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Footprints

A biography of Wayne Shorter
by Michelle Mercer

(Tarcher/Penguin US, 320pp., $24.95)

footprints-coverMichelle Mercer has done the jazz world a great service with her biography of Wayne Shorter, Footprints (Tarcher/Penguin US, 320pp., $24.95). Skilfully interweaving matters musical (early experiences in Newark, hard bop with Art Blakey et al., participation in one of Miles Davis's most enduringly intriguing bands, pioneering fusion work with Weather Report, his late acoustic resurgence) with matters personal (his embracing Buddhism, his many family tragedies and triumph over them), Mercer has produced a compulsively readable account of the life and work of one of jazz's most respected living practitioners.

The many apparent contradictions informing Shorter's career (the tension between art and commerce, his innovative jazz-based compositions and his immediately accessible work with pop and rock figures, his fondness for brandy and Buddhism, to mention just three) are delicately and illuminatingly handled, courtesy of lengthy and revealing interviews, not only with Shorter himself and the likes of Herbie Hancock etc., but also with figures such as Carlos Santana and (most tellingly) Joni Mitchell, whose contributions are all characteristically cogent, perceptive and sensitive to subtleties of music and personality.

There are occasional problems (Lester Young mysteriously imported into the bebop movement, Jymie Merritt transformed into a pianist etc.), but overall, this is an absorbing study of a man whose career encapsulates and throws intriguing light on all of jazz's post-bop history.