Shorter's distinguished reputation as a player, composer and innovator of jazz in no way prepares you for the sound of his voice piping in over the phone lines. It's pinched and raspy, a little cracked around the edges, and he speaks with the genial wisdom of a Buddhist monk or a Jedi master. He emphasizes certain words with hushed volume and a prolonged hiss of breath; others he pounds into your eardrum with an ecclesiastical yelp. "Yeah, there's a connection between painting and writing and music, all those things," he explains thoughtfully. "When you talk about connecting things, connecting dots and stuff, that's just intelligence. But human beings have been very busy historically -- I'm talking about hundreds of years -- with disconnecting dots."
Shorter's own history is a lesson in the art of connection. Throughout his 45 years as a professional musician, he has hooked up with some of the most celebrated ensembles in the jazz pantheon: Weather Report, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis's mid- to late-'60s group -- not to mention his own acclaimed bands as a leader. In each incarnation, he has brought together many elements of style, technique and concept, synthesizing bebop, avant-garde, Latin, funk and rock; he's even played with Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell. Underlining it all, though, has been his faith in the science and religion that is jazz.
"One time my music teacher at NYU was teaching this advanced harmony class, and she asks us, 'How many of you students have a hard time at math?' About half the class raised their hands. And she said, 'Well, you're doing math now,'" Shorter, a New York University alumnus, remembers with a laugh. From his hard-swinging days on the Jazz Messengers' front line to the abstract intensity of his work on such Davis landmarks as In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, he has restlessly explored the arithmetical dimensions of lyricism, balance and tonality in jazz. His own masterpieces as a leader, including 1965's bewitching Speak No Evil and 1974's chart success Native Dancer, were always a couple decimal places away from the mainstream, adding soul and mystery to melody and rhythm.
"Using numbers to me is just another way of having fun. Sometimes you have to go through all this mathematics and planning to get to that gut feeling," he says. "When you can go and reach that deep, then you know you've answered the question 'What is life?' What most people don't realize is, the answer is the question."
Shorter's explanations of his music, like his songs themselves, often start out as simple, friendly conversations before trailing off into complex and extended narratives on the nature of life, death and the reality of the cosmos. No doubt he absorbed some of this philosophical mysticism during his long friendship with John Coltrane. Though they never appeared on the same record, the two saxophone luminaries developed their respective revolutionary styles while practicing and performing together in the early '60s.
Still, Shorter warns against the mistake of whittling away one's creative impulse with too much rehearsal and scale-running.
"In some instances, practice does not make perfect," he says. "You have to be very careful about this. The element of surprise has something to do with more than practice: becoming aware. You can practice something and still have tunnel vision. You become a tunnel visionary."
Shorter uses both alto and soprano saxophone to probe the depths of texture and emotion, shifting from a sparse and lonesome ghostliness to jumbled runs of notes and harmonics, but his playing in later years has kept mostly to the minimal. He is also known for his equal strength as both composer and improviser, though Shorter sees the dichotomy of freedom versus structure as "an illusion" that becomes revealed through the act of performance. "Improvisation slowed down is composition. Composition speeded up is improvisation," he says sagely. "But that's actually leaving a lot of other components out. One big thing is story, the storytelling aspect."
And how exactly does one tell a story through a saxophone?
"How do you do it?" Shorter echoes incredulously, as if startled that the answer isn't common knowledge. "Why, you have to forget all of your training, that is, all of your academic training, all of the patterns and cliches and risks. If you want to tell a story through music -- and tell a hell of a story through music -- you have to make music that doesn't sound like music. Like Miles used to say, 'I get tired of hearing music.' That means all the hit stuff, those songs on American Idol, all that stuff that's singy-songy, dingy-dongy."
Shorter, accordingly, is an avid reader, citing as favorites Frank Herbert's Dune and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead -- two allegorical epics dealing with the social and moral destiny of humankind. "I think a real story has something which brings value to the surface," explains Shorter. "By the way, we need more novelists. We need more people on this side of the fence ready for the great surge into the galactic unknown. It's life's adventure, life's eternal adventure."
At this point, as if in the midst of one of his fiery solos, Shorter has built up an unquenchable head of steam. "What is music for besides entertainment, escape, going to the bank real fast, having a hit and all that stuff? I guess you could ask, what is anything for? Well, it opens the door to our eternal existence," he theorizes. "We're blind and deaf because of all these desensitizing elements and mechanisms that have invaded our planet through our own self-indulgence and our quest for monetary wealth. Some people wait to see life happening in a movie on the weekend. I believe that we should aim to make movies out of our own lives, for we are the director, producer, actor. We do the scoring, everything. To me, it sounds concrete. Other people, they say, 'Oh, you're thinking in pipe dreams; you're out there.' There's not too much room in this world for the dreamer."
Shorter then interrupts himself. "Wait a minute, breaking news: Martha Stewart arrives in federal court in New York. She's being indicted," he says, apparently watching TV while speaking on the phone. "Do you know how Martha Stewart spells soul?"
Can't say that I do.
"S-o-l-d."
No argument here. But Shorter has a remedy for Stewart's bourgeois ruthlessness: "I think she needs to speak with someone who's not infected with the material world," he advises. "She really has to speak with...I won't say a priest, but someone who can help her get in touch with her eternal self. She is an eternal, whether she knows it or not. What we're doing through music or art or writing or whatever is telling of the coming of the great, eternal adventure of life, through its great tragedies and great happinesses. But the indestructible happiness is to transcend all the temporary things like 'My phone just died!' or 'Somebody stole my girl!'" He croons the last four words as if they were the chorus of a corny pop song. "Even heavy tragedies like somebody very close to you dying, the kind that make you want to drive your car off a cliff or drink yourself to death, can be transcended."
"The intermissions of sleep and death, they're just bridges," he whispers.
The metaphysical breadth of Shorter's work is perhaps its most defining feature. From the spiritual resonance of the epochal Bitches Brew to the harmonious convergence of the V.S.O.P. Quintet, his gifts to jazz have made the art form both more adventurous and more accessible. His most popular and lucrative project remains Weather Report, formed right after he left the Miles Davis group in 1970. One of the few groups of the fusion era that didn't wind up degenerating into either fluffy disco-pop or gratuitous prog, Weather Report was an implement with which Shorter and pianist Joe Zawinul charted new territories of rhythm, electronics and mood. Shorter has also collaborated with Herbie Hancock on many albums over the years -- Shorter's innovative Adam's Apple and Hancock's funk opus Man Child being particularly stunning examples -- culminating in 1997's 1+1, an affable, even brotherly duet between these post-bop giants.
Some of Shorter's post-Weather Report work, though, has suffered from a little too much slickness and digitization. But his latest two albums -- 2002's Footprints Live! and this year's entrancing Alegria -- rekindle the hunger, urgency and acoustic warmth of his creative peak. Pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade seem to be telepathically linked to their leader; their intricate playing spins webs around Shorter's graceful, weightless lines, a single neural network of flashing synapses and pulsing emotion. The music, like Shorter himself, is at once earthy and otherworldly.
"Man, this is the joy of living. To be manifested as a human being is the greatest fortune ever in this thing called the ultimate entity. All the guys in the band, we're just trying to convey all of that joy in the music," Shorter concludes, sounding a bit like Yoda if he had come of age in the 1950s reading sci-fi pulps and listening to bebop records in Newark. "When we go on stage, the only thing we prepare for is to be vulnerable. We can't rehearse for anything. How the hell do you rehearse the unknown?"
