Wayne Shorter - The Soothsayer
Released - 1979
Recording and Session Information
Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, March 4, 1965
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; James Spaulding, alto sax; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; McCoy Tyner, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Tony Williams, drums.
1531 tk.11 Lost
1532 tk.12 Valse Triste
1533 tk.14 The Big Push
1534 tk.17 The Soothsayer
1535 tk.20 Lady Day
1530 tk.22 Angola
See Also: GXF-3054
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Lost | Wayne Shorter | March 4 1965 |
| Angola | Wayne Shorter | March 4 1965 |
| The Big Push | Wayne Shorter | March 4 1965 |
| Side Two | ||
| The Soothsayer | Wayne Shorter | March 4 1965 |
| Lady Day | Wayne Shorter | March 4 1965 |
| Valse Triste | Jean Sibelius | March 4 1965 |
Liner Notes
WAYNE SHORTER
Of the eight "straight ahead" recording sessions that Wayne Shorter made for Blue Note from 1964 to 1967, only three featured a front line that extended beyond the quartet or quintet format. This date, recorded on March 4, 1965 and released here for the first time, features James Spaulding and Freddie Hubbard. "The All Seeing Eye', recorded in October of the same year, added trombonist Grachan Moncur to the Shorter-Spaulding-Hubbard line. Finally, "Schizophrenia" from March 10, 1967, which was Wayne's last pure date, offered Spaulding and trombonist Curtis Fuller.
Considering that Shorter's first major gig found him arranging and composing for the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra, that he arranged a beautiful set of orchestra and septet charts for Freddie Hubbard's "The Body And The Soul" (Impulse) and that his final three years with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers sported a rich sounding three horn front line, it is curious that he did not delve further into this aspect of his remarkable talents on his own sessions.
Another very special aspect of this album is the presence of Tony Williams. While it may seem logical for him to be in this group because he and Shorter were members of the Miles Davis quintet of that day, it is interesting to note that the three preceding Shorter dates had Elvin Jones and the four following had Joe Chambers. It is especially enlightening to hear the Williams of this period work with McCoy Tyner. To my knowledge, they never recorded together again until McCoy's somewhat contrived "Supertrios" album in 1977. But in 1965, their realms were a great deal closer.
James Spaulding, the unsung hero of Blue Note in the sixties, was introduced to the label sharing the front line in Freddie Hubbard's quintet. He appeared over the years on sessions by Bobby Hutcherson, Grant Green, Horace Silver and many others. Orginally from Indianapolis, Spaulding first made his presence felt in several fine editions of Sun Ra's orchestra in Chicago in the late fifties. Upon coming to New York, he was not only a regular at Blue Note sessions, but also worked in Hubbard's first working band, with Randy Weston and for the last half of the sixties with Max Roach's ensemble. During the seventies, he has been seen all too infrequently, recording his own album for Sonet in Scandinavia and appearing on discs by Kenny Barron and Woody Shaw among others.
Freddie Hubbard, who had appeared on Wayne's previous date "Speak No Evil" and would participate on the next one "The All Seeing Eye," worked side by side with the tenor saxophonist in Blakey's band from the fall of 1961 until March of 1964. Wayne and Freddie would, of course, work together again with the creation of V.S.O.P in 1976 with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams.
Ron Carter's supple, strong presence was felt on "Speak No Evil," "The All Seeing Eye" and "Schizophrenia." He and Wayne were band mates in the Miles Davis quintet and appeared together on such fine Blue Note dates as Lee Morgan's "The Procrastinator" and McCoy Tyner's Expansions."
McCoy in his six years with the John Coltrane Quartet gave birth to a unique new approach to the piano and, with Trane, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison, helped to redefine the basic sound of a jazz ensemble. He was present on Wayne's first two Blue Note albums "Ju Ju" and Night Dreamer'.' Wayne's spare, dry approach allowed a variety of nuances, unseen elsewhere, to appear in McCoy's playing.
Lost is a graceful, medium tempo original in triple meter with solos by Shorter, Hubbard, Spaulding and Tyner. This version having never been issued, Shorter resurrected it for Weather Report's Live In Tokyo recording.
Angola is the kind of medium-up cooker that Wayne might have brought into Art Blakey's band. After spirited solos from the three hornmen, Tony Williams gets off an inventive drum solo.
Although the melody line of The Big Push is rhythmically unusual, the solos by Shorter, Hubbard, Spaulding and McCoy flow in straight four. Wayne's solo entrance is arresting and wry as he playfully and creatively juggles a simple two note motif and weaves into a full blown solo.
