Woody’s background
Woody Shaw (1944-1989) came onto the jazz scene in the mid-1960s, a time in which jazz was in a period of rapid change, growth and experimentation. It was also a period during which the leading creators of jazz from virtually all the earlier styles and eras could still be heard performing live at or near top form, including such seminal figures as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie. Shaw’s playing and compositions directly or indirectly incorporate the influence of all of these masters.

In terms of stylistic experimentation, musical innovation and aesthetic controversy, the late 1950s represented a turning point in the evolution of jazz. There was a fracturing of widely held consensus regarding what “real” jazz was and, for the artists, what musical elements were or were not essential to creation of jazz. Woody Shaw, as much or more than any other trumpeter of his era, absorbed the traditions of jazz based on intimate knowledge gained by playing alongside his elders and also incorporated the innovations of the late 1950s and 1960s into a unique and immediately recognizable voice.

Like virtually all jazz musicians prior to the ascendancy of institutional jazz education, the young Woody Shaw learned his art by listening, emulating and serving apprenticeships with bands led by master musicians. Shaw was a member of the bands of Art Blakey, Horace Silver and Max Roach for substantial periods and also spent time with Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon and others. He was also influenced by his contemporaries and band mates including Larry Young, Chick Corea, Tyrone Washington and Joe Henderson.

Woody’s Role in the Evolution of Jazz Trumpet
Woody Shaw’s music and influence may be seen in context of the evolution of jazz trumpet. Influences on his trumpet style include Clifford Brown (1930-1956), Miles Davis (1926-1991), Kenny Dorham (1924-1972) and his immediate predecessors Lee Morgan (1938-1972), Booker Little (1938-1961) and Freddie Hubbard (1938-2008). In turn, Shaw had a profound impact on virtually every subsequent jazz trumpeter including Tim Hagans, Tom Harrell, Randy Brecker, Brian Lynch, John McNeil, Dave Douglas, Alex Sipiagin, Scott Wendholt, Ingrid Jensen, Sean Jones and many others. Wynton Marsalis, Terrance Blanchard and Chris Botti are among the influential players that studied with Shaw

When Shaw emerged on the international jazz scene in the early 1960s very few trumpeters were combining the traditional approaches of bebop and hard bop with innovations of the recent era. The leading creators of the new styles were mostly saxophonists and pianists. John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner and others began to use different harmonic, rhythmic and structural concepts from those of hard bop. These included such musical elements as complex reharmonization, static harmony, modal harmony, pedal point and ostinato, atonality, polytonality, pantonality, intervallic playing, new kinds of scales and chords, free improvisation, group rubato, new approaches to musical form, etc. These innovations resulted in a tremendous increase in the technical demands on jazz players. Since the first creators of these new approaches were mostly saxophonists and pianists these new ways of playing were first conceived and demonstrated in terms that were friendlier to woodwind and keyboard technique. The level of required technical demand was raised to a point few if any hard bop brass players could reach.

Among trumpet players prior to Shaw, a few more open minded and well equipped bebop and hard bop trumpeters, particularly Kenny Dorham and Thad Jones (1923-1986), managed at times to successfully adapt their established approaches to the new music. Don Cherry (1936-1995) in his work with Ornette Coleman and as a bandleader himself had created a singular voice in the arena of avant-garde or so called free jazz. In the early 1960s Miles Davis was still playing his version of hard bop with his personal synthesis of newer innovations yet to come. Only Freddie Hubbard and Booker Little had begun to consistently find personal approaches rooted in hard bop integrated with the new music. Not coincidentally, Little and Hubbard (like Shaw) each possessed a very high level of trumpet technique.

Improvising over Hindemith. In addition to knowledge of the jazz tradition and contemporary jazz innovations, Shaw was fascinated with late 19th and 20th century “classical” music and intently studied the harmonic language and compositional approaches found in that music. Shaw was fascinated by the music of such composers as Bartok, Stravinsky, Messiaen and Hindemith. I spent a considerable amount of time with Shaw in the mid to late 1970s. At one point I recall that he was travelling with recordings of the piano accompaniments to several of the Hindemith Sonatas for the various instruments. During that period he made it a regular practice to improvise by ear using the Hindemith piano accompaniments as “play-alongs.” He was also the first person to suggest I read Hindemith’s The Craft of Musical Composition and Technique de mon langage musical by Messiaen. It is quite easy for me to hear the influence of these studies in the melodic and harmonic language of both his compositions and improvisations.

The basic elements of Shaw’s mature style are virtually all present by the time he recorded the seminal album Unity (Blue Note 97808) in 1965 under the leadership of fellow Newark, New Jersey native Larry Young on organ with collaborators Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone and Elvin Jones on drums. Half the compositions on the original album were by Shaw, including Beyond All Limits, Zoltan (dedicated to another 20^th century European composer, Zoltan Kodaly) and The Moontrane.

By the time of the making of the field recordings presented on Woody Shaw: A Trumpet Legend Revisited (ITG-021), Shaw was musically mature as trumpeter, composer and bandleader, and was solidly established as a preeminent voice in contemporary acoustic jazz. The band on tracks one through four was his working group at the time. They were regularly travelling the world and the core of the group had been together for some time. This shows very clearly in the level of ease and familiarity his young colleagues (Steve Turre, Mulgrew Miller, Stafford James and Tony Reedus) display with both the musical materials and one another.

