
Alegria (Verve Music Group)
Wayne Shorter
Released March 2003
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album 2004
JazzTimes Album of the Year 2003
Record of the Year 2004 Jazz Journalists Association Awards
YouTube:
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About:
Alegría is an album by saxophonist Wayne Shorter released on Verve Records in 2003. It is the second album to feature the ‘Footprints Quartet’ of Shorter, pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade – it appears intact on tracks 1, 7 & 10. The piece “Orbits” is a complete and quasi-orchestral re-imagining of the song of the same name, originally recorded by the Second Miles Davis Quintet and released on the album Miles Smiles in 1967. “Capricorn 2” revisits another Shorter composition first recorded by Davis in 1967 (though not released until 1976 on the primarily Shorter-composed Water Babies), while “Angola” dates from Shorter’s own 1965 album, The Soothsayer.
Track Listing:
1. Sacajawea (Wayne Shorter) 7:40
2. Serenata (Leroy Anderson) 6:09
3. Vendiendo Algería 7:03
4. Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 (Heitor Villa-Lobos) 6:00
5. Angola (Wayne Shorter) 5:28
6. Interlude (Wayne Shorter) 1:49
7. She Moves Through the Fair (Traditional) 4:39
8. Orbits (Wayne Shorter) 6:09
9. 12th Century Carol 6:04
10. Capricorn 2 (Wayne Shorter) 5:59
Personnel:
Wayne Shorter: soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone
Danilo Perez: piano (1, 3, 7, 9, 10)
John Patitucci: bass
Brian Blade: drums (1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 10)
With
Robert Sadin: conductor (2, 3, 8, 9)
Brad Mehldau: acoustic piano (2, 5, 8)
Terri Lyne Carrington: drums (3, 5, 9)
Alex Acuña: percussion (3, 4, 5, 9)
Frank Morelli: bassoon (2, 8)
Allen Blustine: clarinet (2, 3, 8), bass clarinet (2, 3, 8)
Chris Potter: bass clarinet (5), tenor saxophone (5)
Paul Dunkel: flute (2, 3, 8)
Steven Taylor: oboe (2, 8)
John Clark: French horn (3, 9), alto horn (9)
Stewart Rose: French horn (3, 9)
Bruce Eidem: trombone (3, 9)
Jim Pugh: trombone (3, 5)
Papo Vázquez: trombone (3)
Steve Davis: trombone (5)
Michael Boschen: trombone (9)
Chris Gekker: trumpet (3, 9)
Lew Soloff: trumpet (3, 9)
Jeremy Pelt: trumpet (5)
Marcus Rojas: tuba (9)
Charles Curtis: cello (2, 8), cello solo (4)
David Garrett, Barry Gold, Gloria Lum, Daniel Rothmuller, Brent Samuel and Cecilia Tsan: cello ensemble (4)
Recorded at Cello Studios (Hollywood, California); Avatar Studios, Clinton Recording Studios, Sear Sound and Burning Kite Studio (New York City, New York).
Produced by Robert Sadin
Executive Producer: Richard Seidel
Recording and Additional Mixing: Clark Germain
Mixing: David Darlington
Mastering: Mark Wilder
Art Direction: Hollis King
Design: Sachico Asano
Review:
First,
an admission: I have always been ambivalent about Wayne Shorter. This is
heresy, I realize. Shorter, after all, is a composer of jazz standards, such as
“Footprints” and “Sanctuary,” that will last as long as the art form is
practiced somewhere on the planet. He is a saxophonist of undeniable skill and
originality and seriousness, and he has been a guiding force in groundbreaking
ensembles like Miles Davis’ “second great quintet” and Weather Report. He makes
records that only Wayne Shorter could have made.
Yet from his earliest Blue Note recordings, he
never fully worked for me. His tone on tenor saxophone had a slightly dry
asceticism, and I could never fully buy in to his oddities, his jittery
scattering of thematic fragments, his crowded harmonies, his intellectualized
asymmetrical phrasing. I preferred the 1964 Miles Davis band with George
Coleman on tenor to the post-1965 quintet featuring Shorter. True, as a musical
thinker, Coleman was not in Shorter’s class. Yet the Davis band with Shorter
never made a masterpiece like the one it made in 1964 with Coleman, My Funny
Valentine.
There is also a genuine question whether all the
ground that Shorter broke for Miles Davis turned out to be fertile. Albums
strongly influenced by Shorter, like E.S.P., from 1965, still sound amazingly
modern in their melodic and harmonic ambiguities. But they also sent Davis down
a path that led to his abandonment of acoustic jazz and the opportunity to
build upon his enormous early achievements.
