Behold, the Sea! Wayne Shorter

There's a story I like about Wayne Shorter. It's told in Footprints, Michelle Mercer's biography of Shorter, a book that folded in his voice and which may have to serve as his autobiography, unless he writes a proper one. It is told by Hal Miller, a jazz historian who sometimes traveled on tour with Weather Report, the band Shorter played saxophone with from 1971 to 1985.

"I remember once I asked Wayne for the time," Miller told Mercer. "He started talking to me about the cosmos and how time is relative." Miller and Shorter were waiting somewhere — an airport, a train station, a hotel. The band's keyboardist, Joe Zawinul, who took charge of such matters as what the road crew was supposed to do and when, set Miller straight. "You don't ask Wayne shit like that," he snapped. "It's 7:06 p.m."

I have had similar conversations with Shorter over the years. Not long after I read that book, I got in touch with him, hoping we could listen to some music that he admired, as a way into having a conversation about music and, ultimately, about his own work. I figured that the exchange might be one ballooned 7:06 p.m., but I also figured that as long as we were listening to the same music at the same time, the conversation wouldn't break down. After he finished a European tour with his quartet, we got together on a December afternoon at his home in Aventura, Florida, less a town than a thicket of tall condominium towers near the ocean.

Since he went back on the road with an acoustic jazz quartet in 2001, after an extended period of fits and starts following the breakup of Weather Report, Shorter's shows have built up a consensus of awe seldom encountered in the splintered world of jazz. He has been playing his own compositions — from his days with the mid-1960s Miles Davis Quintet to pieces from later solo records — and establishing that there is a way of writing tunes for a hard-core jazz group that are not codified by style as soon as they hit the music paper. The pieces are open-ended, a function of his temperament, as a few hours in his company makes clear.

Shorter, born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, has a cast of mind that makes his jazz almost zenlike. His songs are succinct, clever, sometimes even cute, but they also pose unanswerable questions. Many of his songs from the mid-1960s, when he was turning out one small masterpiece after another — "Fall," "Limbo," "Nefertiti," "Et Cetera," "Orbits" — are dressed in odd phrase lengths and rarefied harmonies. They can seem too fragile to be bruised in a nightclub.

A test of jazz musicians and composers is whether their writing can succeed outside their own creators' preferred context: a trio, a quartet, a big band, or whatever. Wayne Shorter's "Footprints," "Speak No Evil," and "Infant Eyes" have been common standards for a long time now, played in many different types of bands, with other compositions of his approaching that level. Likewise, it's not just with his quartet that he can slay audiences. I once saw him walk on stage for a single solo, on a version of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Dindi," with the singer Flora Purim. It was spectacular, a grainy, evocative, playful thing that kept striking earthy and far-out patterns. He had just turned seventy-one at the time and gave no indication of having decided that he could rely on a boilerplate version of his own sound.

Standing at the windows of his apartment tower, Shorter pointed out the nearby buildings where Whitney Houston and Sophia Loren lived, then showed me a catalog of new work by his wife's cousin, a sculptor from São Paulo. (In 1999 he married Carolina dos Santos, a singer and actress, his third wife.) Finally, he produced a box set of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. "I got something good for you," he said.

I had been expecting classical music. Some of his recent works have been rearrangements, for orchestra and jazz quartet, of Villa-Lobos and Sibelius. I thought he might pick Stravinsky, the bebopper's idol. But this choice made sense, too; the English composer Vaughan Williams, directly or indirectly, influenced many postwar film composers, and if there's one artistic stimulus that Shorter always seems open to, it is the movies.

Small and cheery, dressed in I'm-not-going-outside-today clothes and bedroom slippers, he spent some time struggling to set the Krell home-theater preamp so that it could play a CD. I was forming a suspicion that he didn't listen to music much.

"Hey, man, the Krell. You ever see the movie Forbidden Planet?" he asked. "There was this planet full of people called the Krells. And nobody had been there from Earth — the explorers from Earth didn't see anybody when they arrived. But they all went to sleep one night in their spacecraft, and you hear the first sound of special effects that really came to the fore in movies — this chrrmmm! Chroooom! And you see the ground that's been depressed by huge footprints, not human ..."

He first chose the opening of Vaughan Williams's Symphony no. 1: "A Song for All Seas, All Ships," composed in 1910, with orchestra and choir singing lines taken from a poem by Walt Whitman. After the fanfare, twenty seconds into the piece, as the strings begin to rise dramatically, Shorter smiled. "Life, that's what he's saying," he said. "It's a metaphor for life."

It is superhero music. (Shorter, who is not cagey about his enthusiasms, wore a blue Superman T-shirt that day.) "Behold," the chorus sang out again, "the sea!" The cymbals crashed, illustrating a wave, and then the tempo fell off, the sound dispersing like spray.

"I like that," he said. "It's almost saying, 'Look at your life.' If anybody wants to commit suicide, just take a look at your life. Look in the mirror. Because we are the ship." The brass lines grew denser. "I like that, the little line in the bass going down, the contrary motion. It's like describing a thing that you don't need to worry about. It's like, life should be awesome. The lyrics are saying something else, but there are some things that lyrics cannot express." The chorus came back again. "Power!" he said, grinning.

"I only heard this piece eight or nine months ago," he explained, motioning to the box set we were listening to, which he had just unwrapped. "But Ralph Vaughan Williams, I've been tracking him since I was about sixteen or seventeen. I used to listen to a program called New Ideas in Music, which came on every Saturday at noon on the radio."

Shorter's mother worked for a furrier...