Jazz pioneer Wayne Shorter dies aged 89
- The saxophonist and master songwriter performed with Miles Davis and changed the sound of jazz in the 1960s
- He also led his own group, producing the jazz standard ‘Footprints’, and co-founded fusion group Weather Report
American saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who wrote some of jazz’s most acclaimed compositions and whose often plaintive playing changed the sound of jazz in the 1960s before he explored rock-fusion, died on Thursday aged 89.
His publicist, Alisse Kingsley, said he died in Los Angeles, without citing a cause.
Shorter made his name playing the tenor sax with drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the late 1950s and joined trumpeter Miles Davis’ influential 1960s quintet alongside pianist Herbie Hancock, bass player Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams.
Shorter wrote some of the group’s most famous songs including “E.S.P.” and “Nefertiti”. Davis hailed him as his band’s “idea person, the conceptualiser of a whole lot of the musical ideas we did” who also “understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them”.
Hancock also hailed Shorter’s songwriting. “The master writer to me, in that group, was Wayne Shorter,” the keyboardist said. “Wayne was one of the few people who brought music to Miles that didn’t get changed.”