Wayne Shorter

USA, 1958–2023

American saxophonist and composer (1933-2023), one of the great writers in jazz. Musical director of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, then the compositional engine of Miles Davis's second great quintet, then co-founder of Weather Report - and across it all a writer of oblique, harmonically restless tunes that became standards.

MusicRoots documents 8 artists who influenced Wayne Shorter and 1 artist Wayne Shorter influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.

Who influenced Wayne Shorter?

• Lester Young — Seeing Lester Young at fifteen was the formative moment of Shorter's musical life; he later wrote 'Lester Left Town' for him.
• Charlie Parker — Parker's records were among those that turned the fourteen-year-old Shorter to music.
• Thelonious Monk — Monk was in that same first batch of records, and his angular, space-filled writing is the closest ancestor of Shorter's own oblique compositions.
• John Coltrane — Coltrane was one of Shorter's first saxophone idols and a practice partner in the mid-1950s, before Shorter turned away toward a more succinct manner of his own.
• Coleman Hawkins — Hawkins, who made the tenor a solo voice, was among the saxophonists Shorter idolised at the start.
• Ludwig van Beethoven — Shorter was fascinated by the dramatic architecture of classical symphonies - Beethoven above all - and built that sense of long-form structure into his writing.
• Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral colour is the other classical source Shorter names behind his compositional thinking.
• Art Blakey — Shorter joined the Jazz Messengers in 1959 and became their musical director; Blakey's practice of making his young players write and arrange is what turned him into a composer.

Which artists did Wayne Shorter influence?

• Joni Mitchell — Shorter played on ten of Mitchell's albums from Don Juan's Reckless Daughter onward, and his soprano became a voice inside her late jazz music - she edited his takes, he said, as if painting with them.