Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter

by Michelle Mercer

Overview

Saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter has not only left his footprints on our musical terrain, he has created a body of work that is a monument to artistic imagination. Throughout Shorter's extraordinary fifty-year career, his compositions have helped define the sounds of each distinct era in the history of jazz.

Filled with musical analysis by Mercer, enlivened by Shorter's vivid recollections, and enriched by more than seventy-five original interviews with his friends and associates, this book is at once an invaluable history of music from bebop to pop, an intimate and moving biography, and a story of a man's struggle toward the full realization of his gifts and of himself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781585424689
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/2007
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	268,749
Product dimensions:	5.96(w) x 8.96(h) x 0.99(d)
Age Range:	18 - 14 Years

About the Author

Michelle Mercer is a New York Times bestselling author and a veteran music commentator for National Public Radio. Michelle is the author of Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter (Penguin), Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period (Simon & Schuster), and the ghostwriter of other titles. She’s the first woman to be a featured Hot Box critic for DownBeat magazine, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Village Voice, among many other publications. Michelle has won fellowships and residencies around the world, and has presented and reported on art, music, and culture in 20 countries. 

Table of Contents

Foreword   Herbie Hancock     ix
Preface   Wayne Shorter     xi
Introduction: Face of the Deep     1
Water Babies     11
Bop Fiend: "As Weird As Wayne"     26
The Newark Flash     40
Hard Drinking, Hard Bop with the Jazz Messengers     64
The Elders     74
Children of the Night     84
Miles Smiles     97
Sanctuary     120
Music for Films That Would Never Be Made     138
We Were Always Here     147
Native Dancers and Fairy-Tale Friends     163
Elegant People in Heavy Weather     175
Wild Flowers     192
Joy Ryder     210
"Get your cape out of the cleaner's and fly, Superman!"     222
High Life     230
Super Nova     243
Prometheus Unbound     255
Notes     273
Bibliography     281
Pure Poetry: Compositions   Wayne Shorter     285
Acknowledgments     305
Index     309