Jazz Series 3: Wayne Shorter - The All Seeing Eye
The All Seeing Eye
First and foremost, I'd like to apologize for the delay in this review. I meant to do it sooner, but I had a hard time convincing myself to relisten to this album, mostly because I didn't like it very much upon first listen. Did that change on the second listen?
Well before we get into that, let's look at the lineup: Wayne shorter on tenor sax, his brother Alan Shorter on Flugelhorn on the closing track, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and flugelhorn, James Spaulding on alto sax, Grachan Moncur III on trombone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Joe Chambers on drums. This is very much a star studded lineup, with some of my favorite players of their respective instruments, so one might think this album should be at least solid, right?
The issue with the lineup is this record is intended to be an avant-garde jazz record. A few of these players, including Herbie Hancock and even Wayne Shorter himself aren't very well suited to avant-garde jazz in my opinion. Freddie Hubbard, Grachan Moncur III, and Joe Chambers hold things down well, but when two of the most focal players aren't playing interesting solos or accompaniments for the context, it begins to fall apart.
This album is a stark contrast to his previous album, Speak No Evil, which is a masterful post-bop record, one of my favorites in fact. The beautiful melodies of that record are gone here, but they aren't replaced with anything interesting enough to make it a worthwhile listen. This album falls in an awkward spot for me: it's not enough like his older records to fit in with them, but it's still too straight ahead, and not chaotic enough for the most part to be a great avant-garde jazz record to me. Even the song Chaos, pales in comparison to anything John Coltrane, Sam Rivers, Pharoah Sanders, or others were writing around the time.
The album's longest song, Genesis is the biggest example of this. It's a slow burner, sparse, somewhat experimental, but not really aggressive or in your face at all. Because it's so slow and comparatively empty, it kinda feels boring at times. The songwriting in general is just not that interesting, and feels like it's just typical post-bop but removed from the pretty melodies, but without enough of an avant-garde twist to make it compelling. Ironically, the one song Wayne Shorter didn't write is the albums best. Mephistopheles, penned by Alan Shorter is a tense, and enthralling listen the whole way through, simply due to how well it's written. It's dark and brooding, which makes sense considering Alan had at least a little bit of a background in avant-garde jazz.
Would I say this is a bad record? Not really, but I wouldn't call it a good one either. It's mediocre, leaning good thanks to the addition of Mephistopheles. I wouldn't recommend it outside of that track though, except to diehard Wayne Shorter fans, wanting more of his music. 5/10.