Some 206 Zulu readers will be familiar with our Always Remembered series, a tradition we carry each year where we take time to hold space for people within Hip Hop and its peripheral communities who passed on over the course of the preceding year. In the past, this remembrance has taken the form of an annual video episode of our Meeting of the Minds podcast. For 2024, we’ll be sharing these memories in a different way.
Over the course of this year, we’ll be sharing a written commemoration of some of these influential members of our greater community, one at a time. We know that the act of remembrance is a tremendous power we have to keep our predecessors and ancestors alive through our collective voice. In that grain, keep posted for our ongoing series of brief stories looking into the lives of some of the fascinating people that transcended their physical frames in the course of 2023. And if any of these individuals have impacted you in any way, remember, your retelling of these stories will keep them alive in perpetuity. This is Always Remembered…
Wayne Shorter
Wayne Shorter could easily be called one of the forebears of Hip Hop culture, among many other musical movements that have been born from a sense of freedom and self-reflection. On the heels of a career in jazz that began when he was 19 years old, Wayne Shorter, one of the most dynamic and influential musicians in history, passed on last year at the age of 89.
From an industry perspective, Wayne was a 12 time Grammy Award-winning saxophonist and composer as well as the creator of one of the most unique sounds in jazz for more than half a century. From the bebop and hard bop eras in the 1950s, onto some of the most widely known music from jazz’s small-group period in the ‘60s, and then into the experimental era of rock and electronic sounds that the ‘70s ushered in, his soprano and tenor saxophones were a constant throughout.
Wayne Shorter was part of some of the most important groups and collaborations in jazz history, from playing with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the early years, to joining Miles Davis’ second quintet along with Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Herbie Hancock. He recorded a range of classic albums on Blue Note Records with members of John Coltrane’s quartet, Freddie Hubbard, and more. After both artists work as architects of the genre shifting modal jazz sound, Wayne and Miles stuck together as they experimented with electronic instruments. Wayne would also later co-found Weather Report, one of the most influential jazz fusion bands of the ‘70’s.
His last album was a crazy multi-disc four movement suite that he made with a group of young musicians, along with a 34 piece chamber orchestra. In true form for one of the masters of fusing mediums, the record included a graphic novel attached to accompany the music. That album dropped in 2018, over 50 years after Wayne Shorter joined the Jazz Messengers, an end cap to those decades at the forefront of some of the most influential music ever made.
The final album was called Emanon, which is “no name” backwards- taken from a Dizzy Gillespie and Milton Shaw composition released in 1947. It’s also the name that Aloe Blacc and Exile used for their collaboration group, along with many other off chance Hip Hop connections to the earlier paths that Wayne Shorter carved for the freedom of expression that Hip Hop would carry on over the years.
In the 1970s, Wayne became a Buddhist and spent his subsequent years living out some of the best principles of that spiritual path. In an NPR interview in 2013 he said, “We have a phrase [in Buddhism]: hom nim yoh. It means ‘From this moment forward is the first day of my life.’ So put 100 percent into the moment that you’re in because the present moment is the only time when you can change the past and the future.”
We’ll take that example from him and continue to hold to our power of making change by living in the moment. For the affirmation of the power of freedom in art that he proved for musicians to come, and the artists walking the path he tread- from producers that sampled his work, to saxophonists playing in styles he created, to emcees improvising in the ultimate act of oneness with the present as we saw in Bodhisattva Wayne- we remember Wayne Shorter.