Wayne Shorter

Having recently finished reading a biography of Wayne Shorter, I decided to give a thorough listen to the only solo Shorter I actually own – Adam's Apple, from 1965. It's a good album. Not cosmically good, not transcendent, but solid. Featuring a quartet of Herbie Hancock, Reggie Workman and Joe Chambers in addition to Shorter, it's best known for having the first recorded version of "Footprints" – Shorter's best-known and most widely-covered composition. The version he recorded with Miles Davis a few months later is better known, but this one is excellent as well. It is more rhythmically direct and insistent than Davis's, making up in groove and decisiveness what it lacks in atmospherics and ambiguity.

The rest of the album, too, is nothing to scoff at. Adam's Apple did give in partly to Shorter's record company's demands for commercially viable music, with predictably mixed results. The title track that opens the record is a funky soul-jazz number in the style that was all the rage then. Not Sidewinder-funky, but funky. Shorter is comfortable, having learned to play this kind of stuff with Art Blakey, but he sounds uninspired. Hancock's solo is as much of a disaster as he was capable of allowing to be released – he never really finds the groove the rest of the musicians are in, doesn't develop his ideas, and comes off as bumbling.

Thankfully, the rest of the record is a giant step up. The other “commercial” track, a Brazilian-ish sounding "El Gaucho" works far better. It's a minor blues laid over an edgy bossa-nova groove, and vaguely resembles something Joe Henderson might have done in his early days. Shorter's solo is confident and inspired, as is Hancock's – neither one is beholden to the supposedly accessible intentions of the tune, and they explore the harmonic and melodic potential of the music fully.

What elevates the record above the workaday for me, however, are the two slow tunes – Jimmy Rowles' "502 Blues," and Shorter's own "Teru." The former is obviously a tune from a different pen and a different time than Shorter's own. The melody's intervals are far more grounded in conventional tonality than the rest of the material. Shorter manages to impose his own mood on it, though, and it works like a charm. His version ends up being dark and searching but without the deliberate evilness someone like Miles would have imposed on it. "Teru," to my ears, is a minor masterpiece. The head is very minimalist – only a handful of notes – but utterly original and distinctive. The feeling is melancholy, but Shorter's harmonies are vague, and the tonal center is not at all obvious. He achieves the mood he is looking for without having to resort to an excess of melodramatic minor chords. The rhythm section's backing is perfect – Chambers, who is perfectly capable of sounding like two drummers at the same time – barely touches the cymbals with his brushes here.

My 2003 CD reissue came with a curiosity – Hancock's "The Collector" included as a bonus track. I was not surprised that it was not released on the original LP – it is way different in feel than the rest of the music here. It is more intense, more Milesian and just far more “out” in general. Chambers does his best Tony Williams impression, and both Hancock and Shorter throw all caution to the wind (too much for my taste), and more than once come very close to falling off the cliff of dissonance.