Speak No Evil

Since we were on the subject of Weather Report last time – and the political weather looks decidedly heavy since the Brexit fall-out – it's but a short hop, step and a saxophone squawk to Wayne Shorter. Specifically, his third album for the legendary Blue Note label, Speak No Evil.

It took me a little while to make that short step, but seeing him live at the North Sea Jazz Festival sometime in the mid '80s made me realise that there was nothing to be scared of. I had this misguided notion that the second great Miles Davis Quintet, the '60s model that included Wayne Shorter and two other foot soldiers on this album, pianist Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter on double bass, played much more atonally than they actually did. My youthful sensibility was still too fragile for anything seriously avant garde.

Shorter played that evening in a marquee in the grounds of the UN's International Court of Justice complex in The Hague. He was flirting with jazz-funk at the time and the band was nothing to write home about, but Shorter played superbly and was presented with a huge bouquet of gladioli at the end of his set. I remember, too, being transfixed by the female drummer. The only others I'd ever seen behind a drum kit before were Karen Carpenter and Honey Lantree of the Honeycombs, so it was quite a novelty to see a genuine jazz drummer of the opposite sex. It must've been Terri Lynn Carrington, who would go on to enjoy a varied and successful career behind a hi-hat.

Speak No Evil was recorded on Christmas Eve, 1964, not long after Miles Davis persuaded him to leave Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and join his quintet. A special day, a special album. If anyone were to ask, and even my closest friends probably wouldn't, then I'd tell them unhesitatingly that my three favourite jazz albums are Kind of Blue, Mingus Ah Um and Speak No Evil. There; I've got that out of my system.

What puts this album a notch above his first two for Blue Note is not necessarily the playing, but the quality of the compositions. Shorter plays uniquely tenor rather than soprano sax on this album, which suits me fine, and although he had his own voice (pitched somewhere just between John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins), he will probably be primarily remembered as a composer rather than a stylist.

He did it for Art Blakey, he did it for Miles Davis and Josef Zawinul, and he certainly does it here. There are six numbers and they're all memorable in their different ways. The opening 'Witch Hunt' and the title track are almost even hummable, sort of, and all six share a wonderful air of mystery. It's partly the complementary combination of Shorter's sax and Freddie Hubbard's trumpet underpinned by a superb but unobtrusive rhythm section and Herbie Hancock's customarily elegant piano. And it's partly just Shorter's unusual way with a melody.

He was known in school apparently as 'Mr. Weird' and there's a slightly unsettling ambiguous quality about the chords he chooses. You never quite know which way a tune is heading. It can float off at any moment onto some quite new plane. On this album, he revealed how he was 'thinking of misty landscapes with wild flowers and strange, dimly-seen shapes – the kind of places where folklore and legends are born. And then I was thinking of things like witch-burnings, too.'

The title track, for example, is unquestioningly beautiful and yet the insistent theme leaves you a tad uncomfortable. It would be a brave film director to do so, but I can't help but think this album would make a fantastic soundtrack for an adaptation of a Wilkie Collins or an Edgar Allen Poe novel. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has yet made The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym into a film. Here's the ready-made score...

Nowhere perhaps is this quality more deliberate than 'Dance Cadaverous'. Shorter was 'thinking of some of those doctor pictures in which you see a classroom and they're getting ready to work on a cadaver'. Mr. Weird indeed. It's a very strange creative trigger and it certainly has the desired disconcerting effect. By contrast, the gorgeous 'Infant Eyes', inspired by his daughter, is the most obviously traditional piece in the collection.

In making Speak No Evil, Shorter talked about abandoning everything that he had done before. 'I'm trying to fan out,' he explained, 'to concern myself with the universe instead of just my own small corner of it'. That was quite some creative ambition to harbour. While the result doesn't deviate as far from the customary Blue Note template of the time as much as, say, Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch does, it still transcends the majority of the label's bread-and-butter blowing sessions. There's no doubt in my mind, at least, that Speak No Evil is a great composer's finest hour and a very accessible masterpiece.

Tale Spinnin'

Sitting in on one of a series of jazz seminars at Brighton Art College in the '80s, I embarrassed myself by suggesting that, of all contemporary jazz outfits, perhaps Weather Report would one day acquire Duke Ellington's status of immortality. Really? Eyebrows were raised; titters were barely suppressed.

I should have known better at my age. Having decided to take a year off from the daily treadmill to study for a PGCE in the mistaken belief that a teacher's life was possibly for me, I had enough time on my hands to participate in a weekly seminar among students at least five years younger than I was.

