WAYNE SHORTER — The Soothsayer (review)

WAYNE SHORTER — The Soothsayer album cover Album · 1979 · Hard Bop Buy this album from MMA partners
5/5 ·
Mssr_Renard
I must say that this Shorter-album is one of my favourites, and I consider this one to be a tad overlooked by people. This album was released in the late seventies but contains songs recorded on march 4th 1965 and the line-up is a special one.

McCoy Tyner plays with Shorter on JuJu, while on most Shorter-albums Hancock handles the piano. The Spaulding-Hubbard-Shorter pairing is just perfect, wich is also used on The All Seeing Eye (augmented by Alan Shorter and Moncour).

Also very special about this album is Tony Williams on drums, because Shorter worked mostly with Elvin Jones and Joe Chambers. Tony and Wayne were both members of Miles' group so it is not that odd.

All musicians involved in this wonderful album have their moments, but I think it's mostly the Shorter-Spaulding pairing that makes this album interesting. The two saxes sound excellent on the unisono-parts but the solo-trading is great to. I think that Hubbard is the least prominent.

I already have most of the VSOP-albums (Shorter-Hubbard-Williams-Carter-Hancock) of the late seventies and somehow this album can be seen as a pre-cursor of those great albums.

The music and compositions of this album are much more mature than the Art Blakey-albums Shorter played on. My guess is that Shorter kept the best compositions for himself. This is wonderful album wich should have been released in the sixties and fits perfectly in the string of albums JuJu, Adam's Apple, Speak No Evil, All Seeing Eye, etc.
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