Learning to love the difficult
Revisiting a past review of Wayne Shorter, reading books about Satanic Panics, and enjoying some new Wye Oak music
I had the chance a few weeks ago to hear Children of the Light, the jazz trio that is essentially the trio that backed Wayne Shorter for the last two decades-plus of his career. Though the show was booked before Shorter's death on March 2, it came less than a month after the leader passed.
Shorter's death stirred a memory. I knew Shorter had played at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City 20 years ago, and recalled that I had written about it in some capacity. It turns out I interviewed him for a preview, then reviewed the show. One would think a jazz fan would remember interviewing a towering figure like Shorter, but with my 20 years-plus of journalism now more than a decade in the rearview mirror, memories tend to blur.
Once I looked up the interview, my recollection stirred a bit. Shorter is notoriously elliptical in interviews, and he lived up to that billing. I'm sure at the time I thought him difficult, but reading through now, I see he was actually being patient with a young guy who wanted to spend time talking about his return to acoustic music after a long stint in the world of fusion.
"That's an isolationistic separatism kind of thing," he told me about those who wanted to distinguish between those two settings. "I didn't think of it as playing with acoustic instruments. I didn't put the word acoustic out front, as if acoustic is an instrument itself. The story and content and intention and celebration and all of that, and the eternal flow of trust in eternity itself, that's the main thing."
The other thing I found difficult was the performance a few days later. Shorter, joined by Danilo Perez on piano, Brian Blade on drums and John Patitucci on bass, performed a set that, according to my review, "seemed as if the group was improvising off bits and pieces from Shorter's compositions or test-driving entirely new tunes. So, while a snippet of 'Sanctuary' or 'Footprints' seemed to pop up out of the free-form waters from time to time, the four never kept with any one theme long enough to allow your ear to grab hold."
Shorter told me in that interview that he appreciated the way his bandmates played, even hinted that their ability to not play what is expected was a plus.
"These guys don't have a bunch of baggage," he said. "The arteries are clear. To use an analogy, you can run the water through the garden hose and you won't get a lot of rust."
At the time, what I knew about jazz would maybe fill a thimble that sat unnoticed on Shorter's mantle. Now, 20 years later, it might fill two. I was a fan of Shorter's earlier solo LPs like See No Evil and JuJu, had no time for his fusion period -- either with Miles Davis or as a member of Weather Report, and was having difficulty finding a way into the new music he was making with Perez, Patitucci and Blade. As such, I essentially panned the quartet's show that week.
"The group played just six songs, five in the main set and one encore," I wrote. "The first tune was 25 minutes long. By the end of the show, a substantial part of the capacity crowd seemed to give up, the trickle of people headed to the exits during the earlier tunes growing to a minor exodus before the encore… the Wayne Shorter Quartet on Wednesday sounded like four talented musicians in search of a song that they weren't quite able to find."
I dearly wish I had a recording of the show, for while I appreciate what I felt at the time, I suspect I would be much more forgiving, and rewarded, were I to hear the exact same set today. (The set above from a German festival, was recorded just a few months before the show I saw). My tastes have only grown more expansive over the past two decades. I have a much greater appreciation for fusion (I love most of Miles work from that era, though Weather Report still eludes me for the most part) and have fully embraced song structures many would strain to call music. In short, I'm primed now for what Shorter offered 20 years ago and would surely be content in the journey, knowing it is sometimes more rewarding than the destination.
That helped to make the Children of the Light show so rewarding. I said the show from two decades ago sounded like four musicians all soloing at the same time. A better description, I realize now, is that of close friends in a bout of one upmanship. Sometimes everyone sits back and listens while one of them spins a tale; other times everyone has something to interject, passion and energy taking over before things sort themselves out, the conversation veering off in unpredictable yet satisfying directions.
What I didn't understand then but appreciate now is that there is great value in such moments, that to get to a point where all three can seemingly play their own thing, they needed to spend years listening to one another, knowing when to add something and when to lay back. Blade's playing in particular was likely what I found lacking in 2002. He doesn't drive, doesn't propel. He colors and shades, and that lack of aural signposts to guide the listener led me to hear exploration as aimless wandering.
