Vinyl Vault — Weather Report Potpourri

The jazz world lost another one of its greatest practitioners last week with the passing of Wayne Shorter. He was highly influential in many different contexts throughout the majority of his 89 years on our planet. His solo albums on the Blue Note record label remain classics to this day. As part of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, he honed his compositional skills. His work with the Miles Davis Quintet straddled the period from when Davis and his colleagues were struggling to break free from the limiting conventions of mid to late1960s jazz into Davis’s groundbreaking fusion of jazz and rock.

Vinyl Vault is sponsored by Vinyl Me, Please

Shorter continued at the forefront of pushing that new musical form to new heights with his 16-year collaboration with fellow Davis alum, Joe Zawinul in the band Weather Report. His post-Weather Report career was equally fertile, continuing nearly to the end of his life. Shorter was known not only for his impressive tenor and soprano saxophone work but also for his compositional skill, penning many now-standard compositions which, by definition, have elegantly stood the test of time.

The Vinyl Vault will focus on some of his time in Weather Report. We’ll delve into some lesser-known Weather Report albums and tunes and feature compositions by Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, and Zawinul. We’ll also be able to stretch out with one or more longer Weather Report tracks more suited to evening radio rather than daytime play.

Shorter’s loss is a blow to the jazz world, but we can be thankful he left such a rich recorded legacy.

We’ll enjoy a tiny slice of that legacy Tuesday evening. Join Geoff Anderson in remembering Wayne Shorter on the Vinyl Vault at 8:30 on KUVO/kuvo.org.

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