BLP 4232

Wayne Shorter - Adam's Apple

Released - October 1967

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, February 3, 1966
Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Herbie Hancock, piano; Reginald Workman, bass; Joe Chambers, drums.

1699 tk.3 Adam's Apple

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, February 24, 1966
Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Herbie Hancock, piano; Reginald Workman, bass; Joe Chambers, drums.

1700 tk.11 Footprints
1701 tk.14 El Gaucho
1702 tk.16 502 Blues (aka Drinkin' And Drivin')
1703 tk.17 Chief Crazy Horse
1704 tk.20 Teru

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Adam's Apple	Wayne Shorter	February 3 1966
502 Blues (Drinkin' and Drivin')	Jimmy Rowles	February 24 1966
El Gaucho	Wayne Shorter	February 24 1966
Side Two
Footprints	Wayne Shorter	February 24 1966
Teru	Wayne Shorter	February 24 1966
Chief Crazy Horse	Wayne Shorter	February 24 1966

Liner Notes

IT hasn't been very long since jazz music represented just one thing to the general audience-the sound of the night life. The list of television shows which found jazz the perfect accompaniment for scenes of violence and fast action is too familiar to mention. Yet in recent years jazz finally has come to fill a broader spectrum of experience, even for the most casual listener. Curiously, and perhaps appropriately, this filling out of the emotional color wheel has come at a time when young jazz men have been accused of a monochromatic brand of self-expression. That such is not the case is clearly revealed in this set by the Wayne Shorter group in music performed with great subtlety and almost gentle underplaying by a collection of extraordinary young jazz musicians.

For the last seven or eight years now, Wayne Shorter has been carefully, but surely building a career as a creative professional jazz performer. Recognition of his skills began as early as November of 1959 when LeRoi Jones wrote of Shorter in the Jazz Review: "He is, now, almost at [the] third ... critical stage of his career: the Innovator." More recently Shorter has been an enormously valuable member of the Miles Davis Quintet, a difficult assignment for any player. But Shorter has survived and prospered; early in 1967 he was commissioned to write an 18 minute orchestral prelude for the Davis group performance at the Los Angeles Jazz Festival at U.C.L.A., incorporating several of Davis' better known themes. His selection reflects an increasing general awareness of Shortens skills as a composer and arranger, an awareness further emphasized by the inclusion in this collection of five Shorter originals.

To make the circumstances even more felicitous. Shorter has chosen a particularly responsive group of sidemen. Herbie Hancock's accomplishments over the last few years have been so numerous that it would take the rest of this brief space just to list them. Suffice to say that he works brilliantly with Shorter, the familiar atmosphere of their association in the Davis group enlivening and brightening their work here. Reggie Workman has long been a player too little appreciated for the scope of his talents. Joe Chambers has played in most of the new jazz groups, often under pretty extraordinary circumstances. Yet his work with Shorter seems to be filled with a special warmth and imagination.

The remarkable thing is not so much that these are all fine young jazz players, but that they are individually and collectively mature enough to play with such effective "point" to their performance. Young artists usually are filled with the turbulent juices of early enthusiasms, but only the rare ones can channel these drives - reducing them not one whit in their meaningful-ness or intensity-into an expression which touches the many sources of internal expression.

Adam's Apple, the title tune, represents in its own way a kind of universal contemporary sound - jazz and the elan of dance music combined, an updating of the most familiar blues and a vehicle for the romping journeys of the pop parade.

502 Blues, the only tune not written by Shorter, cannot technically be called a blues. It is, however, a perfectly lovely line that retains the essence (and even the fragility) of the modern genre of late night, urban blues. Shorter plays delicately, framing his phrases above a nearly suspended rhythmic pulse, ending in a cascading passage immediately picked up by Hancock and Workman. Notice Hancock's touch, the way he almost lovingly coaxes his own sound from what can be, in lesser hands, an impersonal instrument. And notice, too. Chambers' sensitive accompaniment, a marvel of underplaying in an age of drummers who grasp their dynamic levels with rough hands.