The Soothsayer is a burning, delightful descending line that engenders the kind of fire that makes Spaulding fly. He and Wayne steal the show here. Shorter launches his flight with those fragmented, punctuated lines that were a trademark of his playing in the sixties.
Shorter has always been a master composer of ballads. And his tribute to Billie Holiday Lady Day is no exception. He gives an unbelievable reading that is set off by a lovely, lyrical piano solo from Tyner.
A year and a half before the session, Wayne had recorded his own Dance Cadaverous (on Speak No Evil) and credited the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius' Valse Triste as an inspirational source point. Here he arranges Sibelius' own music for the sextet with solos from all except Williams.
Coincidentally, this ensemble is VSOP with McCoy in place of Hancock and with Spaulding added. But this was no planned all-star reunion. This was merely the music of the period played unselfconsciously by the musicians who were playing it best.
-Michael Cuscuna
RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes
A NEW LOOK AT THE SOOTHSAYER
The mid-sixties were an incredibly creative period for Wayne Shorter. His playing and writing for both the Miles Davis Quintet and his own Blue Note albums form a body of work comparable to the best of both the straight-ahead and the freedom schools he straddled with such singular imagination. It was perhaps inevitable that Blue Note would find itself unable to issue all of his recordings at the time of their creation, and a cause for celebration when his "missing" sessions, The Soothsayer and Et Cetera, finally appeared in 1980. The Soothsayer was particularly welcomed for a reason that Michael Cuscuna highlights in his original liner notes — the rare presence of drummer Tony Williams.
Williams was another member of Davis's band of the period, though a relatively reticent one when it came to recording. He had a Blue Note contract, like Shorter and Herbie Hancock, but only dabbled in composition at this point, and only cut two albums for the label. Neither did he feel compelled, like Hancock and Davis bassist Ron Carter, to supplement his income by becoming a first-call studio player.
"The group that I was with, with Miles, was so great, everything else to me was — there was nothing that I had any desire to be a part of," Williams told Pat Cox in a 1970 Down Beat interview. "People had asked me to make records with them and I had to turn them down because I didn't want to make records just for the sake of making records...I had already done what these guys were doing, was on top of what was going to happen, so that after that, when they asked me again, I said, 'I've already made a record with you."'
Fortunately, Williams did not feel that way about Wayne Shorter. In the same interview, he explained why horns were omitted from his Lifetime band by noting, "I could find no saxophone player that I liked as much and who had as broad a scope as Wayne Shorter." So Williams had no compunction about pairing up more than once with the saxophonist outside of the Davis group, as he did at Blue Note on Grachan Moncur's Some Other Stuff and his own Spring, as well as on the present tracks.
Shorter surrounds himself with other sympathetic partners here as well: Ron Carter, another Davis colleague; McCoy Tyner, making the last of three sideman appearances with Shorter that would be reciprocated when the saxophonist was featured on Tyner's Expansions and Extensions at decade's end; and the Indianapolis twin terrors, Freddie Hubbard and James Spaulding. The alto saxophonist is absolutely explosive throughout, threatening to steal the show, and clearly impressive enough to earn inclusion in other Shorter projects where a second saxophone was required.
That said, it is hard to eclipse the leader on a Wayne Shorter album. His joint prowess as player and writer, and his blend of the traditional and the visionary, are simply too exceptional to take a back seat to anyone. The music here is a case in point. On the surface, Shorter's five compositions appear relatively conventional next to the more open forms of The All Seeing Eye or the mysterious themes he was beginning to contribute to the Davis group. The structures look familiar and are easy to parse. "The Big Push," for instance, is a 24-bar, AAB line, with modulations where one would expect to find them in a blues chorus. Yet "The Big Push" is hardly a long-metered blues in the manner of Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder." The harmonic motion, combined with the rhythmic trajectory of the melody, lead the musicians in other directions. You can't just blow reharmonized blues choruses on the form and make much sense. One has to treat "The Big Push" as a thing unto itself, which is a part of Shorter's genius. Another part involves how he takes the possibilities of the forms even farther as he improvises. Hubbard, Spaulding, and Tyner, all first-class players, may not be intimidated by the challenges of the music, but none of them are able to play out the implications as fully as Shorter himself.
Since Shorter's compositional output for Davis and his own sessions tended to run in separate courses, the belated issue of The Soothsayer would have been welcome if only for its introduction of unheard Shorter originals, of which the most memorable are "Angola" (the faster master take was probably chosen for time rather than quality considerations), "The Big Push," and "Lady Day," a haunting ballad in the vein of "Infant Eyes."
— Bob Blumenthal, 2007
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