The Elements of Woody's Innovative Musical Style
Rhythm. Shaw’s music is rhythmically traditional in the sense that he rarely performed in meters other than 4/4, 6/8 or ¾. The underlying bass and drum parts and the basic forms of the tunes are consistently in a regular meter. However, the music is made more rhythmically complex by the superimposition over those simpler meters of irregular note groupings (5 and 7 note groupings for example), polyrhythmic effects and multimetric or polymeter. Superimposing polyrhythm over a regular ground meter is an approach that can be traced directly back to the African roots of jazz. In the 1940s bebop musicians began to make jazz rhythms more complex by increasing the layers of polyrhythm. By the mid-1960s John Coltrane’s Quartet (and his drummer Elvin Jones) and Miles Davis’s Quintet (with drummer Tony Williams) increased this polyrhythmic complexity to a tremendous degree. Shaw’s approach to jazz rhythm is a further extension of these innovations.

Harmony and melody. Harmonically and melodically, Shaw often incorporates sequence, polychords and bitonality, planing, interval based playing, pitch sets, pentatonic scales and modes of limited transposition such as the octatonic or diminished scales. Many of these musical elements are present in the music of Coltrane, Little, Wayne Shorter and others. Shaw found a personal way to integrate these devices and adapt them to the trumpet. In order to do so he developed a stunning ability to cleanly execute wide intervals, a phenomenal finger technique and the ability to articulate legato passages at a very rapid speed. Combine this with a rich dark sound and a personal approach to vibrato and inflection and you have a singular voice.

This CD’s Recordings
To Kill a Brick starts the present collection with that most enduring of all jazz vehicles, a 12-bar blues in the key of B-flat. It is enlightening to hear Shaw’s post-bop approach to the traditional blues context. Shaw and the entire band are burning on this one straight from the gate. The piece climaxes with the time honored practice of “chases”-all three wind instruments trading improvised passages as the group collectively builds in dynamics and intensity.

Joshua C is an original Shaw composition that demonstrates his unusual approach to form in composition. The piece has a number of scripted “hits” or predetermined figures in the accompaniment that occur at designated points between more open sections of improvisation. The harmonic language Shaw uses in both the composition and his solo uses a number of modern devices, including modal scales, polychords, bitonality and synthetic scales. By the way, a punning Miller quotes The Doors during his solo. See if you can catch it.

We’ll Be Together Again is a beautiful ballad that was originally a popular song from the mid-1940s. This recording gives us a wonderful opportunity to hear how Woody handles a standard ballad, making it his own. Shaw has rearranged the piece to better fit the overall approach and sound of his group. The tune is reharmonized in a way that lends itself to the style of this group, yet doesn’t weaken the lyrical nature of Carl Fischer’s beautiful melody. Moving contrapuntal inner voices are added to the accompaniment as are a pedal point and rhythmic hits during the melodic statement. The group implies double-time rhythm at points during Miller’s piano solo. When Shaw begins his improvisation the group commits fully to the double-time, raising the energy level.  The group builds through a full chorus of trumpet improvisation. James takes a bass solo on the first half of the form and Shaw reenters at the bridge, the first portion still in the double-time, to recap the melody. Shaw improvises a brief cadenza before the final cadence.

OPEC is a treasure! Beginning with a drum solo by Reedus, this tune is what jazz musicians call a burnout tune. The melody is an excellent example of the unusual intervals in Shaw’s melodic language. Shaw and Turre execute the call-like melody in octaves. Shaw’s solo features most all of the identifying rhythmic, harmonic and melodic elements of his style and demonstrate the technically challenging nature of his musical conception. He uses the full range of his instrument effectively and dramatically. His melodic lines often contain very wide intervals, including long strings of intervals of a fourth or fifth. Miller’s accompaniment employs polychords and extensive use of planing. The harmonic language of Shaw’s improvised melodic lines makes use of sequence, pentatonic scales and modes of limited transposition. Sections of the performance are given over to free improvisation i.e. at the end of Turre’s trombone solo and again after Miller’s piano solo. Perhaps more than any other piece on this set, OPEC demonstrates Shaw’s synthesis of the jazz tradition and the innovations of the avant-garde.

Track five is a bonus and another treasure. Here we hear Shaw improvising over the changes to John Coltrane’s tour de force Giant Steps. Giant Steps is the best known of a group of pieces Coltrane wrote in the late 1950s as study pieces as he worked to master a challenging set of harmonic devices that focused on rapid modulation and third relationships between keys. It is a piece that Coltrane practiced extensively, recorded and (to the best of this writer's knowledge) never performed publicly. Nonetheless, the piece has served as both a study piece and a sort of “acid test” for jazz musicians ever since. The harmonic and melodic devices in Giant Steps are an integral part of Woody Shaw’s approach to improvising and composing. However, he never recorded the piece on a commercial album. Here is evidence of his command of the work’s inherent challenges. Beyond that, we hear mastery of those challenges to the degree that Shaw is free enough to be incredibly creative, particularly rhythmically, in spite of the piece’s harmonic obstacle course. It is interesting to compare this version to Freddie Hubbard’s playing on Giant Steps or his own composition, Dear John, which shares the same harmonic progression.

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Pat Harbison is Professor of Music (Jazz Studies) at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is the author of many articles on jazz and trumpet, as well as several books, including Technical Studies for the Modern Trumpet and Twenty Authentic Bebop Solos (Aebersold).

He is an active jazz clinician and has been a faculty member of Jamey Aebersold's Summer Jazz Workshops since 1976. Mr. Harbison is a Selmer/Bach Artist and a former faculty member of University of Cincinnati.

His many recordings as a jazz trumpeter include a 1999 solo debut, After All. In addition to appearances as leader, his recording credits include the PsychoAcoustic Orchestra, the Blue Wisp Big Band, and David Baker's 21st Century Bebop Band.