Wayne Shorter’s music has received recognition from all around the world as well as appreciation from critics and has several pieces that have evolved into jazz standards. The 12-time Grammy winner Shorter.
What is Wayne Shorter known for?
Shorter is an American musician and composer well-known for his major jazz saxophonist, among the most influential hard-bop and modal musicians, and a pioneer of jazz-rock fusion music.
Shorter studied at New York University (B.M.E., 1956) and served in the U.S. Army (1956–58). He spent brief periods in the Horace Silver quintet (1956) and the Maynard Ferguson big band (1958) before his first major association, with Art Blakey’s hard-bop Jazz Messengers (1959–63). He joined Miles Davis’s modal jazz quintet as a tenor saxophonist in 1964 and stayed with him during Davis’s early fusion music experiments, leaving in 1970 as a soprano saxophonist.
Shorter and keyboardist Joe Zawinul formed Weather Report, a fusion band that experimented with an unusual diversity of sound hues, for the majority of the 1970s and the early 1980s. He frequently picked up the tenor saxophone again, and in his later years, he ran his own fusion music ensembles.
