Wayne Shorter – Odyssey of Iska (Blue Note, 1971)

Wayne Shorter (ts, ss); David Friedman (vib, mar); Gene Bertoncini (g); Ron Carter (b); Cecil McBee (b); Billy Hart (d); Alphonse Mouzon (d); Frank Cuomo (d, perc)

Recorded on August 26, 1970

In September 1969, Wayne Shorter and his wife, Ana Maria, had a daughter. They named her Iska.  In her biography, Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter (Penguin, 2007), author Michelle Mercer explained that ... 

"Wayne had liked Cyprian Ekwensi's 1966 novel Iska, and especially admired its girl protagonist, who was a symbol of the winds of change blowing through post-colonial Africa.  In Nigeria, iska is the Hausa word for wind, but it's also a poetic expression for transition, or for liminal things like ghosts" (p. 135).  

Sadly, the joy from the birth of their child was soon followed by tragedy.  Just months after her birth, Iska experienced a severe adverse reaction to a tetanus vaccine.  Her breathing was obstructed for an extended period time until she was rushed to the hospital.  The results were horrific.  The oxygen deprivation meant that Iska experienced severe and permanent brain damage.  

So this music represents Shorter's attempt to reconcile what has happened to his child.  Given these grim circumstances (and the album's title), it's no surprise that The Odyssey of Iska takes us on a journey.  There's a sense of progression from the beginning of the album to the end.  On the first cut, "Wind," a storm is gathering.  The second cut is "Storm," and it is followed by "Calm" after the storm.  After the storm comes "Depois do Amor, o Vazio"; translated into English, this means, "After Love, Emptiness."  And the album's final track is "Joy."  So we experience a progression from foreboding gray to stormy darkness to finally emerge into some sort of recognition of survival.  I think the final cut is about finding some meaning and some joy beyond surviving.  But Shorter doesn't give us “normal” joy.  The music is not celebratory in the normal sense.  Instead, there's a swirling sense of struggle towards hope. 

Setting aside this terrible back-story, one of the things that I love about this music is that Shorter is striking out for parts unknown, new territory.  He is leaving behind the old structures and conventions and seeking to forge new ones.  I think it’s notable that Shorter didn't use a pianist -- or keyboards of any kind -- on the record.  (Even the producer, Duke Pearson, doesn’t play.)  So there is none of the harmonic stability that a piano would provide.  Instead, the only chordal instruments are David Friedman's vibraphone and Gene Bertoncini's guitar.  And they seem to use their instruments primarily for textural purposes, rather than providing harmonic support.  As a result, the music has floating, unmoored quality.

Listening to this music, one can't help but hear it in relation to the music that Shorter would soon be making as a member of Weather Report.  (Even the song titles "Wind," "Storm," "Calm" point in the direction of weather and the natural world.)  But this music sounds very different -- especially on the bottom of the sound spectrum.  This is what Weather Report might have been like without Josef Zawinul's dense forest of keyboard sounds. 

The music is moody and foreboding. Some have even described it as "melancholy," but I'd be hesitant to use that word. There's no sense of melancholy repose; things are continually astir.  The decision to use two drummers and a percussionist adds to this sense of infinite movement.  Rather than providing a sense of beat or forward momentum, the drummers provide texture in a painterly way.

It’s strange.  One of the remarkable things about this music is that it sounds so abstract and spontaneous while it's also orderly and thought-through at the same time.  Shorter often speaks about the idea of improvisation being "spontaneous composition," and you can hear that here.  It’s composerly music -- even if the composing is taking place while Shorter is playing.

When I listen to this music, I hear a father using his immense imagination to try to make sense of things, trying to find some way to communicate and connect with a daughter who is forced to live in an isolated world.  But of course the music works on a universal level as well. Like all great artists, Shorter takes the most personal and specific of circumstances and transforms them into something much greater, something mythic, something with which we all can identify.

Iska Shorter died in 1986 at 14 years of age.