May 28--The four apparently telepathic musicians who drew a large audience to Orchestra Hall in Symphony Center on Friday evening share more than a long history together.
Each happens to be a keenly responsive player unafraid of leaping into the unknown, clearly a requirement for playing in the Wayne Shorter Quartet.
Chicago has heard this uncommonly nimble band on various occasions since its inception, in 2000, including landmark performances at the Chicago Jazz Festival and in Orchestra Hall. None has been more fluid, spontaneous, mercurial or inspired than this one.
At 82, Shorter stands as the epitome of youth, at least as measured by elasticity of thought and freedom of expression. A resume as long and rich as Shorter's -- which includes widely admired work with Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Weather Report and more -- might weigh down any musician trying to satisfy particular audience expectations.
Shorter, however, ignores all that, intent above all on addressing the musical and emotional needs of the moment. His solos and accompanying statements are driven not by a master plan or even by the score at hand. As he told me earlier this month, in characteristically enigmatic fashion, "What's written is a reminder for us to not play what's there."
So it was this evening, with Shorter and the quartet offering a great deal of music from their aptly named 2013 album, "Without a Net." But the themes of tunes such as "Zero Gravity" and "Orbits" were only starting points for free-flowing improvisations that left the recordings and preconceived notions far behind.
Instead, in these works and others -- including "Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean" and "Joy Ryder" from the quartet's "Beyond the Sound Barrier" album of 2005 -- Shorter and friends took flight. These weren't straightforward renditions of a band's working repertory so much as occasions for crafting abstract portraits in sound.
There's no score, in other words, that possibly could notate the particular colors, textures and rhythms that pianist Danilo Perez drew from the piano while playing keys and manipulating strings inside the instrument. Nor the concise, tightly coiled phrases that Shorter produced in response on tenor and soprano saxophones, alternating between the two throughout an intermissionless concert.
Bassist John Patitucci's plucked notes and bowed lines gave this prickly, pointillistic music welcome cohesiveness, but no one drove its ebb and flow more than drummer Brian Blade. It was his push and pull on the rhythmic progress of the music, which only sporadically involved a steady pulse, that held everything together (inasmuch as these freely moving parts can be said to have adhered to one another).
The most striking work belonged to Shorter, who played the least but stood at center of some unusually translucent sound. His signature tone -- especially on soprano -- is well known from a long discography, but it was less obvious on this night. For when he played tenor saxophone, he often produced a muted, grainy, craggy, fragile timbre of a different sort. And though the piercing quality of his soprano work was more familiar, the telegraphic nature of his lines kept listeners guessing.
Yet just when you thought you had a handle on the nature of Shorter's terse vocabulary for this performance, he would erupt into heady, fast-flying passagework that referenced not only the enduring facility of his technique but the bebop roots of his earliest playing.
In the end, this was Shorter at his most gestural, the man dispatching bursts of sound, observing his colleagues' reactions, then interjecting new ideas whenever he thought matters might be getting a bit too comfortable.
"What kind of trouble can we get into?" he said at one point during the performance.
If memory serves, that's how young people think, and Shorter is the youngest of them all.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@tribpub.com