As for Shorter’s 15 years with Weather Report,
and his switch to soprano saxophone as his primary instrument, and all the
electric projects that came after-I listened more from obligation than from
enthusiasm. Weather Report was the greatest ensemble that ever played the
self-limiting genre of fusion. But it was still fusion.
Then came Footprints-Live! It appeared last year
without warning: Shorter’s first all-acoustic recording since 1967, a volatile
joining of forces between a reborn 68-year-old master and one of the hottest
young rhythm sections in jazz. It was recorded live in the summer of 2001 at
several lesser-known European jazz festivals, and, while the audio quality was
undistinguished, the music was not. Shorter, mostly on tenor, played with the
fearlessness of a creative artist who has nothing to lose and nothing to prove,
and he just aired it out. Incited by his rhythm section, he took sublime
liberties with his own vintage tunes, like the title track. Footprints-Live!
won polls and prizes all over the world in 2002, and it was voted JazzTimes’
album of the year. On a personal level, it was the Shorter recording that
replaced my ambivalence with undiluted admiration, if not quite passion.
Because of the high profile of Footprints-Live!,
its successor, Alegria, has been much anticipated. The personnel includes the
same provocative rhythm section: pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci
and drummer Brian Blade. Yet in many respects Alegria could hardly be a more
different album from its predecessor. It is a studio recording rather than live
(with much better sound). It presents an expanded ensemble with percussion,
brass, woodwinds and strings, rather than a quartet. It is about composition
and orchestration and the painting of complex, impressionistic designs on a
broad canvas, rather than blowing. Its concept comes from highly conscious,
detailed processes, rather than in-the-moment visceral inspiration.
And it works.
This hour of music contains rare richness and
range. Wayne Shorter’s musical literacy is so sophisticated that he sounds
entirely at home as he moves from 1930’s flamenco tunes (“Vendiendo Alegria”)
to a medieval Christmas carol (“12th Century Carol”) to Celtic folk songs (“She
Moves Through the Fair”) to pieces from his own 1960’s portfolio (“Orbits,”
“Capricorn II”) that he blows up and reassembles. He utilizes an ensemble at
times as large as 20 pieces to create dramatically variegated, through-composed
contexts for his own adventurous forays on both tenor and soprano. There are
lilting, suave meters, and contrapuntal intricacies, and pieces that drive hard
with dense African energies.
It is striking that, given all the meticulous
arrangements, and given also the cameo appearances of powerful guests like Brad
Mehldau and Chris Potter, there remains so much space for (and so much focus
on) Shorter’s own individual improvisations. He plays brilliantly: his pure,
luminous soprano wheeling and soaring with or against the full ensemble; his
tenor lines more like broken brush strokes and suggestive spare gestures. The
pieces on which he plays both horns, like “She Moves Through the Fair,” are
especially interesting in the way they juxtapose Shorter’s two distinct
instrumental personalities.
The piece that will get the most attention is
Shorter’s adaptation of “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5” by Heitor Villa-Lobos.
Its marriage of classical and jazz idioms sounds unforced, even inevitable.
Afro-Brazilian percussion sets up Shorter’s out-of-time, floating tenor
sketches, which transition seamlessly to an instrument in the same tonal register,
the cello of Charles Curtis, whose evocative sonorities linger on Villa-Lobos’
poignant theme. It seems unlikely that the arch formalities of Curtis’ cello
could melt into the sound of Shorter’s horn, but it happens. Shorter spins
corollaries of the melody before passing it back to Curtis, and then they play
it together in pancultural counterpoint.
Alegria, in the scope of its ambition and the
virtuosity of its execution, is a genuine advance upon the widely praised
Footprints-Live! So where does that leave things, ambivalence-wise? As
impressive as it undeniably is, Alegria does not feel like one unified arc of
aesthetic impulse driven by inner necessity, but like a series of examples of
Wayne Shorter’s extraordinary facility and cleverness.
It would be a fair question to ask, “If you stop
just short of according Alegria the status of a major work, what recent album
by a saxophonist-plus-large-ensemble do you think is more important?” To cite
one example, I believe that the Joe Lovano Nonet’s 52nd Street Themes (Blue
Note) is a stronger recording.
But I also believe that Alegr¡a will win as many
awards as Footprints-Live!, and it will deserve them.
Tom Conrad (JazzTimes)