December 8, 2023
By Ted Panken
Wayne Shorter was 33 on March 10, 1967, when he recorded Schizophrenia. It was his eleventh leader date overall, his eighth for Blue Note, and first in a little over a year, after having recorded the previous seven within the 17 months following Night Dreamer in April 1964. He was 30 months into a five-and-a-half-year association with Miles Davis, who had followed a half-year hiatus in 1965 by finding steady work for the Shorter-Hancock-Carter-Williams laboratory, resulting in the music documented two months after Schizophrenia on the astonishing Sorcerer, the date that clarified, as Todd Coolman wrote in the notes for Miles Davis Quintet: 1965-‘68, that Miles “had found and solidified the sound, style, and substance he had been searching for” and that the group, with Shorter as its “central compositional voice,” had become “the singular pivotal force in propelling jazz out of the bebop era and into the music of the ‘70s and beyond.”
On Schizophrenia, the leader deploys a less-traveled front line mix of his tenor saxophone, James Spaulding’s alto saxophone or flute, and Curtis Fuller’s trombone, and the same unitary Hancock-Carter-Joe Chambers “rhythm section” that coalesced Shorter’s October 1965 septet suite, The All Seeing Eye, into a visionary masterpiece. He feeds them such ravishing, harmonically ambiguous songs as “Go” and “Miyako” (for his daughter) and burners-with-an-edge like the title track and “Playground” to dig into. In sum, Shorter attains an equipoise between his first-half-of-the-‘60s achievements in “bish-bash, sock ‘em dead’ hardbop as musical director with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and the form-bending equations he was conjuring for his Davis bandmates to experiment with on a nightly basis.
Although it couldn’t be predicted in 1967, Schizophrenia would be Shorter’s last “straight-ahead jazz” album for a while. On his ninth Blue Note date, Super Nova, rendered 30 months later, Shorter incorporated multiple guitars and percussion (with a decidedly Afro-Brazilian orientation), offering his own perspective on the new sounds that Miles Davis was exploring on the 1969 recordings In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. “Miles called me later,” Shorter once told me. “He said,‘We covered a lot of ground, didn’t we.’ His saying that stayed with me. It was music for music’s sake. Miles realized that we had covered a lot of ground; somehow it touched his whole human essence.”
In a 2008 DownBeat piece in which a few dozen eminent jazz musicians chose their favorite Blue Note date, the alto saxophonist-composer Greg Osby—himself an extensively documented Blue Note artist during the ‘90s and ‘00s—discussed Schizophrenia, which he heard at 14, as follows:
“It became the soundtrack for my early years. For me, Wayne is one of the most, if not the most, effective and prolific small group composers in the history of the music, and this is one of his most advanced outings, a beacon for small group composition. He knows how to make a small combo sound expansive with personalized and advanced arranging techniques, unorthodox couplings of instruments. It sounds big and rich, and you don’t miss the sections. Not to mention his penchant for really tight voicings, with his unmistakable tone in the middle. He takes a very cinematic approach towards music. He doesn’t really talk in terms of notes. He talks a lot about imagery and evocation of moods and feelings and vibrations, which people have characterized as “cosmic talk.” But he’s such an accomplished player that you have to accept what he’s saying and how he’s saying it. A good example, in terms of saxophone playing, is a passage on ‘Kryptonite’ where he’s triple-tonguing, which is really hard to do—it sounds like a waterfall, which is appropriate for that piece. Even ‘Tom Thumb,’ which is a toe-tapper, is highly stylized and twisted in a way that makes it stand out from things like ‘Sidewinder’ and ‘Song for My Father.’ This project rings in the back of my head as a sound-post whenever I’m about to compose something.”
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