Wayne Shorter, Schizophrenia

Album of the Week, July 16, 2022

Miles may have gone through some quieter periods between 1964 and 1966, but he and the quintet were now, it seems, determined to make up for lost time. We’ve entered a period of the discography where it’s difficult to cover the recordings in strict chronological order, between the albums that were all laid down in one session and the others that are made up of tracks from a variety of sessions, sometimes spanning several years. But before we commence the later part of the Second Great Quintet, there was still room for members of the group to record their own solo albums in between quintet sessions. And so we find Wayne Shorter on March 10, 1967, entering Van Gelder Studios once more for Blue Note, this time with a sextet: Curtis Fuller on trombone, James Spaulding on alto sax and flute, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Joe Chambers on drums, to record Schizophrenia.

The album gets off to a strong start, with a Shorter original we’ve heard before, now in a fuller arrangement. “Tom Thumb” here benefits from Herbie Hancock’s sambaesque introductory statement, as well as James Spaulding’s distinctive tone on alto and the remarkable timbre of Curtis Fuller’s trombone. Herbie’s solo, full of unusual chordal clusters and tones, is notable after all the right-hand-only solos we heard on Miles Smiles, just six months before; it’s a reminder of how much of a full orchestral sound he can bring to the party. James Spaulding’s solo on alto is striking as well, covering a range of two plus octaves and playing with the time before returning to the contours of the melody. After the rocky terrain of The All Seeing Eye, this is almost Wayne Shorter as pop artist, though there’s nothing watered down about those solos.

As if to remind us of the earlier album, “Go” opens with an out-of-time modal chord progression from the horns, but then enters a more wistful balladic feel as they settle into a gentle samba-influenced melody. The group plays freely with time through the intro, but you can always feel the pulse just below the surface. When Spaulding enters on flute, it’s breathtaking, as is the handoff from the diminuendo in the flute into Shorter’s tenor entrance. The concluding chorus opens with Shorter alone before the rest of the horns come in to provide melancholy counterpoint. It’s one of those remarkable Shorter compositions that sneaks under the blankets of your mind.

The title track, true to its name, seems to have a split psyche, opening in a slow out-of-time statement by the horns before kicking into a higher gear as a fast modal workout for the whole band. Shorter’s solo is appropriately fiery, of course, but we also hear Fuller on a blistering trombone solo and Spaulding seems to fan the flames.

“Kryptonite” is a James Spaulding composition, and features him on flute in the opening statement of the theme, alongside the rest of the horns, and then into a flute solo that starts with the opening chords and then finds its way into adjoining tonalities, all while holding onto the rhythmic drive of the theme. It’s a strong opening statement, and Shorter’s solo goes in a different direction, picking up a rhythmic figure from Spaulding and then making his own scale out of the raw material of the chords, before returning to the opening theme and his opening rhythmic statement. Hancock’s solo vamps over or two chords from the theme but is mostly a right-hand statement, before the final chorus comes in.

“Miyako,” named for Shorter’s daughter with his ex-wife Teruko Nakagami (who appears on the cover of Speak No Evil), is a ballad in the spirit of “Infant Eyes,” which was also dedicated to her. The melody is simple here, but the richness of the arrangement—where would this album be without Curtis Fuller’s trombone??—sets it apart, as does the chord progression that takes us from minor to relative major to lands unexplored in just a few bars. It’s stunning…

… but not quite as stunning as the opening of “Playground,” a full band workout that seems to flash from darkness to valediction to schoolyard namecalling in the first minute. We’re not in pop music territory here anymore, but the freer statement feels closer to where Shorter’s muse was taking him. Still, the closing is nowhere near as dark as The All Seeing Eye. Despite (or perhaps because of) the freedom of Shorter’s approach, we still find ourselves unexpectedly in a gospel moment as Hancock exchanges chords and comments under Fuller’s solo. Spaulding’s solo complements the gospel moment, but his repetition of the thematic idea is more free jazz than gospel shout. Hancock takes us back to the darkness from the opening theme, but playfully, with runs in the right hand against rumbled chords in the left, leading into the final chorus with the horns. A repeated blare on the final chord takes the song, and the album, out.

Schizophrenia is as wide reaching as its title suggests, finding Shorter revisiting some of the musical approaches from his earlier albums at the same time as he feels his way into new ways to approach free jazz. It’s a fun record, if measured by nothing else than it seems to end too soon. Some of the fun of the record would return in Shorter’s compositions on the next Miles Davis Quintet album; we’ll hear that next week.

You can listen to Schizophrenia here.

Wayne Shorter, The All Seeing Eye

Album of the Week, June 25, 2022.

