Jazz Just Lost One of Its All-Time Greats
Wayne Shorter was a giant of the genre as an improviser, bandleader, and thinker, but above all as a composer.
by David A. Graham
Mar 03, 2023
4 minutes
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In a 2014 interview, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter was asked how often his working quartet rehearsed. His reply was evasive and illuminating: “How do you rehearse the future?”
This was classic Shorter—gnomic, gnostic, mischievous, wise. It was a bit of a humblebrag too. For more than six decades, he conjured the future of music into being, with or without the benefit of rehearsal. Shorter, who died yesterday at 89, was a giant of jazz as an improviser, bandleader, and thinker, but above all as a composer—arguably the greatest in jazz since Thelonious Monk, and inarguably one of the greatest the genre, and the United States, has ever produced.
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