Alan Shorter: Mephistopholes To Orgasm Revisited

It is often said of a musician, be they alive or no longer with us, that they deserve to be better known. This is emphatically true of the wayward trumpeter and composer Alan Shorter, who was overshadowed during his lifetime by his brother, Wayne Shorter, and who continues to be passed over today in 2024.

Some responsibility for his obscurity lies with Alan Shorter himself. Known as Doc Strange to his teenage schoolmates in Newark, New Jersey, Shorter engaged with the music business strictly on his own terms, refusing ever to compromise. It was an unequal struggle, made the more so by the relatively challenging nature of his music. As a trumpeter and flugelhornist Shorter's technique was only so-so, and his improvising abrupt and micro-episodic. As a composer—and it was as a composer that Shorter shone most brightly—he was unsettling going on spooky. Indeed, some of his pieces make Bernard Herrmann sound like a composer of lullabyes.

A measure of Shorter's obscurity during his lifetime can be gauged from the amount of space given to him in The New Grove Dictionary Of Jazz, first published in 1988, the year Shorter passed, and then by far the most comprehensive one-stop compendium of jazz biography available. Almost alone among the thirteen musicians who are heard on Mephistopholes To Orgasm Revisited, Shorter has no entry in the 1,400 page large-format tome. Perhaps significantly, the only other musician heard on the album to be missing from Grove is another overshadowed sibling, drummer Muhammad Ali, who took over on one recording session after his brother Rashied Ali walked out following a row with producer Esmond Edwards.

When it came to talking about his music, Shorter was cooperative and fulsome on the infrequent occasions when he was interviewed. But his responses, enigmatic at best and incomprehensible at worst, tend to raise more questions than they do answers. (In a 1967 interview for Jazz Hot magazine, Shorter said: "Some of these things I say, I don't understand them myself, not completely. I don't know why I say this or that.") What little hard information about Shorter's life and career is known was brought together in 2020 by aficionado David Grundy in his essay "Why?" The Parabolic New Music of Alan Shorter. The piece can be found online, and it remains Shorter's most extensive biography.

Mephistopholes To Orgasm Revisited opens with "Mephistopholes," from Wayne Shorter's The All Seeing Eye (Blue Note, 1966). The 9:40 track was written (and presumably arranged) by Alan Shorter, who also plays on the album. The rest of Revisited is the complete Orgasm (Verve, 1969), one of only two albums Shorter released as a leader. He fronts a quintet featuring Gato Barbieri and either bass and drums team Reggie Johnson and Rashied Ali or Charlie Haden and Muhammad Ali. ("Rapids," on the YouTube video below, is one of the tracks). The album benefits, like all the releases on the ezzthetics label's Revisited series, from state-of-the-art sound restoration.