I didn’t make that mistake at this recent show. On this night, playing a set that included Shorter classics like "Sanctuary" and tunes penned by the trio members, they conversed like people at a wake, that small group of friends who find themselves laughing and then looking up to see if anyone noticed. The audience and the band could collectively mourn and celebrate, somber feelings quickly overtaken by the virtuosic playfulness of the performance.
I'll leave you with Shorter's final words to me in that interview, a fitting epitaph, I suppose, but also a reminder that music is a continuum. What you don't like now, you might like later. What you don't understand in the moment might become clear in time.
"Music is to celebrate life and its eternity," Shorter said. "Music is a small drop in the ocean of life itself. Living and dying is a part of that journey."
Wilson and Darnielle write of Satanic Panics
I have been meaning to read Kevin Wilson for a while now, and was glad to remember a copy of his latest novel, Now is Not the Time to Panic on my Kindle when searching for something to read while away from my books recently.
It's a clever tale of two bored kids in 1996 Tennessee who create a poster that becomes a sensation in their town. File it under "Satanic Panic," as the townspeople, and eventually people across the country, ascribe evil intent to the creation. Bad things transpire, and the book uses this to offer a rather moving excavation of the lives of a couple of misfits.
While reading, I couldn't help but think back to another 2022 book, John Darnielle's Devil House. Though set a decade earlier in mid-'80s California, there are broad parallels between the two books. Darnielle's tale, which centers on an adult video store that becomes a haven for some disaffected teens, is more sinister, darker in the micro sense than Wilson's book.
I couldn't find anything linking these two books, save for a reference Wilson makes to Darnielle in an interview with Audible about audiobooks, and specifically his favorites. "I just love his voice," Wilson says of Darnielle reading Devil House. "The way he reads his own words, it's one of the rare times where an author is qualified to do the work."
Darnielle's book felt a bit claustrophobic, while Wilson's is lighter in tone. Reading them within the space of a few months allowed them to sit in dialogue with one another, and in a broader conversation with the world around us. As politicians seek one bogeyman after another to scare people into ignoring the things their lives lack, we seem to be in an endless spiral of Satanic Panics. Last year it was Critical Race Theory. This year it is trans kids. Wilson and Darnielle both seem to be commenting on this phenomenon, looking at the present by looking back.
These are the kind of books teens would love, a way to see how the world has always created big problems by overreacting to situations and willfully misinterpreting information. Quick, before some pearl-clutcher with too much spare time adds them to the naughty list.
New music, new strategy for Wye Oak
Speaking of long-ago interviews, I chatted with Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack of Wye Oak shortly after the duo's first album was released. They were planning a show in Iowa City in the summer of 2008. Then the floods hit, wiping out wide swaths of the city for the summer, and that plan was scuttled. I don't recall much from the conversation -- any document of it now lost -- other than that they seemed so earnest and likable. They were in their van between gigs, either driving or sitting somewhere to chat before hitting the road, both contributing over a speakerphone.
This unassuming young band whose debut made hardly a ripple has become one of my favorite acts; Wasner is one of my favorite songwriters and vocalists, and a hell of a guitarist, too. They have been as adventurous as any indie rock band over the past 15 years, and continue to innovate beyond the creation of music. Or rather, of music product.
The band essentially gave up on albums after 2018's The Louder I Call, the Faster it Runs. Since that time, they have issued six stand-alone singles and one collaborative EP. “Something that felt exciting to me was being a little bit more fleet-footed and light about being able to put things out into the world,” Wasner told Exclaim! about releasing singles instead of albums. "A lot of these songs, we would write them and record them and then they’d come out a couple of weeks later, which, to me, just sort of feels so much more in line with how the creative process works and feels on our end of things.”
In the era of streaming and Bandcamp, I'm surprised more artists don't take this path. For fans who want a slab of vinyl, acts can eventually deliver the way Wye Oak does with the newly announced collection, Every Day Like the Last, which collects those six singles with three new songs. The first of these is the title track, a serene, acoustic guitar driven tune that bursts into full flower as Stack’s polyrhythmic drums stagger to a close. It’s a welcome continuation of what they do so well.