Wayne Shorter is no Johnny Come Lately waving a tenor sax and a hank of hip hair–he's been around a long time, paying dues and building a personal style steadily since he first appeared around 1960 along with the whole crew of Young Turks that set out then on a series of great Vee Jay blowing sessions like The Young Lions, which can be found if you're inordinately lucky perhaps in some Thrifty Drugstore for 50c. That album marked one of the first waxings for most of these men: Lee Morgan on trumpet, Shorter tenoring, altoish Frank Strozier, Bob Cranshaw on bass, pianist Bobby Timmons who went on to play with Cannonball Adderley, and drummers Louis Hayes (also later with Cannonball) and Albert "Tuttie" Heath. All went on to fame and more prestigious engagements in the Sixties, but only Morgan and Shorter still soar strong with albums under their own names now, And only Shorter has contributed something substantially new to the language of American music, only Shorter and a most exclusive handful of others from all the stars and sidemen of the past decade.

Wayne has come a long way, playing on myriads of Blue Note albums with Herbie Hancock and others, a protracted stay in Miles Davis' surpassingly brilliant bands of the late Sixties including the revolutionary stylistic shift beginning with In a Silent Way, moving from that pinnacle to the celebrated but relatively non-boundary blitzing Weather Report collaboration and continuing to make his own albums on Blue Note. It's an impressive record, and yet in one sense Wayne seems to have sneaked up behind us and stunned us in an instant with the scope of his conception, because his presence, though never far from our ears, was somehow so unprepossessing all those years that we never really snapped awake, or this listener didn't anyway, until the kingdom was literally blooming all around us. Maybe it was because he was such a reliable and consistent name turning up on so many good–not earth-shaking, revolutionary or audacious, but just unerringly rich, warm, musically impeccable and engrossing Blue Note albums. There are a whole lot of talented ears that missed out on all that music, and if anybody reading this is willing to take my word on a subtle treasure trove of beautiful, highly developed and utterly distinctive music, my advice would be to scout your local bargain bins and grocery stores where whole racks of them are turning up for $1.97 or less and pick up two or three by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, Donald Byrd ...

The thing is that there were all these incredibly sensitive musicians recording for Blue Note at that time and still today, from funk-and-grits Lou Donaldson to the angular conservatory brilliance of Andrew Hill, and most of them are still there making one good record after another–but Shorter leaped ahead in a series of seven-league bounds. At this moment he is one of the crucial voices we're going to have to listen to hear where everybody else is gonna be tomorrow. He has grown both in stature and breadth of implements and styles at his command, working gradually through and out of the inevitable early efforts in the constant shadow of Coltrane as all young saxophonists in this country are and not a few of the old ones, until now he is one of the few men around that doubles on tenor and soprano sax (as others did in droves, following 'Trane to musical Aldebarans if possible) who has almost completely transcended the overwhelmingly powerful 'Trane influence to speak with a voice that owes or echoes no one now save Wayne Shorter, and unmistakably exists in that voice.

I have been listening to this record over and over again for the past month, and I still can't begin to convey the complexity, the depths and shadings and shifting fabrics of its flow anymore than I can begin to see an end to the discoveries that I make in different streams and valleys of it with each new playing. I'm really becoming convinced that Shorter must be heard in the fullness of his own song outside of Davis and Weather Report albums. I think Shorter's own projects are as important and seemingly infinite in the mileage of their endlessly unraveling revelations as the best of these albums. Silent Way is a towering beacon that will light the way clear through this decade and maybe beyond, but after a mere two or three listenings I knew it by heart. Odyssey Of Iska is so intricate, so full of things, that even though it seemed a smidgen less accessible initially than its beacon parent, I'm almost living in it now, like a vast opulent mansion brimming with tales of lives lived there so that every time you enter another room something new and fascinating catches you no matter how many times you've been in it before.

As for the rather programmatic aspect of the music itself, the five pieces seem to be based on impressions of primal elements and sensations: "Wind," "Storm," "Calm," "Joy"–and the improvisations have the subtlety and elusiveness of their subjects. Unlike Weather Report, though, this album is nothing if not substantial. As it whirls and flashes and eddies and rests through its series of almost visually tangible earthly landscapes, it's reminiscent of the wind Shorter's solos describe and impersonate not in being something invisible and impossible to grasp and ride with, but in being every bit as surprising, capricious, every bit as able through the subtlest sinews of unvaunted strength to change the faces of mountains and waters. (RS 98)

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