The Wayne Shorter Quartet

Without A Net

(Blue Note)

A hornman born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, even at school the ever-innovative Wayne Shorter played truant to go and hear visiting big bands.

He turned to the clarinet at 16, soon moving on to the tenor saxophone and breaking into luminous company by playing with bop pioneers like Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Jackie McLean and Horace Silver.

He studied music at New York University and spent two years in the army, then he was making records for the Vee-Jay label, including albums like Second Genesis and Wayning Moments, before being invited by Art Blakey to become both musical director and featured tenorist of the Jazz Messengers from 1959-64.

The Blue Note label recognised his inclination to break out of hard-bop strictures and in the early to mid-'60s he made a stack of starkly original albums for them like Speak No Evil (1964), Juju (1964), Et Cetera (1965) and Adam's Apple (1966).

In 1964 he became part of the new Miles Davis Quintet with Miles, bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock and drummer Tony Williams, and he toured the world with this most stellar of bands.

His next step was into jazz fusion discoveries with Weather Report and novel electric albums like I Sing the Body Electric (1972), Mysterious Traveller (1974), and Black Market (1976).

As the years passed, Shorter has returned to a no less adventurous sound of an acoustic quartet, and his latest octogenarian achievement is Without A Net, cut with his long-time confreres of other generations, bassist John Patitucci, drummer Brian Blade and the Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez, the latter two experienced leaders of their own bands.

The album is Shorter's first Blue Note album for 43 years, and all tracks except one were recorded during the quartet's 2011 European tour.

Perez's pounding Isthmian chords contrast with Shorter's fleeting soprano saxophone through the opener, Orbits, with Blade's splashing drums, while from the outset of Starry Night it is Patitucci's dancing basslines that give a deep undertow to both Perez and Shorter, making it very clear that this is certainly a quartet of equals with the notion of "accompaniment" powerfully set aside. Nothing is so subservient here.

Always a potent tunesmith - remember Angola or Footprints from his former Blue Note days - Shorter has written all bar one of the pieces on Without A Net, and SS Golden Mean is one of his most memorable.

It's a craft of swirling curlicues of sounds, with Shorter's gyrating soprano and a racing Perez, until the brakes are applied at the tune's denouement.

Then it's directly into Plaza Real with more soprano artistry stirred by Blade's unflagging drums, a revival from Weather Report days, in particular from the 1984 album Procession.

Myrrh is the shortest track, just three minutes of Shorter's incense-inspired soprano pealing out a storm of combustive wind power, undeterred by its bearer's 80 years.

It moves directly into Pegasus, recorded in concert in Los Angeles, with The Imami Winds supplementing the quartet, comprising flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn and bassoon.

After Perez's exquisite opening solo, the winds enter in ensemble before Blade's joyous and insurgent drums, and Shorter's boiling soprano creates the mythical horse through his sonic lines and colours and sometimes even Parkeresque licks of legend.

Back to 1933 and the title tune of the Rogers/Astair film Flying Down To Rio, beginning with a whistle before Perez's comping notes and Patitucci's delving beat prelude the Shorter soprano in Brazilian garb, sounding itself almost oboe-like, breaking into skyward phrases.

Zero Gravity To The 10th Power follows, with Shorter at last on his tenor saxophone sounding characteristically buoyant, almost weightless over Perez'a pacey keyboard runs and Blade's intermittent thrashing.

It has been a long wait for the other horn, but one rewarded with the old sense of the sudden and unexpected.

The very title of this album is a summation of Shorter's astonishing life in jazz - his daring, his embrace of risk, his extereme vulnerability as an artist, the achievement of spanning much of a century of music, always originating, always blowing deep into the future, beyond years and the sheer life of breath.

Sonny Rollins 83, Wayne Shorter, 80. Both still blowing like rebellious youths. There's hope for us all.

Chris Searle