Totally Flipping out about the upcoming Wayne Shorter Quartet Release

There is a new Wayne Shorter Quartet album coming out on February 5^th! I’m excited, you should be too. I was just 13 years old when I saw this band for the first time and got completely blown out of the water. They’re 2004 album Beyond the Sound Barrier was a mainstay for me and a bunch of close friends for most of high school. Now I know a bunch of people have heard Sound Barrier by now, and I think most people like it, but if you haven’t got the chance to see them live you are missing out on the fact that by the time that album came out, the band had already progressed a few light-years beyond what you hear on those recordings. In the early 2000’s the band was making a name for itself with radical revisions of classic pieces from Shorter’s oeuvre. When I saw them in 2004, they played three pieces, each stretching well over half an hour, with no readily discernible form. This band deals with improvisation on a grand scale. Furthermore, they are navigating this terrain without falling prey to any of the more tedious tropes that even the best improvisers often fall into. Shorter and company don’t embrace the more pure sense of improvisation that people in the free jazz scene tend to follow, While the idea of improvisation as a form of composition has been thrown around a lot, The Wayne Shorter Quartet’s music is one of the few working bands that actually justify use of such a phrase. I really don’t exaggerate in saying that they have the greatest sense of timing, patience and group rapport of anyone band that I’ve had occasion to hear. One of there improvisations really does feel like a structured, considered composition, without losing any of the immediacy of composition.

One could still wonder, whether this new album will capture the band’s live personality (or could any album do this?) Like their previous two albums, this next one will be a collection of live recordings from the band’s tours. As excellent as those records are, they don’t sound very similar to the band’s live performances, at least not the way that they play now. The new record also features a rather extended piece featuring the Imani Wind Quartet. Well… I’m skeptical about that one, but I’m perfectly willing to be proven wrong. There’s really no saying what this album will be like, but if you care about jazz and/or improvised music, there is really no excuse for sleeping on this one.