Zero Gravity
VICTORIA KINGHAM on Dorsay Alavi’s exceptional biopic of Wayne Shorter
March of this year saw the death of an extraordinary musician, and another small piece of magic went out of my life. A unique talent, a unique spirit, admired and adored by musicians, friends, relatives – the Newark Flash (so named by Lester Young on first encounter with his magical ability) was a once-in-a-century phenomenon.
Most people, when asked if they can name a jazz legend, will say Miles Davis, John Coltrane, maybe Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie. Fewer of them will name Wayne Shorter. Yet he was one of the most original and influential jazz composers of his lifetime, and had a musical career that lasted from his teenage years in the school band at Newark in the 1940s, to (in the twenty-first century) leading complex orchestral performances which intentionally made no division between the written and the improvised, that correspondingly required only the most gifted musicians to play them.
His music was a background to my life during the early 70s and 80s, less so in the frenetic subsequent years, until now. It is beautiful, unexpected, ‘cliché-free’ yet unforgettable, impossible to classify, sometimes opaque, always reaching out to express the hitherto inexpressible. “Hearing Wayne’s music”, affirms Herbie Hancock, “made you question what music was.”
Create like a child
There would be little point in a long exposition of Shorter’s achievements here. Others have done this, in a raft of obituaries. Recently though, a brilliant friend, whom I have always considered a mentor, drew my attention to a superb documentary of Shorter’s life, made shortly before his death but released this September, by Dorsay Alavi. It’s an exceptional film, thoroughly researched, and faithful to detail, made with love. “Play music for the kind of world you want to create”, Shorter told his fellow musicians, who were almost like his children. And Alavi’s film, in a wonderful way, puts him in that world. He is perhaps the Picasso of music. His compositional skills were honed in the music department of NYU, but it seems that by the age of 22 he could already play everything in every style. Like Picasso, an artistically essential factor for Shorter was to retain the ability to create and to think like a child.
The biography covers three episodes of Shorter’s life, and intentionally makes little separation between the musical and the personal, individual events. “Wayne never really wrote a song. He’s been writing a soundtrack for his life”, was how it was described by one of his long-standing collaborators, off-the-wall creative pianist Danilo Pérez. Alavi’s documentary positions him absolutely within his own world with its joys and its tragedies, while at the same time showing his lifelong search for the world within and beyond each moment. “When he plays one note … they’re not notes any more, they’re big galaxies, constellations”, Carlos Santana says of his playing.
He had visual as well as auditory gifts: according to Joni Mitchell he was the only person able to interpret musical instructions metaphorically, to think of swooping birds, empty rooms, lost horizons, and play them. The film correspondingly shows some memorable drawings he made of his wife and his children. “Talking to him you realised that not only was Wayne Shorter a genius, but that he assumed everybody else was as well”, was the conclusion of bass player Reggie Workman.
Compelling viewing
A biopic as good as this is rare: it requires not only filmic knowledge but incredibly detailed documentation of its subject, their personal history, and the surrounding international history. Research that has probably taken ten years or longer is squeezed into three hours of compelling viewing: the result is to give us intimate insights into the long trajectory of the life of a human being who was convinced from a child that there was nothing he could not or should not be able to achieve. It is sometimes funny, sometimes heartrendingly sad, always illuminating. Further, it opens up and extends our understanding of what jazz music is, and what it can be.
The three-episode film, Zero Gravity, is available free to watch on Amazon Prime. Go there.
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