Defying gravity

It’s easy to imagine the director Dorsay Alavi going all the way through an alphabetical list of Wayne Shorter’s compositions while looking for a suitable title for her three-part documentary on the life and work of the great saxophonist and composer, and knowing when she reached “Zero Gravity” that she’d got it. As such bio-docs on jazz musicians go, Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity is something of a masterpiece. The title expresses the subject’s unique characteristic, present in his music and in his conversation, as I found while interviewing him in his London hotel room for the Melody Maker in 1972, during Weather Report’s three-week season at Ronnie Scott’s. Here’s how the piece started:

“I hate to talk about music,” Wayne Shorter said. So we didn’t — at least, not really. For instance, we talked about the navigation of ships. Wayne showed me several large books on the subject, told me he was hoping to study it seriously, and then unrolled a sheet of score-paper on which he’d written a new composition called “Celestial Navigator”, based on the feelings gathered from his discoveries.

We talked about the sacred figures of Brazil — like the Lady of the Sea. If you see her, Wayne said, she she sees you, then you don’t live to tell the tale. But she serves people from the sea, too, and every Brazilian home contains her picture. And he showed me another piece, named after her.

And so it went on, through an hour or so of conversation which I can only compare to the experience of talking to Ornette Coleman, Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) or Van Dyke Parks. The interviewee is operating on a different plane of thought and expression, and your best plan is to keep out of the way and let their logic take its own trajectory. Of course that doesn’t always work. Sometimes you can’t help trying to drag them back to earth. Yet at such moments Shorter remained gracious. Here’s more:

Although he didn’t really want to discuss it, I asked him why he left Miles Davis. “After six years with Miles it was becoming… that living cycle, that seven-year itch thing, came around. I knew had to take a year off, at least. My wife and I moved around, spending the summer in a town house in New York, where I could think about how to get rid of that sound I had with Miles, to get the sound of the musicians, and the compositions I wrote during that time, out of my head.

“I wanted to rid myself of any one association — so that people can look at anything new that I do with a bit of objectivity, without connecting me with Miles or Art Blakey, as everyone always has.” It wasn’t always easy for him to take his sabbatical. “Miles would call me up and ask if I wanted to make a record date, or write something for his band, and I had to refuse because it was necessary for me to break that connection completely.”

He talked about his most recent Blue Note album, Super Nova, and its projected successor, Odyssey of Iska, dedicated to his younger daughter, and about his enthusiasm for the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento (who would be featured on Native Dancer, his first album for Columbia, in 1975). And he spoke warmly, of course, about Weather Report:

“I’d always had the feeling that it would be nice to have a band in which everybody would hold their own and have a leader’s responsibility. We’re all responsible to many different obligations, which is much better than when one man is responsible for everyone’s obligations. We can do more, musically. It was hard to find a bunch of musicians who were prepared to stop playing like they used to.”

That last remark is the kind of thing that pops up throughout Zero Gravity: little maxims, like Zen koans, that open the mind to new ways of thinking about old subjects, some of them adapted from Davis, his former boss. “Play like you don’t know how to play” is one. Search for “music that doesn’t sound like music” and “Jazz means, ‘I dare you'” are others. Danilo Perez, the pianist with his quartet, remembers being given a large pile of new compositions, and on asking Shorter when they were going to find the time to rehearse them, getting the reply: “You can’t rehearse the unknown.”

The first of Zero Gravity‘s three hour-long episodes deals with his early years, from a New Jersey childhood to the great Davis Quintet, the director taking the chance of using two young actors in wordless imaginative reconstructions of his boyhood with his brother Al. The second part examines with the period of Weather Report’s great success, the reasons behind the group’s dissolution, his work with Joni Mitchell, and the personal tragedies he encountered during those years, including the deaths of Iska and her mother, Ana Maria Patricio, his second wife, and of Al, his brother.

The final part deals with the music of his last 20 years: the wonderful quartet with Perez, the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Brian Blade, the orchestral pieces, and the opera, Iphigenia, written and performed with Esperanza Spalding. Her presence in the film, along with that of Mitchell and the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, reminds us that few jazz musicians of his generation were as comfortable as Shorter with the idea that female musicians could have equal standing within the music.

Shorter’s love of fairy tales and science fiction, in part ignited by early exposure to Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, is also featured as part of an exploration of the character of a man who retained a child’s sense of wonder throughout the life that ended last March, in his 90th year on the planet. The animations and flights of visual imagination that appear throughout the film, alongside many fine clips of the Jazz Messengers, the Davis band and the Shorter quartet, make complete sense. Filmed and edited while he was still alive, and thus preserving him in the present tense. Zero Gravity is pretty much the perfect tribute to an extraordinary human being.

* The film Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity is available on Amazon Prime.