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Night is a journey to distant places that the morning light dissolves. It is black ink in a sequence of thoughts poured onto the white paper, the cover that removes color and consistency from every vanity. Night is a scotch sipped that sooner or later will send me to my maker.
Few things calm me like the clinking of ice cubes in a moderately shaken glass. My eyes get lost in that liquid float of small icebergs that gradually melt away. Sometimes I make sure to do things right, adding a good stimulant that perfectly matches the situation and mood. Like a nice record, just for a change. Or as always.
Music in the night is the echo of silence and the magic that breaks it.
Some records find their natural dimension in the nocturnal territories, like indigenous species living within boundaries traced between twilight and dawn. In this silent time, with a drink in hand and chased by relentless insomnia, I often turn to Wayne. Very often to Night Dreamer, like a sinner revealing his sins to a confessor who already knows them. Even today, as almost always, I stayed away from the city, remaining home, far from the crowd, from the posers with their SUVs that occupy the entire roadway and radiate Despacito everywhere. But also from jazz clubs flooded by last-minute characters with the urgent need to appear or be seen at all costs in the right place, the socially consecrated or recognized one. I prefer to observe the city from here, where its shining lights almost seem like a starry sky. And then I am not alone, there is Wayne. He, like me, cannot stand the frenzy of the urban jungle. And apparently not even the inappropriate questions.
"What you young folks need to understand is that we recorded our records to pay the rent!"
But a record like Night Dreamer is not made simply to pay the rent, no Wayne. Otherwise, one could build a Doric temple to shelter the dog from the rain, or design a spaceship to not be late for the office. And no, it just doesn't hold. But now let's take a step back, because we cannot start from the epilogue for Shorter's first album for Blue Note.
First of all, we need to frame the context, the historical moment, and Wayne's individual moment, a phase between the rewarding apprenticeship experience with the Jazz Messengers and the one that saw him star in Miles Davis's grand quintet. Shorter lays down his royal flush: McCoy Tyner on the piano, Elvin Jones on the drums, Reggie Workman on the double bass, and Lee Morgan on the trumpet. To make an easy-to-understand soccer parallel in the football-obsessed Italy, it's like having Pelé, Maradona, Zico, Messi, and Ronaldo on the same team. Such talent inevitably bears fruit.
"Night Dreamer is not bop and not yet post-bop, but a bop in transition."
The title track is a dazzling sparkle in the agitated movements of reeds and brass, catechized by Tyner's piano. Shorter marks the time without haste with extended melodic lines, a fluid and extraordinarily direct sound. In Shorter's new horizon, the passages become simpler, of a very complicated simplicity. "Something that is both light and heavy", he described the album's opening in an interview of the time, a three-four time symphony like a waltz that bravely ventures between major and minor keys.
"Oriental Folk Song" and "Virgo" effuse into the empyrean encouraged by the stealthy pace of Jones's brushes, supported by a nearly bare harmonic session, an original minimalism that would touch many compositions in the years to follow. In "Black Nile," Shorter and Jones are two bodies belonging to the same soul, the harmony is astonishing, the synchronization absolutely perfect, the phrasing incredibly tight. Gentlemen, this is what we call jazz <›ǧäz‹. In the muscular blues of "Charcoal Blues," the range of beats drops a little and the proscenium, just for a change, opens once more on Shorter, and even lower in range with the mid-tempo of "Armageddon." The epic eternal struggle between good and evil takes shape in this deep musical transposition considered by Wayne the epicenter of the entire album. Shorter's virtuosity follows each other, reaches and disperses again, drifting toward cosmic abstraction.
Night Dreamer is a spontaneous album, born from improvisation like all jazz records, full of pathos and energy, perfectly balanced between musical tradition, experimentation, and innovation, because in music as in life everything changes, forever is only the moment before. It is all a becoming.
By the way, the three ice cubes have become water and the record has been spinning for a few minutes on off trail, in that no man's land. I feel like putting on my jacket and rushing down the elevator to some bar, but it quickly passes and I resume my private liturgies, almost disdainful of that impious thought. Three cubes for a new scotch and the needle put back to the beginning of the grooves, where dreams begin, at a boundary drawn between twilight and dawn.
That's all jazz.
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