Wayne Shorter

Wayne Shorter was born on the twenty-fifth of August 1933 at Newark, New Jersey, and came up through Arts High School, New York University — music education, 1956 — and two Army years at Fort Dix. After a spell with Maynard Ferguson he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in August 1959, taking the chair Hank Mobley had held, beside Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, and Jymie Merritt; he rose to the band's musical director and stayed five years.

In September 1964 Miles Davis called, and the Second Great Quintet — Davis, Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams — had its composer: "E.S.P.," "Nefertiti," "Footprints," "Sanctuary." The same seasons produced his own Blue Note masterworks — Night Dreamer and JuJu in 1964, Speak No Evil recorded on the Christmas Eve of that year, The All Seeing Eye, Adam's Apple. He stayed with Davis into the electric dawn of In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, leaving in 1970.

That year he co-founded Weather Report with Joe Zawinul and Miroslav Vitouš and rode it sixteen years — Heavy Weather and "Birdland" carried the music to the world in 1977. A Nichiren Buddhist from 1973, he lost his wife Ana Maria on TWA Flight 800 in 1996. In 2000 he formed his great final quartet — Danilo Pérez, John Patitucci, Brian Blade — where composition happened in the act of playing.

Twelve Grammy Awards came to him — among them the 1998 prize for his composition "Aung San Suu Kyi," and a last one won weeks before his death. He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1998, took the Polar Music Prize in 2017 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2018, and at eighty-eight premiered his opera Iphigenia with esperanza spalding. He died at Los Angeles on the second of March 2023, at eighty-nine. Honored be Wayne Shorter, who wrote the questions the music is still answering.