Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter

John Kelman

Senior Editor since 2004

With the realization that there will always be more music coming at him than he can keep up with, John wonders why anyone would think that jazz is dead or dying.

Recent articles (2,366 total)

Published: December 19, 2004

View All 1 2

Throughout Shorter's life there has been tragedy, including the brain damage of his daughter Iska and the loss of his wife Ana Maria and their niece on the infamous TWA Flight 800 crash of '96. Shorter's resilience, in large part due to his Buddhist faith, turned loss into triumph, and discord into ascendance. Following the death of Ana Maria, in fact, and following his marriage to family friend Carolina Dos Santos in '99, Shorter began a serious and concerted return to the public eye, collaborating with orchestras and ultimately forming his current quartet where, for the first time he is revisiting some of his earlier composed works. But what distinguishes Shorter is his ability to reinvent his material. Rather than simply reproducing songs like "Footprints," "JuJu" and "Water Babies," he, Perez, Pattituci and Blade take them to completely new places. And in the same way that Miles would provide pithy and sometimes on the surface unfathomable instructions, so Shorter gives his band mates directions like "We'd rather go for elusiveness than clarification."

The idea of writing a book on an artist who is not only still alive but in the midst of a musical renaissance and, therefore, still a work in progress, may seem premature; but Mercer gives it all sense even as it ends on an open-ended note. How many writers have the opportunity to not only interview people who have been associated with the subject, but to spend significant time with the artist himself, getting a clear picture of his life from his perspective?

In some respects Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter is more autobiography than biography. Mercer's clear and concise prose reflects Shorter's own personality in a way that would be impossible had she not had such deep exposure to Shorter himself. Mercer has delivered a book that, by having the luxury of involving the artist himself, is arguably be one of the most thorough, enlightening and entertaining biographies written of a jazz artist to date.

View All 1 2