Greg Wall – tenor Saxophone
Andy Gravish -Trumpet
Jen Allen – Piano
Essiet Essiet- Bass
Sylvia Cuenca – Drums
The great Wayne Shorter, 1933- 2023, was among the most influential improvisers and prolific composers in Jazz history.
Since his first performances with Art Blakey in the late 1950’s, he stayed at the forefront of Jazz, simultaneously straddling the past and the future of the music.
Although his saxophone playing was inimitable, his writing influenced just about every jazz composer to follow,
Speak No Evil was one of several albums Wayne recorded for Blue Note in 1964, his first year as a member of Miles Davis’s mid-1960s quintet. The album is generally regarded as one of Shorter’s finest, and also a highlight of the Blue Note catalogue. NPR’s Murray Horwitz stated in 2001 that “Speak No Evil is sort of a consolidation of Wayne Shorter’s compositional excellence. It’s so thorough and consistent and wide-ranging. It’s almost a manifesto for his ideas. Those ideas were new 40 years ago, but they’re still fresh today.”
New York Times critic Ben Ratliff included the album in his publication Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings stating that it offers “the first taste of a gnomic compositional style that would haunt jazz forevermore… Just about everybody playing jazz born in the 1950s and after accepts it as a foundation.”
On June 12, as part of our Distinctive Disc playlists series, we will celebrate the compositions that make up “Speak No Evil” with a stellar group of artists who have been listening and performing this music their entire careers. Come hear how this music is still alive and growing, 60 years later!
