lowquality.net

So, as some of you know, I’ve been lis­ten­ing to Wayne Shorter a lot lately. I’m not a Jazz musi­cian, but I like to study it because I feel like it makes me a bet­ter musi­cian when I play “eas­ier” music. I think of it like train­ing for a marathon, you prac­tice with weights on your feet so you’ll be faster when you do the real thing. Jazz is like weights on me feet, at least academically.

But when­ever I get into a musi­cian or band– and this has been the case since I was a teenage met­al­head– I like to know more about the peo­ple that play it. I guess largely this is due to the con­cep­tion that know­ing what expe­ri­ences may have evoked the feel­ings cap­tured in a song, or lyric or what­ever, will make me per­form the song bet­ter. I guess that’s mostly true. So, any­way, I got Kim to track down the Wayne Shorter biog­ra­phy at the library and I’ve been flip­ping through it here and there.

Wayne, appar­ently, likes to play word games with peo­ple in con­ver­sa­tion. For exam­ple, when some of the mem­bers of the Miles Davis Quin­tet were dis­cussing the mea­sure­ments of some women who had passed by, Wayne started in about Astro­physics and plan­e­tary dimen­sions. Many of his band­mates thought he was crazy, it’s not that the asso­ci­a­tions are totally unre­lated, but they’re kind of a stretch (and I don’t think a bet­ter descrip­tion could exsit for the music he was mak­ing with the Quintet).

He does this to inter­view­ers fre­quently, answer­ing direct ques­tions with ref­er­ences to broad cos­mic philoso­phies and spir­i­tual obser­va­tions. He seems to leave the inter­viewer feel­ing some­what con­fused and a tad over­whelmed but, as even Her­bie Han­cock says, it can have a qual­ity of mak­ing a sim­ple ques­tion seem so much more than it was intended to be.

Her­bie also says Wayne plays the horn the same way. That he can make so much more out of a small idea.… and this is what I have been think­ing about.