Spalding was afraid to push, but says that realizing his opera felt more urgent than ever. "So the fact that momentum hasn't been generated to do that is problematic." "Damn, I'm sure Wayne has said this other people – that he wants to make an opera," Spalding recalls thinking at the time. "Me and Esperanza, we started talking and talking – and then she said, 'Let's do it. "When I first looked at a good opera book, the first thing I saw was a sentence that said, 'In opera, anything goes," Shorter recalls. He thought it might involve taking a 400-year-old play by the Greek writer Euripides and turning it into something new and unbridled. The two jazz revolutionaries, who came up in completely different eras, connected deeply, and Shorter eventually told Spalding about his long-held operatic fantasy. "I noticed that she would attack things that no one else would," Shorter recalls of Spalding's singular way of playing. His Grammy-winning acoustic quartet, formed in 2000, endured for two decades.īut through all those years, opera still lingered in the composer's imagination – until he met composer, singer and bass prodigy Esperanza Spalding.
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"This opera was going to be based on motorcycle gangs," he said via Zoom from L.A., "like the movie The Wild One that Brando was in." Then Shorter heard Leonard Bernstein was working on a musical about gangs, called West Side Story, so he put his idea aside.Īfter graduating in 1956, and then two years in the army, Shorter proceeded to transform American music with other jazz pioneers, including Art Blakey and Miles Davis, and in the fusion group Weather Report. Shorter started thinking about a long-form, dramatic work when he was a 19-year-old music student at New York University. It's taken literally decades to get to this moment. The work then travels to three further cities: Washington, D.C., and Berkeley and Santa Monica, Calif.
(Iphigenia), is set to premiere in Boston this week. "I just wanted to just take a moment to register the momentousness of this, that we are all here together just to call up the name of Wayne Shorter in this space," Blain-Cruz says. Director Lileana Blain-Cruz picks up a microphone and acknowledges the Los Angeles-based jazz elder who couldn't make the trip east. One recent November morning, after months, even years, working apart, a chamber ensemble, jazz trio and more than a dozen opera singers finally have an opportunity to rehearse together, in person, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams.