This feature originally published in the Fall 2018 edition of JAZZIZ. By Larry Blumenfeld With Emanon, Wayne Shorter realizes his dream of exploring nameless reaches. When Wayne Shorter was in his early teens, living with his parents in the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey, he was fascinated by science-fiction and comic books. He drew
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Cut to 2013. Shorter’s quartet, with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade, by then a dozen years running, had become one of modern music’s great stories and singular pleasures. With this group, Shorter sometimes employed his classic works as mere springboards toward collective improvisation, to foster what he calls “self-actualized communal leadership.” The music focused on motion, dynamics and mood, without concern for style. It combined Shorter’s late-in-life ambitions and the spirit with which, at 15, he’d drawn Other Worlds.
“Wayne wants to hear us struggle and even mess up,” Patitucci told me a decade ago. “And if we mess up, we keep going. He wants us to find something that’s uncharted.” Shorter’s album Without a Net, recorded in 2010 and released in 2013, featured the woodwind quintet Imani Winds on a 23-minute piece, “Pegasus.”
In February 2013, Shorter upped his own ante. The day after a performance at Carnegie Hall that combined his quartet with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Shorter brought the combined ensembles into a recording studio for orchestrated versions of “Pegasus” and “The Three Marias” (which first appeared on Atlantis) as well as two new compositions, “Prometheus Unbound” and “Lotus.” These recordings form the first disc, the musical core of a gorgeous and unusual new package that includes three CDs and a 48-page graphic novel created by Shorter in collaboration with artist Randy DuBurke and writer Monica Sly (Discs One and Two feature quartet performances recorded at The Barbican in London, in 2015). The name — of Disc One’s four-piece orchestral suite, the graphic novel’s protagonist and the overall package — is “Emanon.”
Blue Note president Don Was had suggested creating a graphic novel in connection with Shorter’s new music. “He mentioned it casually,” Shorter says, “but the wheels in my head started turning right away.” Was suggested DuBurke as the man for the job. Shorter liked what he saw in DuBurke’s graphic novel about Malcolm X and his version of Deadwood Dick, a character first introduced in 19th-century dime novels. “When I saw his drawings,” Shorter says, “there was something about the way the characters moved and the action developed that reminded me of my own music.” On St. Nick’s Day in Switzerland, where DuBurke, who was born in Brooklyn, now lives, he received an email from Shorter’s agent: “Wayne Shorter is a fan of your work and would like to commission you to do a graphic novel.” DuBurke had just wrapped up the holiday gifts for his children and now here was an unexpected and nearly unbelievable one for himself. He looked at the Shorter recordings in his collection — Speak No Evil and Beyond the Sound Barrier, among others. He shot an email back: “That Wayne Shorter?”
Yes, it was. DuBurke met Shorter in London in late 2014, after attending the very quartet performances documented on Discs Two and Three of the new Blue Note set. They talked about science-fiction and real science, quantum mechanics and such. (DuBurke calls himself a “science geek.”) Shorter mentioned the cover illustration of a sci-fi book by Anne McCaffery, of Pegasus, the white-winged horse of Greek mythology. With the four tracks of Shorter’s orchestral suite as his soundtrack and guide, DuBurke returned to his studio and began drawing. He discovered that Pegasus originated in Ethiopian mythology. The first thing he showed Shorter when they met again in Lyon, France, in 2014 was his painting of an Ethiopian Pegasus, a brown horse with white wings and horns. He wasn’t sure about Shorter’s reaction until that night’s concert: On Shorter’s music stand throughout the performance, alongside the sheet music, had been DuBurke’s rendering of Pegasus.
