Record of the Day: Wayne Shorter, “Beyond the Sound Barrier”

Wayne Shorter
“Beyond the Sound Barrier” (Cd Verve B000918QAY)

Jazz music has often been vilified beyond all limits in Italy, being attributed by bad-faith critics to hairy singer-songwriters with poetic ambitions, singing lawyers, Sinatra clones, showgirls posing as heirs to Billie Holiday and company singing (all busy telling us how much Giaass there is in their modest products).
Fortunately, every now and then a record comes along to remind us that jazz is something else: Wayne Shorter has brought this music back to the level of artistic excellence that it deserves in “Beyond the
Sound Barrier” recorded during a world tour with the quartet including Danilo Pérez (piano), John Patitucci (double bass) and Brian Blade (drums).

A rigorous and uncompromising album where Shorter’s angular language, which has given a splendid display of itself over the last forty years in dozens of historic albums, continues to reach new expressive areas through a writing carved in wood, of absolute precision. Having disappeared the fusion temptations of a few years earlier, Shorter revisits his own songbook (“Joy Rider”) with three unreleased songs and even a theme by Mendelssohn (“On Wings of Song”), through an entirely acoustic sound in a bare and current way, without the slightest nostalgia but ideally reconnecting to albums like “Speak No Evil” and “Adam’s Apple”.

The interaction between the other musicians is imbued with a quiet tension that remains under the skin to emerge in sudden waves of energy, as intense as they are unpredictable. Shorter has now metabolized Coltrane’s influence in a soloism that alternates pointillist moments streaked with spots of color with dazzling explosions of notes that seem guided by a mysterious instinct and instead are the result of a slow exploratory excavation through every smallest harmonic corner of the songs.

Of course, this music is not good as background music on the highway and can be considered too “difficult” while ironing,
so the bigwigs of the record industry have not printed many billboards for it. The strength of its contents guarantees it in any case a constant duration over time and reconfirms Shorter’s art as one of the few oases from which one can drink for those who still believe that jazz is a music to be listened to and not a background to sip a cocktail.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical subjects.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: Un disco per ogni giorno dell’anno” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.