The late Wayne Shorter and his brother Alan, himself a brilliantly oblique avant garde trumpet player, once attempted to model the entire world in clay. “He made a hundred people and I made about 150,” Shorter recalled. Refusing boundaries of scale or feasibility throughout his career – which culminated in an opera completed during the covid pandemic – Shorter never did the expected.

In the ‘brick city vanguard’ of Newark, New Jersey, Shorter attended Newark Arts High School after winning a city wide arts competition, all the while absorbing mambo, cha-cha, horror movie soundtracks, and “this new music called bebop”. Back then Newark was an incubator of talent, from singers Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan – who attended the same church as the Shorters – to Amiri and Amina Baraka, organist Larry Young and trombonist Grachan Moncur III.

“We stopped reading comic books,” Shorter recalled. “Charles Christopher Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk took the place of Captain Marvel [...] This was a social movement. It is a movement away from ragtime and the constrictions that were associated with ragtime like minstrel stuff. This is being ‘cool’.”

Like Sun Ra, Shorter operated as a kind of philosopher, delighting in linguistic puns, using music and language alike to reach beyond social norms or the realms of common sense. Around Newark’s musical circles, recalled Amiri Baraka, Shorter developed into “a metaphorical reference: ‘...as weird as Wayne’”.

After studies at New York University and two years in the army, Shorter joined Maynard Ferguson’s Big Band and, subsequently, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, for whom he went on to become music director. A Muslim since the late 1940s, Blakey (Abdullah Ibn Buhaina) instilled a sense of cultural heritage among the younger musicians he mentored in the band.

At a gig in colonial era Algiers, The Messengers were met by a torrent of abuse after Blakey challenged the venue’s racially exclusionary policies. Asking “Gentlemen, are you ready to die?” he escorted the band through the crowd while carrying a copy of the Koran. The first piece Shorter wrote for Blakey was entitled “Africaine”; in February 1964, Shorter appeared on Lee Morgan’s Search For The New Land, its second track “Mr Kenyatta” dedicated to the newly elected president of independent Kenya.

Leaving The Messengers in 1964, Shorter recorded Night Dreamer, a record at once wistful and restless: in his words, “a paradox, like you’d have in a dream”. This mood continued on Speak No Evil, his 1966 record that’s at once eerie and tender. In the sleevenotes, Shorter wrote: “I was thinking of misty landscapes with wild flowers and strange, dimly seen shapes – the kind of places where folklore and legends are born.” “Dance Cadaverous”, adapted from Sibelius’s Valse Triste, gleams with mysterious intimacy and utopic promise. Listening to the record, a friend remarks: “It’s like they’re whispering to each other.”

In his 1968 book Black Music, Baraka places Shorter within the ranks of the jazz avant garde. But this is a profoundly introspective outness. At times on The All-Seeing Eye, a 1965 suite concerning no less than the creation of the world, the music seems to collapse in on itself: the desolate introspection of Grachan Moncur’s solo on “Chaos”, a kind of anti-gravity vortex, the elongated one-chord vamp of Alan Shorter’s “Mephistopheles” – that track being the only time the brothers collaborated on record. On Moncur’s 1965 album Some Other Stuff, Shorter blares out of the void with desolate grandeur and fire, communicating as if in an unknown language.

Shorter joined Miles Davis in September 1964. Immediately, spaces started to open up in the music. “It wasn’t the bish-bash, sock ’em dead routine we had with Blakey, with every solo a climax. With Miles, I felt like a cello, I felt viola, I felt liquid, dot-dash... and colours started really coming.”

Shorter’s compositions likewise opened up space in Davis’s music. On the title track to 1968’s Nefertiti, Davis and the group opted not to solo on the theme: instead, they repeated it over while the rhythm section added an ever changing parade of textures underneath, dominated by Tony Williams’s boiling, surging drums. It remains one of the most extraordinary creations in Davis’s and Shorter’s work alike.

Over the next few years, Shorter played in Davis’s so-called Lost Quintet – a ferocious free-oriented band of Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack De Johnette – and in the sprawling set of studio sessions that yielded Miles In The Sky, Filles De Kilimanjaro, In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew and Big Fun.

Shorter had initially begun playing soprano saxophone so as to be heard over the electric instruments in Davis’s band, describing its sound as “like the dolphin coming from the bowels of the ocean, overcoming and shooting higher than the waves”. On the sui generis In A Silent Way, Shorter’s bell-like soprano seems to float over the music; on his own trilogy of albums recorded for Blue Note at the end of the decade, meanwhile, it imitates the rythmised shrieks of the Brazilian cuica. Featuring a varied cast of musicians including Sonny Sharrock, John McLaughlin and the 19 year old Belgian percussionist Micheline Pelzer, often playing multiple instruments, the fragmentary suites of Supernova, Moto Grosso Feio and Odyssey Of Iska seethe with relentless urgency and desolate lyricism. Shorter pays tribute to Billy Strayhorn, covers Antônio Carlos Jobim, and traces the roots of colonisation across the Red and Black Atlantic, from Brazil to the Antilles.

In 1974, Shorter continued his explorations of Brazilian music on Native Dancer, his last album as a leader for the next decade. The album came about out of his wish to collaborate with the extraordinary Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento, whose work, formed and forged in Brazil, was often in tension with the US-supported military regime.

Just as jazz fusion became solidified as a critical and marketing term, so Nascimento’s music suggested fusion of a different sort, building on a tradition of syncretism to merge Afro-diasporic religion, Catholicism, folk music, and the sounds of US jazz and pop. Including songs from Nascimento’s 1973 album Milagre Dos Peixes, on which he had sung wordlessly in protest at state censorship of lyrics, Shorter’s Native Dancer finds the singer turning his voice into an instrument and Shorter his instrument into a voice, in a display of a pan-African and pan-American solidarity that speaks all the more powerfully without words.

