A new documentary shows that music was just one facet of the great jazz saxophonist’s gift.
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One thing that emerges in Dorsay Alavi’s three-part documentary “Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity” is that the late, great jazz saxophonist and composer was, not to put too fine a point on it, a nerd. Born in Newark in 1933, he grew up a devotee of comic books and fantasy movies, and, with his older brother, Alan, created a theatre of cosplay in a nearby vacant lot, which, he recalls in the film, served sometimes as the Sahara Desert and sometimes as Mars.
Shorter was also a movie buff, and it was cinema, curiously, that awakened his musical vocation. He began cutting school to go to the movie theatre, where, between features, there was often live music, sometimes by notable jazz bands. When he was hauled before the vice-principal, the woman, with Solomonic wisdom, decided not to punish but to encourage him, and sent him to music class. At fifteen, Shorter started to play the clarinet; a year later, he switched to tenor saxophone.
With Alan , Shorter formed a band that played modern jazz. The brothers cultivated a reputation for weirdness, wearing exotic costumes of brimless hats and floor-length coats, and painting nicknames—“Doc Strange” and “Mr. Weird”—on their saxophone cases. Wayne went to N.Y.U. and studied music composition. By that time, his performances were attracting attention from leading modern-jazz musicians, who called him “the Newark Flash.
Shorter was with Davis when, in the late sixties, the group shifted toward rock-inflected music with electric keyboards and guitars, but without sacrificing intensity or freedom. In 1970, encouraged by Davis to form his own group, Shorter co-founded Weather Report, which similarly fused rock and jazz but with less dissonance and less fury. The results proved less challenging for Shorter, but they earned him a pop-music currency rare for jazz musicians.
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