Wayne Shorter

This is the Messengers album on which Shorter, as musical director, first had a 3-horn front line in hand. The arranging craft he honed under Blakey shows itself in dense harmonies.

• First, listen to the theme, where three horns, trumpet·trombone·tenor, stack different notes into a single thick chord (voicing). The man who refined this texture was Shorter.
• Each time a solo ripens, Blakey presses his sticks into the drumhead and rolls them in a driving barrage (press roll) that pushes the soloist to the next level. This is the engine of the Messengers' signature red-hot hard bop.
• On Shorter's tune “Children of the Night,” his tenor seems to move not in bright cries but in dark, slanting lines that bend and turn.
• The title track, by pianist Cedar Walton, mixes in passages that linger on a single chord (a technique of modal jazz), capturing the air of a moment when hard bop was crossing into new harmony.

A signature Blue Note album, recorded on Christmas Eve of the year he joined Miles's quintet. His imagination, steeped in film and folklore, soaks fully into the tune titles and the dark atmosphere.

• The opener, “Witch Hunt,” begins with an introduction the two horns blast out like a fanfare and, true to its title, builds the tension of being hunted.
• Elvin Jones's drums lay down layer upon layer of rhythms that split each beat into three, creating a swell in which several meters seem to flow at once (polyrhythm). Hancock and Carter lightly dab chords atop that tide.
• The ballad “Infant Eyes” is played by the quartet without Hubbard, letting you hear up close as Shorter spares the vibrato and slowly draws out the melody in a breathy tone.
• It was recorded in a single day at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The form is the classic head-solo-head (theme-improvisation-theme), yet in each tune the bar count and chord progression veer slightly from convention.

Shorter's title track overturned the division of roles within the quintet. It is the recording that shows most clearly why he was the one who breathed ideas into this band.

• The title track has no horn solos. Miles and Shorter simply repeat the slow, mysterious theme from start to finish, while beneath them the rhythm section improvises. Lead and accompaniment have, in effect, traded places.
• Each time the theme comes around, Tony Williams's drums shift in intensity and density, gradually stoking the fire. That is why the same melody, repeated again and again, never grows dull.
• The heart of this quintet is the give-and-take (interplay) in which the soloists and rhythm section respond to each other's sounds on the spot. Listen for the passages where Hancock deliberately holds back his chords to leave empty space.
• Listen, too, to Shorter's “Fall” and “Pinocchio” on the same album. With the short, angular theme of “Pinocchio” and the slowly drifting harmonies of “Fall,” they show the two faces of his writing.

Around the time he was caring for his ailing daughter and embracing a new faith, he made this album with the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento. It includes a piece dedicated to his wife.

• The opener, “Ponta de Areia,” begins with Nascimento's high, clear head voice (falsetto) tracing the melody in wordless sound. Shorter's soprano saxophone takes up that voice and carries it on.
• Shorter's “Ana Maria” is a tune named for his wife. Weighted toward a round, singing melody rather than flashy technique, it sounds like words quietly offered to someone beloved.
• Herbie Hancock took part on piano and keyboards. Over the softly swaying rhythms peculiar to Brazilian music, jazz harmony blends in naturally.
• In an era of fusion swept by electric instruments and sheer volume, it is regarded as an album that showed an entirely different path through unhurried tempos and open space.

The peak of Weather Report after Jaco Pastorius joined, and the band's biggest commercial success. Instead of long solos, Shorter chose to change a tune's color with a single short phrase.

• Zawinul's “Birdland” opens on a low synthesizer bass figure; Jaco's bass then lays the melody on top in clear harmonics (harmonics), struck by lightly touching the string, and the instruments pile on one by one as the music swells.
• Jaco's fretless bass glides from note to note, singing like a human voice. In “A Remark You Made,” its ballad dialogue with Shorter's tenor is especially beautiful.
• In Shorter's own “Palladium,” Latin percussion lays down a dense groove, and Shorter's saxophone tosses out short motifs that lock into the rhythm.
• It is fusion, blending electric instruments with jazz improvisation, yet the improvisation is meticulously placed within the arrangement. It is what became of the early ideal that everyone would improvise at once, once that ideal gave way to tightly woven composition.

The quartet's first album, capturing performances at European festivals in the summer of 2001. Having passed through a season of loss, he returned to the stage by rebuilding his old tunes anew each time.

• “Footprints,” written in 1966, is famous for its accompaniment in which the bass repeats a short figure (ostinato). Here Patitucci treats that figure merely as a point of departure, and the tune, its tempo loosening and tightening, becomes something else entirely.
• Brian Blade's drums shrink until they are almost inaudible, then explode in an instant. These plunges in dynamics drive the breathing of the whole band.
• Shorter does not spin out long solos; he tosses off a short phrase and leaves silence behind it. The moments when Pérez's piano takes up that empty space and carries the conversation on are the heart of this quartet.
• It comes close to collective improvisation, where the line between soloist and accompanist blurs. Listen to it alongside the traditional approach of playing a set number of choruses and then handing off to the next player.