2 Wayne Shorter projects capture the late jazz saxophonist’s wandering spirit

Wayne Shorter performs during the Marciac Jazz festival in southern France in 2005. Two recent tribute projects each aim to capture the wandering spirit of the late saxophonist.

Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images

Herbie Hancock walked onstage at the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday night leading two small children by the hand: his grandson, Dru, and Wayne Shorter’s grandson, Max. Describing them as best friends, aged a year and a half apart, Hancock made the obvious parallel to his own relationship with Shorter, over more than six decades. “He loved us with courage in his heart,” Hancock attested. By “us,” he seemed to mean all of the roughly 11,000 people gathered before him under a clear summer sky, but more too: every member of the human race, here and beyond. Simply but pointendly, he added: “Wayne was ready for rebirth.”

Shorter, who died on March 2, was a saxophonist of elliptical eloquence and a composer of farsighted and revealing imagination. Like Hancock, a brilliant pianist and frequent collaborator, he was also a practicing Buddhist. As an enlightenment belief system, it complemented Shorter’s lifelong inclination toward all things cryptic and cosmic. This was mainly a stealth influence in the Hollywood Bowl concert, for which Hancock served as musical director, with a starry assortment of friends and an unbilled appearance by Joni Mitchell. It runs more deeply and forthrightly throughout Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity, an illuminating three-part documentary released on Amazon Prime, in time for what would have been Shorter’s 90th birthday.

One challenge in celebrating Shorter’s legacy is the sheer expanse and variety of his creative output, which had a profound impact on the evolving jazz…