There comes a time in every great artist’s life when all the lessons they’ve learned go out the window and everything starts flowing on raw emotion.
For Wayne Shorter, one such moment occurred during a set with Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet at The Plugged Nickel in Chicago in late 1965.
The song was “Stella By Starlight,” and Shorter was tasked with taking a tenor sax solo following a breathtaking, six-and-a-half-minute treatise from Miles’ trumpet.
He entered slowly (as one tends to when faced with a challenge of that magnitude), leaving long pauses between brief runs that lacked the virtuosic flair of his bandleader’s.
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