Arguably no other living figure ties together the last 50 years of jazz the way Wayne Shorter does. Classic hard bop with Art Blakey, shimmering solo albums for blue note bordering on freejazz, state of the art post bop improv with Miles' second quintet, omnivorous fusion with Joe Zawinul - Shorter clearly has membership of the pantheon of great sax players that runs from Bird and Prez, through Trane and Sonny Rollins, in fact he may be the last of the great tenors everybody agrees on. So its not a surprise to see a medium size theatre full of gently aging audients wait for Wayne Shorter to appear onstage with his all star band at the Helix last night.
Now past 70, he looks like a more sprightly, more portly Mohamed Ali. Over the course of two hours he never leaves the crook of the grand piano and occasionally seems to hold onto it for fear of falling over, but after this performance I suspect he could still take most of us in a one to one fight. Because this is serious man music for men with serious man beards.
Without a word, a countoff or an indication of tempo we are immediately plunged into a world of pure interpretation. A miasmic, never ending flow of pure sound communication sweeps over us. Never static for long enough to grasp, but always sketching and stretching aspects of the same essential territory. These people really are masters at demolishing the distinction between composition and improvisation, and with so few signposts to orient us (the briefest of quotes from Footprints and Miles Smiles), the effect is alternately one of revelation and seasickness. The first thing to leave you is your sense of time. After ten minutes I thought I might have been there an hour, after an hour I was wondering if the outside world still existed, and when it was over I couldn’t recollect the experience as having had a time dimension at all. The second thing you lose is the blood flow to your lower body. These tunes are long. I counted four in the whole gig, including the encore. If Wayne Shorters lungs felt half as bad as my ass after all that then he deserves our everlasting respect.

Much has been made of the similarities of approach between this band and the great Miles quintet, the elasticity of form, the blurring of the boundaries between composition and improv, the effortless telepathic interplay, the shifting textures... Of course I never had the opportunity to see Miles, but judging by the surviving documents of the period there is at least some justification for the parallel, except, except... when you get this close to the classic sound you start to get greedy. Where’s the second horn? Maybe its a facile reaction to say there’s a Miles shaped hole in the sound, but would it be any more defensible to say there’s a Freddie Hubbard shaped hole? On reflection, I think the answer is yes, and in fact we may be on more solid ground if we substitute trumpet for trombone. Grachan Moncur III anyone?