Another Shorter original, El Gaucho, closes the first side of the record. It might be called a sort of jazz bossa nova (listen for Chambers' eighth note figures) but its sudden and unexpected chord changes lead the players into areas rarely explored in the style's more popular form. Hancock's comping proves that a strong and individual accompanist can more than compensate for the absence of guitar.

Back to the blues on Side 2: Footprints, another Shorter original, explores the six-eight form in dark, walking fashion, with some special Shorter chord alterations. Aside from Shortens predictably fine chorus, notice the crisp cross-rhythms toward the end of Hancock's solo. And listen to Workman's remarkable well-articulated lines (also on Teru), played with a clarity that might more easily be produced on an electric bass.

Teru reveals yet another facet of Shortens work, the ability to write a highly sophisticated contemporary ballad. Shorter solos feelingly, his voice-like lines underscored by Hancock's moving chordal figures.

Chief Crazy Horse reflects a trace of the affection Shorter still feels for John Coltrane, in a line that is filled with recurrent pedals and unpredictable harmonic movement. Chambers has an opportunity to stretch out, again demonstrating his understanding of the values of contrast and dynamic variation.

That Shorter has the talent and technique to do almost anything he wants seems apparent. A great deal of his work in this collection is eminently satisfying on any level. But it is an even finer achievement in totality, since it provides us with such a revealing cross-section of that rarest of qualities, youthful artistic maturity.

- Don Heckman

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT ADAM'S APPLE

No slight on the four musicians who directly contribute to making Adam's Apple such a memorable experience, but hearing this intriguing program of music in light of subsequent history brings to mind three additional associates of Wayne Shorter who were not present at the February 1966 sessions.

First and foremost is Miles Davis, whose then-current band featuring Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams was in its second year together and well on its way to being recognized as the second "classic" Miles Davis quintet. The legendary fivesome recorded "Footprints" eight months later on Davis's Columbia album Miles Smiles, and the success of that version (which actually saw release before the present take) helped to make the blues easily Shorter's most popular composition. Here, in its original arrangement, "Footprints" is in 6/8 meter throughout, and the heavy, pendular piano vamp suggests the feeling of the John Coltrane quartet. Davis recast the rhythmic terrain with Williams imposing an 8/8 meter against the original 6/8 as the band drifted between the three and four feelings for a more fluid and mysterious groove. Hancock's composition "The Collector" (a bonus track here that first appeared in Japan) was also recorded under the name "Teo's Bag" by the Davis quintet two years after this performance, but in that instance the open-form 4/4 swing feels conventional next to this version's unpredictable energy. Joe Chambers's contribution plays a critical part in generating that energy, and in the overall cohesion of all the present performances. While Chambers's name does not spring to mind as quickly as those of Art Blakey, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams when considering Shorter's music in the '60s, he did participate on four of the saxophonist's Blue Note albums of the period, where he proved equally sympathetic to Shorter's vision.

Jimmy Rowles, the second absent presence, wrote the haunting "502 Blues (Drinkin' and Drivin')," which could be described as a very Shorteresque ballad. The tune was originally recorded by the Bill Holman-Mel Lewis Quintet on the 1958 Andex album Jive For Five, with the composer on piano and haunting muted trumpet by Lee Katzman. Here, it provides the first recorded sign of the mutual admiration in which Shorter and Rowles held each other. In the subsequent decade, Rowles returned the compliment on several of his own recordings by covering " Lester Left Town" (with Stan Getz), "The Chess Players" (in two versions), and three other Shorter compositions on a duo album with bassist George Mraz (Music Is The Only Thing on My Mind, on the Progressive label). It's a shame that Shorter and Rowles never found the opportunity to record together.

Finally, the spirit of Shorter's former front-line partner in Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Lee Morgan, hovers over the title track. "Adam's Apple" the tune proves that even an artist as singular as Shorter had to bend to the soulful vamp formulations that made Morgan's hit "The Sidewinder" a template for so many subsequent Blue Note recordings. This is not one of the genre's notable successes, and (especially given its survival as the sole released track from the first Adam's Apple session) one wonders if Shorter and company really had their hearts in the effort. That said, the saxophonist's use of the same riff as both entrance point to his solo and coda is a notable touch, and Hancock's ability to extend funk into outward-bound territory with his comping and improvisations is once again on display. When it comes to writing a catchy soul anthem, however, Shorter's magnum opus is "Tom Thumb," which he recorded with Bobby Timmons for Prestige a month before this session and reprised on his own 1967 Schizophrenia date — and which happens to be among the tunes reprised by the Rowles/Mraz duo.

