Jazz breaking news: No Whys And Wherefores As The Wayne Shorter Quartet Conjure A Sense of Wonder

The bass-led trio were not hanging about and launched straight away into ‘Abraham’s New Gift’, the opening track from their 2009 album Green Delay which also featured on Alive recorded just last year three miles away in Camden Town. Høiby later joked that they were there as a “fan band, boy band” for the main act, but the audience had by then already responded to the band’s energy, characterised in the bouncy compound time signatures that give Phronesis an elastic springiness that produces a kinetic energy. ‘Charm Offensive’, ‘Love Song’, the band’s musical response to prevailing influence Avishai Cohen, and Neame’s opportunity to shine in ‘Happy Notes’, completed a set that had plenty of impact. Judged solely by the unindulgent reaction of this audience Phronesis have made the transfer from their habitual playing environment in jazz clubs and connoisseur festival slots to a large concert hall with ease.

While the Wayne Shorter Quartet has been together for 11 years this was the first London concert in nearly four years by the great Newark-born saxophonist and composer, now 78, blowing low, long, strong and abstract on tenor and soprano saxes.

Playing with pianist Danilo Pérez, who since his last visit with Shorter has become artistic director of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute in Boston and released the critically acclaimed album Providencia last year. Bassist John Patitucci, who aside from touring with Shorter has also been busy teaching and composing new music for bass, woodwind quintet and piano. But drummer Brian Blade in the interim has changed emphasis entirely, developing a new side to his profile in recent years, particularly on the album Mama Rosa, featuring his singing and guitar playing. As a quartet Beyond The Sound Barrier was their last quartet album outing in 2005 and there is no definitive word of a new album although there have been rumours of a release for some time with a date fixed and unfixed on Verve’s schedule time and again. What the quartet played is anyone’s guess as none of the songs were announced, a not unusual feature of Shorter in performance. What they did though consisted mainly of a very long and substantial opening composition, more than half a CD-length in itself, characterised by increasing volume, ecstatic Brian Blade rhythmic punctuation, and softly muffled tenor saxophone asides, clarifications and melodic ideas by Shorter.

As the set developed momentum which it did to formidable effect, Shorter switched to soprano saxophone and back again to tenor, but his soprano spurred Blade on and on and quite often the direction of the latter part of the performance was strongly percussive, acutely intense and extraordinarily powerful.

Peréz provided the dramatic build with dense quartal harmony and a crucial section when he teased the piano strings inside the Steinway. The last tune before the first excellent encore rundown sounded as if it was circling in on the melody of Wayne’s celebrated composition ‘Footprints’ radically transformed and recomposed section by section into a newly minted song. Wayne whistling the lead melody and then coming in on soprano, cueing the cue, knowing the know, daring us in, to awe-inspiring effect.

– Stephen Graham