American jazzman Wayne Shorter, saxophonist considered one of the greatest jazz composers in the United States and a jack-of-all-trades musician, died Thursday in Los Angeles at the age of 89.
His agent Alisse Kingsley confirmed this to AFP in a written message, but without revealing the cause of death of this African-American artist born August 25, 1933 in Newark, near New York, and whose influence on the jazz and other musical genres spanned more than half a century.
eclectic musician
The one that the New York Times describes Thursday in his obituary as an “innovative”, “intrepid” and “enigmatic” musician who played with the greatest – Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Art Blakey – and excelled on both soprano and tenor saxophone, especially with his band jazz fusion of the 1970s and 1980s, Weather Report.
Eclectic and able to approach a number of musical registers, he has played with the Brazilian Milton Nascimento, the Malian Salif Keita, the Canadian Joni Mitchell and even with the legendary rockers of the Rolling Stones, Carlos Santana or even the pop singer Norah Jones.
By the 1960s, Wayne Shorter had succeeded in imposing a third voice in jazz, in a period dominated by legendary saxophonists John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins.
“A lot of catching up to do”
With his brother Alan Shorter (1932-1988), they played bebop and nicknamed themselves “Mr Weird” (“Mister Weird”) and “Doc Strange” (“Doctor Strange”), wearing dark glasses in the half-light of clubs. jazz. He was one of the last giants of the sax, a jazz instrument he had embraced in the 1950s after an adolescence as a clarinettist.
“I knew that people started an instrument at the age of five and so I knew that I had a lot of catching up to do,” he noted with a hint of mischief, in 2018 with the washington postbefore receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Cultural Center in Washington.
The first to react on his blog, the American trumpeter Wynton Marsalis bowed to his 30-year-old eldest who “improved everything he touched and who will remain: purveyor of pentatonic perfection, master of melodies declined in blues, hero of vertical and horizontal and giant harmonic effects of the saxophone whatever the musical register.