WAYNE SHORTER - Juju

"Juju" belongs to the golden period of saxophonist Wayne Shorter's partnership with Blue Note. Other fruits of this collaboration include at the very least albums like "The All-Seeing Eye" (a brilliant blend of hard-bop soloing and almost free-form compositional structures), as well as "Night Dreamer" and "Speak No Evil" (perhaps the more "classic" of the bunch).
Reading the credits, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were looking at a John Coltrane record. There's his drummer (Elvin Jones), his pianist (McCoy Tyner), and his former bassist (Reggie Workman, later replaced by Jimmy Garrison in Coltrane's classic quartet).
The path Shorter follows on this record, however, differs from the one Coltrane was pursuing at the same time: where Coltrane increasingly stripped away the "composed" element and simplified harmonies to free the soloist from dense chordal webs, Shorter bets on writing. The pieces on Juju are indeed children of the modal revolution (sequences of chords not bound by tonal relationships are quite frequent, as in the title track, where the first bars of the theme feature an augmented B chord descending chromatically), but they don't throw tradition entirely out the window. We get the theme stated at the beginning and end of every track, and we get choruses repeated as a backdrop for the soloists (mainly Shorter and Tyner).
"Ju-ju" is an ecstatic (almost tribal) piece in ¾ dominated by Elvin Jones's mighty polyrhythms and the extraordinary intensity and power of the tenor sax solo.
"House Of Jade" is a gorgeous ballad, partly written by Shorter's wife, while "Mah Jong" and "Yes Or No" turn out to be the most fascinating tracks for how closely their structure mirrors their title.
"Mah Jong", in fact, tries to capture the idea of waiting for an opponent's move typical of the game, by dividing the theme into the following statements/sections: tenor sax (first move, entirely over a single chord), piano (counter-move), sax again (second move, entirely over a different chord), piano (second counter-move), and finally sax once more (resolution, over the kind of resolving chords typical of the jazz tradition).
"Yes Or No", on the other hand, is split into two parts: a more "cheerful" one in a major key and a more "melancholy" one in a minor key.
"Twelve More Bars To Go" is a blues, while the theme of "Deluge" has a descending motion made effective by the accents so beautifully articulated by the rhythm section.
Jazz, of course, is not just composition—it's also, and above all, improvisation, and from this standpoint too "JuJu" proves to be a great album.
Among the sidemen, Jones certainly stands out. His drumming on "Juju" is every bit a match for what you'd find on Coltrane's most intense records: uncontainable, noisy, powerful. Along the same lines is Tyner's stellar performance, whose ability to fill the gaps in the melodies of "Deluge" and "Mah Jong" is truly impressive. And finally, there's the leader's own tenor sax, cast here in a different light than the one he takes on in his parallel work on Miles Davis's records: less elliptical, more visceral and intense, often surprisingly Coltrane-like in its power and its occasional insistence on long notes held in the instrument's upper register. These are two different sides of Shorter's artistry, equally fascinating and equally valuable.

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24/12/2019