As 1965 ran on, Miles Davis continued with health problems and personal setbacks. His hip replacement in April had failed, but he checked himself out of the hospital due to boredom in July. In August he was back in the hospital for another go at the hip replacement, this time with a plastic ball joint. The band continued recording, though. We’ve listened to Hancock’s Maiden Voyage. Tony Williams recorded his debut solo album Spring in August with Wayne Shorter and Hancock alongside. And Shorter recorded The Soothsayer in March, The Collector in June, and recorded the Lee Morgan album The Gigolo with his old Jazz Messengers bandmate in June and July. And in October, Shorter returned to Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey with an octet to record his next album, The All Seeing Eye.

To say that this new album was a radical departure from what came before is accurate, and might understate how dramatic a development this was for Shorter the composer. Not only was this the largest group he had ever written for — with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Freddie Hubbard returning from Speak No Evil, and now augmented by trombonist Grachan Moncur III, alto sax James Spaulding, drummer Joe Chambers, and Shorter’s brother Alan composing and playing flugelhorn on the final track — but compositionally this was far from the normal territory he covered. Even coming after some of the danker tracks on E.S.P. we are in new territory here. There is little of the blues or standards jazz on this album. We teeter over the abyss.

Shorter meant this as a concept album, exploring the meaning of life and the existence of God and the Universe. It’s easy to hear a search for the divine in the title track, which opens the album. In some ways the tune here is the most conventional one on the album, but the thick chords take it to a completely different place. Hubbard has a blazing solo that Shorter picks up and carries forward. Hancock slows things back down with his solo and the band comes back at the end to close things down.

The opening track is wild, but nothing prepares the listener for the free opening to “Genesis,” which presents a full keyboard chromatic scale by Hancock that builds from the abyss to a modal statement of the theme, first in the piano, then continued in the horns. Coming out of the band’s opening statement, first Carter and then Shorter take their own free statement of the melody. Shorter builds to a rhythmic pattern that he repeats on a single note for four measures before Hancock picks up the pattern, while Shorter spins back out. Hubbard takes the next solo, keeping in free time while exploring different tones and octaves with his horn. Moncur slowly explores an ascending chromatic scale as the part of Creation that he surveys unfurls. At the end the main theme comes back with the chords from the horns, followed by the piano theme to bring the composition full circle. Twelve bar blues this ain’t.

Chaos,” despite its title, is more conventional, albeit deep in modal jazz. Shorter has called this “what man has done… to God’s creation,” and the music reflects a deep tension, conflict and warring voices, all over the constant pulse of Carter and Chambers. First Shorter, then Hubbard and Hancock make fiery statements before the ensemble plays out the theme again and begin to spiral back out, ending the track in a rare fade-out.

The Face of the Deep” is a relatively more conventional slow ballad, rendered fresh both by the dense voicing of the horn quartet on the theme and by Hancock’s contemplative solo, accompanied by sensitive work from Chambers on the cymbals and a slow heartbeat from Carter. As an aside, this record features some of Carter’s earliest use of the portamento that would eventually become one of his signature techniques. Shorter’s solo here is reminiscent of his work on “Infant Eyes,” with an approach as much about space as about his notes. The horns return after to restate the theme with an ominous swell that leads into the final track.

Mephistopheles,” the sole composition by Alan Shorter on the album, seems at first puckish, with an angular melody in the horns that is played in clusters of notes. But then the rhythm section enters with an insistent ground played in the bass and piano accompanied by subtle cymbal work by Chambers, and the horns return with an ominous restatement of the theme followed by a scream. Shorter picks up the solo over rolling drumwork and that continuing ground, sketching a portrait of an uneven, unpredictable ruler of the underworld. His brother follows with a flugelhorn solo that continues the exploration of the Hadean region, playing against stabbing chords in the piano as he circles the melody, raising it higher and then descending back into the pit. Moncur gets the last word from the horns, with a solo that reflects less fire and more heat, taking the persistent beat of the ground and adopting it for his own descending solo. Chambers takes the ground and double times it for his own solo, then breaks free of the boundaries of the bars before returning to the ground beneath the horns who restate the melody once more, finishing with a final scream.

Shorter would explore many more boundaries of music, both with his solo recordings and his work with the Miles Davis Quintet, but The All Seeing Eye stands as a conceptual milestone in his catalog, both forbidding in its thorny complexity and inspiring in its dark beauty. It was not a permanent change of direction, and next time we’ll explore yet another side of him as a composer and sideman alongside another of his Art Blakey bandmates.

My copy of the record (top) is the recent Tone Poet reissue from Blue Note, which sounds superb. You can listen to the full album here.