The awesomely talented jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter died on Thursday at age 89. Shorter made unforgettable music that is likely to live on long after him.
The awesomely talented jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter died on Thursday at age 89. Shorter’s long and illustrious career began in the 1950s; in the course of it, he made unforgettable music that is likely to live on long after him. When jazz was at its apogee as a centerpiece of the confident and forward-looking America of the post-World War II period and its aftermath, Shorter was a remarkable innovator, an imaginative and daring composer and improviser who never lost his deep melodic sense, even when exploring the outer reaches of what music could embody and express. Shorter’s passing is a signpost of a little-noted fact: a great era of American culture has ended.
The titans are passing from the scene. Sonny Rollins, the saxophone colossus, is still with us at age 92. So is another great tenor man, Archie Shepp, who is 85. Pharoah Sanders, another formidable tenor saxophonist, died last September. Miles Davis and John Coltrane are long gone, as are Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, and so many others. The generation of musicians that gave us such rich, exhilarating, and uniquely American music is for the most part now available to us only on their recordings, and we can be grateful to have those.
Wayne Shorter was at the center of the golden age of jazz (or one of the periods that can deservedly be called that) and played with a veritable Who’s Who of the magnificent musicians of the period. When he was in his twenties, he was a key member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and made a number of classic recordings with the star-crossed trumpeter Lee Morgan and others.
