before, the music was intellectually rigorous. At first the listener had to grasp the abstraction of the composition, how an element of surprise is found in this structure. I actually had the feeling that the music had no center, just fanciful engaging riffs. As John Patitucci performed, draped over his bass, he became the center, and so on. Then Blade on his snare and Perez on piano would pick up a thread. Not until an encore when the group played a variation of Joy Ryder, did each instrument talk tightly to the next.
The performance to my literary mind was governed by the aesthetics of spontaneity, much as the writer Jack Kerouac crafted the best of his deeply poetic novels, in the moment. The musicians, confident of Shorter's composition, made it fresh each time. In Kerouac's words, they had IT. Time stopped.
The fans, I'm told many were musicians themselves, had packed the space and retreated in hushed tones. One said, he'd had a religious experience. Amen.
A version of this post also appears on Gossip Central.
It sounded to me as if the musicians were trying touch each other and did respond to each other's input in somewhat trite and trivial ways. That they were all excellent musicians was not in doubt. I loved some of the witty trifles thrown out by Perez, the beautiful tone and majesty of Pattitucci's bass and the subtle colorings of drummer Blade. Shorter, a great musician, sounded tentative and lacking the authority to pull it together. The idea of a cooperative is appealing, but really someone does have to take the lead sometimes.
I was left feeling that I heard some excellent musicians on a forgettable night. That the band was on the verge of making some amazing music, but couldn't quite make the leap from meanderings with some appealing moments to a momentous and memorable event.
Bob
I've only had the opportunity to see Wayne live once. It really was a spiritual experience. His voicings are so special that he can take you a place where you can see the pristine nature of your own mind.
I hear how woo woo that sounds, but it really was true for me.