Weather Report lasted 16 years, but Josef Zawinul is dead now and his group's reputation has faded over the ensuing decades – along with my damaged pride. We're all entitled to an opinion, but it was a fairly absurd notion: the Duke is widely acknowledged not only as possibly the greatest jazz composer, but also as one of the greatest composers – in any discipline – of the 20^th century.

And yet, I wasn't entirely deranged. Weather Report was built around Joe Zawinul, one of the great keyboard experimenters in jazz, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, whose compositions for the likes of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and Miles Davis' second great quintet in the '60s are now widely recognised as some of the most distinctive since those of Thelonious Monk.

Nevertheless, it's true that the only number to achieve immortality is 'Birdland', the high water mark of Heavy Weather, the group's first album to include their new scarily talented and insanely self-confident bass player, Jaco Pastorius. As good as the album is, I have a particularly soft spot for the funkiest and most fluid of their many records for Columbia, 1975's Tale Spinnin'.

I bought it while still an undergraduate and remember first playing it at a friend's parents' house in Ealing, West London. Her father had a great hi-fi system and was game enough to let me give my new record a spin. Before handing it over, I remember rolling my new Pixal over the vinyl to collect any dust on the sticky surface of what looked like a miniature garden roller. I dispensed with it on learning that life's too short.

Probably I'd never heard a record played on a truly high fidelity system before, but I still vividly recall how the opening bars of 'Man in the Green Shirt' almost blew me across their front room in an approximation of the old Maxell cassette ad. Fortunately, it wasn't anything resembling free jazz. No honking and squealing to set your teeth on edge. An Ornette Coleman might have got me thrown out of the house.

No, there's a distinct melody, carried throughout by Shorter's soprano sax, propelled by the band's (temporary) no-nonsense new rhythm section of Alphonso Johnson on bass, Leon 'Ndugu' Chancler on drums and the Brazilian percussionist, Alyrio Lima. Weather Report was by now principally Zawinul's band. He wanted more bounce to the ounce and, by Jimminy, he got it. Johnson had none of Pastorius's flash and was no jazz heavyweight like his predecessor, Miroslav Vitous, but he was a fine uncomplicated player whose elastic bass lines could push the band into turbo-drive.

My hosts were as under-awed as I was impressed. By the second track, Shorter's 'Lusitanos', played on tenor sax this time, they'd probably wandered off to leave me to it. It's big beefy funk, but taken to a higher plane by Shorter's trademark melodic tension and an ability to use infinitesimal pauses to create drama.

The final track on Side 1 is another Zawinul composition, 'Between the Thighs', whose title and thrust leaves no doubt as to the band's leaning at this stage. Leon Chancler's drumming is particularly enthralling and the ensemble playing sounds a little like Bootsy's Rubber Bland doing jazz.

One consistent criticism of Weather Report was that Zawinul's increasing dominance sublimated Shorter's role. It's true that he was content to play second fiddle and in the first half of this track you barely notice his soprano sax in the background wash. But then comes a wonderful moment when the band collectively takes its foot off the pedal and Shorter comes through to lead things to their engrossing conclusion.

The second side finds the band in a more reflective mood, not only on the final track, 'Five Short Stories', which is mainly just Shorter on tenor sax and Zawinul on acoustic piano with synth-etic atmosphere, but also on the opener. The faux Far Eastern effects of 'Badia' show off the range of Zawinul's array of electronic keyboards and typify the band's impressionistic form of jazz. There are even a few vocal motifs that anticipate its leader's later interest in Mongolian throat singing.

Sandwiched between comes Shorter's 'Freezing Fire', which harks back to the funky feel of the first side. Johnson's stuttering bass figure hurries things along and a whole range of percussion effects redolent of one-time weather-reporter Airto Moreira, the Brazilian maestro himself, colours in the outlines.

Tale Spinnin', like its predecessor Mysterious Traveller and its successor Black Market, won Down Beat's best album award for their particular years. Add Heavy Weather to the equation and you can perm any one from four, but if in doubt it's still Tale Spinnin' I reach for first.

They're still busy releasing new concert albums to cement Weather Report's legacy. Joe Zawinul left us with the band's fine world/jazz successor, the Zawinul Syndicate. Wayne Shorter is in his dotage now, but (as far as I know) still playing and still composing his haunting melodies. And Mike, who led the seminars at Brighton Art College, pardoned my faux pas to the extent of offering me a ticket to go and see Abdullah Ibrahim's Ekaya at the Gardener Centre on the Sussex University campus. I should tell him that I still listen to my Weather Report albums – if not quite as often as I imagined back in the day.