Founded in 1970 with two European expatriates, keyboardist Joe Zawinul and bassist Miroslav Vitouš, Shorter’s new band Weather Report was developing an intercultural music of a different sort. Sci-fi fan Shorter suggested the title to the band’s second album I Sing The Body Electric, taken from Walt Whitman via Ray Bradbury. The second track, Shorter’s “The Moors”, hints at the mestizaje heritage of Mexico along with the history of Moorish Spain. “I was thinking of the Moors going over into Spain, and the mixing of races there. I dig mixtures. Something happened to me when I was walking around the Aztec pyramids in Mexico, something that inspired me to write that tune.” Following Ralph Towner’s classical guitar intro, Shorter’s soprano cuts like pure light through the thick distortions of Vitouš’s and Zawinul’s heavily modulated instruments.

The music shifted on subsequent recordings, after Vitouš left the band to be replaced first by Alphonso Johnson and then by Jaco Pastorius. Zawinul commented: “In the beginning, let’s say, Weather Report was a joint thing. Then, after the second album, there’s no question about it, it became more and more my group.”

As Zawinul and Pastorius competed onstage, Shorter heard something else from the wings. “When I was not stepping out in front, soloing, I was doing orchestration, thinking, Man, if I had 20 cellos, this is what it would sound like here.”

Leaving Weather Report in 1985, Shorter finally had the chance to realise that vision. On that year’s new solo album Atlantis, he wrote, he had sought “to ‘break away’ from known formulas of presenting the ‘song’ to the world”. Largely through composed, its pieces were based on multiple entwining lines, any one of which could serve as principal or counter-melody. Such interplay owed something to classical counterpoint, but it also drew on the sectional organisation of the classic big bands, with Shorter’s overdubbed saxophones at times sounding like the classic Ellington or Basie horn sections.

Atlantis, like the meso-American or African histories to which Shorter alluded in the 1960s and 70s, offers an image of an alternative society that the present world insists on destroying, and that, for him, might be constructed and reconstructed in sound. Each in their own way, the three albums that followed – Phantom Navigator (1986), Joy Ryder (1988) and High Life (1995) – offered worlds of their own: Atlantis, stately and gleaming, Phantom Navigator a futuristic energy, and Joy Ryder a cascading hard edge. High Life, meanwhile, sometimes seems determined to suspend time altogether, the elongated melodies of the folk-tinged “At The Fair” or the insinuating “Midnight In Carlotta’s Hair” winding round on themselves to form a continuous texture of song, as they had done on ‘circular’ pieces like “Nefertiti”.

At the turn of the Millennium, Shorter assembled a new quartet of pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade, which stayed together for the next 20 years. Though this was the first time he’d led an acoustic small group under his own name since the mid-1960s, Shorter did not build on the templates of the bop period. Instead, he adapted and advanced the medley method of Davis’s Lost Quintet, with compositions from across his career – from familiar pieces like “Orbits” and “Sanctuary” to the newer work like “Atlantis” and “Over Shadow Hill Way” – functioning like a deck of cards that could be endlessly combined and shuffled.

The quartet didn’t offer a series of solos on tunes, but a collective improvisation in which no one voice took the lead for more than a few minutes, and in which composed material was treated improvisationally. I saw the band playing in London twice, first in 2006 and then again in 2008, and I was astonished both times. With Shorter leading by stepping back, the four musicians sounded like they were all soloing at once, filling in the gaps round each other’s phrases, responding and tossing back melodic fragments.

This longform unfolding method was best encountered live, but official documentation came on Footprints Live (2001), Beyond The Sound Barrier (2004), Without A Net (2010) and, finally, the boxset Emanon (2018). Borrowing its ‘no name’ backwards title from a Dizzy Gillespie number, Emanon is the most comprehensive official documentation of Shorter’s late work, its range suggested by the juxtaposition between the respective versions of “The Three Marias” with The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the quartet.

The orchestral version lets the composition soar out in full technicolor, framing Shorter’s ecstatic solos; in the quartet version, “The Three Marias” serves more as an occasional reference point, like a wavering light guiding the players on their journey through roads less travelled (like “Over Shadow Hill Way”). There’s politics here too: who today remembers the titular Marias, writers whose book New Portugese Letters challenged the Salazar regime, or the related struggles in Angola and Guinea-Bissau against colonial tyranny, the moment when anti-colonial activism in the peripheries and the resistant voices of artists and activists in the centre combined to bring down a right wing dictatorship? Shorter’s music is not about these events as programmatic depiction, but the title establishes a link to their spirit that serves as a salutary reminder.

Phantom Navigator had been themed around the Other Worlds comic book Shorter had drawn as a teenager; Emanon went one stage further, and included a co-authored comic book of Shorter’s as part of the package. The real other worlds, however, lay in the music. Describing Charlie Parker’s admiration for westernised music in a 1968 Downbeat essay, Shorter argued: “Western scales came from around Greece, Jerusalem and Arabia. They’re world scales, really. People are taught music history this way, separating Western music from Eastern music, but I think it’s one big circle [...] a springboard into history, going all the way back to the great explosion that started this planet.”

Music for Shorter didn’t just contain a world, it contained a universe, and, like the expanding universe itself, it cannot be contained. A supernova has gone out.

Wire subscribers can read a complete consumer’s guide to Weather Report in The Wire 32, Greg Tate’s 2018 review of Wayne Shorter's Emanon in The Wire 416 and Shorter’s own The Inner Sleeve piece in The Wire 423 via the online library.