3:33⅓ - Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil

Today Wayne Shorter died. I think about all the music of his I’ve learned, loved and struggled with throughout my life. When you start learning jazz songs it’s easy to think of them as an unexplainable uniform alchemy, chords symbols written above dense melodies that are performed quite differently than they are read off the page. Inside Wayne’s writing I found something easier to grab on. His songs had amazing basslines, written into the charts. His songs had stark metronomic changes in the arrangement. His songs had singular moments, they had hits, they had gusto. They were the polar opposite of cookie cutter. But they weren’t fancy for fancy’s sake. Okay, here’s a big dumb thought about these. There are some type of songs that I feel require minimal inspiration. Work at the piano and find one and maybe you’ll find four more where that came from. The quality can differ, the feeling can differ but it’s the type of song you can find over and over again and make generations of. Then there are those songs where it feels like you can only find one like that, it’s bespoke, you can’t change it around a bit and make another one. I feel like jazz is full of the first, a workaday tune that does the trick, that helps you get to the solos. There’s a much smaller list of those songs in the catalog that feel like they were handed down from a higher power: “Hey it’s God, I made these two chords work together in a very hypnotic way if you space em out just like this”. And I felt like Wayne got handed so many great ideas from that higher force. He released songs at the pace where it seems he had to get in touch with something more consistent than inspiration, but whatever his method was, he gave us unique, bespoke, world class compositions for over half a century. I am so grateful that Wayne Shorter existed on this plane, and quite regretful I never saw him live.