Free Republic

It was a jazz nerd’s dream come true: legendary Miles Davis and Weather Report saxophonist Wayne Shorter was coming into the studio to record on a song. Even better, it was a song that you wrote. Most rock musicians probably wouldn’t have known Shorter from a hole in the wall in 1977, but Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were no average rock musicians, and Steely Dan were no average rock band. Raised as jazz snobs on the east coast of the United States, Becker and Fagen had worked hard to push Steely Dan beyond their initial 1970s soft rock sound....

Herbie Hancock wrote of Shorter that he could ‘synthesize all the history of jazz into a very special, very alive, musical expression.’Wayne Shorter, the enigmatic jazz saxophonist and composer known as one of the inventors of jazz-rock, or fusion, has died in hospital in Los Angeles, at the age of 89. His publicist confirmed his death to the New York Times. Shorter is survived by his third wife, Carolina Dos Santos, and daughter, Miyako. Like John Coltrane before him, Shorter was a key figure in popularizing the soprano saxophone, an instrument equally suited to carrying a melody as it is...