The remaining three compositions deserve far more attention than they have received in subsequent years. "Chief Crazy Horse" shows how the familiar 32-bar AABA form could still be employed with distinctive results, "Teru" is one of Shorter's most gorgeous ballads, and "El Gaucho" connects with Brazilian samba in both its rhythm and its manner of spinning fixed melodic material over elegantly mutating chords (a la Jobim's "Sabia," for one instance). It is rather startling to realize that all three of these gems have with rare exception been neglected during the past two decades, a period during which it has seemed that half of all new jazz albums have contained at least one Shorter composition. "Gaucho" did get a twin-piano reading from Harold Danko and Kirk Lightsey on Shorter By Two, the 1983 Sunnyside album that, Rowles's earlier efforts notwithstanding, can be seen in retrospect to have started the deluge of Shorter covers.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2003

Blue Note Spotlight - November 2013

http://www.bluenote.com/spotlight/wayne-shorters-adams-apple/

It is unclear whether it was Wayne Shorter’s initial intention to do anything particularly ambitious during the two visits to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in February 1966 that produced Adam’s Apple. Certainly, neither the repertoire—five recently composed Shorter tunes in AABA format and “502 Blues,” by pianist Jimmy Rowles, a hard drinker, as Shorter was at the time (the subtitle denotes the police code for drinking and driving)—nor the treatments contain the radical originality of the five pieces comprising The All-Seeing Eye, recorded four months earlier. Nor is there is a hint of the form-bending improvisational procedures that he, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams were deploying on a nightly basis in the Miles Davis Quintet, for which he’d already composed several consequential pieces—among them “Footprints”—since joining the group in September 1964. Nor does Adam’s Apple contain the vaguely surreal, dreamy, cinematic, parallel universe quality of Etcetera (which would not be heard until 1980) from the previous June.

Rather, Adam’s Apple coheres more closely to such prior vehicles for Shorter’s individualistic tenor saxophone voice as Second Genesis, a VeeJay blues-and-standards swinger from 1960, and JuJu, a kinetic, effervescent session done for Blue Note in August 1964 positioned halfway between the John Coltrane Quartet (the rhythm section are Coltraneans McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman, and Elvin Jones) and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, in which Shorter would serve as Musical Director for another month. On Adam’s Apple, even at higher velocities, the ambiance is reflective, with time feels ranging from swing to slow drag to straight-eighth funk to bossa nova. Shorter’s tone is sumptuous in all tempos and registers; Hancock’s voicings and solos epitomize taste placed at the service of imagination; Workman executes the function to perfection and solos with flair; Chambers plays with the blend of surge, touch, and orchestrative nuance that guaranteed that any mid-‘60s Blue Note recording he performed on would be synonymous with excellence.

All of Shorter’s songs on Adam’s Apple have legs, not least his universally covered 6/8 minor blues “Footprints,” here addressed in an in-the-pocket, a la Coltrane manner eight months before Miles Davis stamped it forever with a complex, elegant, tension-and-release treatment that would appear on the 1967 release Miles Smiles. It remains in the book of Shorter’s current quartet with Danilo Perez, John Patitucci, and Brian Blade, as does the Coltrane homage “Chief Crazy Horse,” highlighted by the leader’s soaring, under-control solo flight. Percolating Samba rhythms propel the flow of “El Gaucho,” a wide-open-spaces melody on which Shorter foreshadows his incipient obsession with the sounds of Brazil. On the more introspective side, “Teru” is an exquisite ballad—recently covered by David Binney and Bob Belden—with an Ellington-Strayhorn quality enhanced by Shorter’s vibrato-less reading, which imparts the quality of art song, or an aria.