Still, Shorter thought the story the two were developing was too literal, too rooted in science-fiction. He enlisted the help of Monica Sly, a screenwriter who had met Shorter through the Nichiren community in Los Angeles. Sly had collaborated with Shorter and pianist Herbie Hancock on an open letter that was widely distributed online in 2016, addressed to “the next generation of artists” and imploring readers not to grow dismayed or complacent during turbulent and unpredictable times. “Whether from sadness, prolonged struggle, or social conditioning, somewhere along the way people forget how to tap into the inherent magic that exists within our minds,” the letter explained. “Don’t let that part of your imagination fade away.”
Sly describes her work with Shorter in terms similar to that of his quartet members. “Wayne will never tell you exactly what he wants you to do,” Sly says. “He wants you to figure it out, like it’s a game.” Shorter provided some clues. He instructed her to research the CERN Large Haldron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, which, among other things searches for miniature black holes, which are key to an advancing theory of a “multiverse,” in which ours is merely one of several universes. In one climactic frame of the Emanon graphic novel, people look excitedly at a newspaper headline that reads: “The Multiverse Exists.”
From her conversations with Shorter, Sly grasped that the four universes he conveyed through his musical suite related to overcoming four distinct fears: In “Pegasus,” the fear of complacency, of living within prescribed boxes; in “Lotus,” the fear of the Other and of the divisiveness that often leads to war; in “The Three Marias,” of censorship and the suppression of free thought and will; and in “Prometheus Unbound,” of the unknown and of the natural vicissitudes of life.
The story of Emanon opens with the suffering of “complacent citizens” who are “numb to their life of degradation” and “blaming all but themselves for their depraved condition.” Emanon is a reluctant hero who engages in a righteous battle that is both physically violent and bent on spiritual renewal. There is clear symbolism: The lotus, the flower that represents purification and enlightenment in Buddhism, blooms at a key moment in the graphic novel, as a promise of peace and harmony. There is delicious irony: “The Three Marias” — a title Shorter first used in 1985, in reference to three Portuguese women who were arrested for writing supposedly obscene literature — becomes the fictional name of a powerful and censorious media empire. The story can be read on many levels — as a statement about the hostility and danger posed by our current political and media landscape, for instance, or a reflection of Shorter’s career-long quest for unbound expression within a cultural marketplace dominated by inhibiting categories. Most of all, the graphic novel seems an allegory for the principles of the Nichiren Buddhism that have liberated Shorter’s life and art. The story ends by invoking “the courage of a Pegasus,” explaining that, “the means to become the producer, director and actor in one’s life lies within one’s self potential.”
Musically, “Emanon” creates a liberating multiverse of a different sort. Shorter’s compositions exist in somewhat parallel worlds. In the previous recorded version of “Pegasus,” the woodwinds of Imani Winds framed Shorter’s soprano saxophone statements or voiced counterpoint to his quartet. Here, the piece begins a with long duet played on soprano sax and piano, and gives way to an entirely fresh set of harmonies, lush and dramatic but free of orchestral conventions. As played with the Orpheus Orchestra on Disc One, “Lotus” is glorious and grand. It sounds fully flowered. The quartet version, on Disc Three, is playful and full of promise, like a seed being planted. It’s no coincidence that Shorter aligned himself with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which has no conductor and for which the musicians shape their sound cooperatively as a group. In classical terms, they embody the “self-actualized communal leadership” Shorter preaches to his quartet’s members. “This whole thing — the story and the music — is about the potential human beings have but don’t talk about,” Shorter says. “It’s about not leaning on something or somebody else.”
Emanon is a large package that physically won’t fit well on a shelf alongside Shorter’s large catalog of previous releases. It’s not a typical book-and-music set in that neither the book nor music is subservient to the other. It’s the manifestation of childhood dreams along with the wisdom of a celebrated musical elder. In that sense, it supports something Shorter has told me in more than one interview, about his music but also about life in general. “There is no such thing as a beginning and no such thing as an end.”
Does Shorter identify with Emanon, the hero of his story? He laughs. “No,” he says. “I think he identifies with me.”
Photos courtesy of Universal Music. Illustrations by Randy DuBurke.