Wayne Shorter - Adam's Apple (2022 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series 180g Vinyl LP)

Wayne Shorter - Adam’s Apple | Vinyl LP - 2022 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series Reissue (4579756, mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, pressed at Optimal Media)

• The first recording of “Footprints”, eight months before the Miles Davis Quintet cut it for Miles Smiles, alongside four more Shorter originals and Jimmy Rowles’ “502 Blues (Drinkin’ and Drivin’)”.
• A quartet with Herbie Hancock, Reggie Workman and Joe Chambers, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder at Englewood Cliffs in February 1966, while Shorter and Hancock were both playing in Miles Davis’ quintet.
• Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series, all-analogue: mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio from the original tapes, 180g vinyl pressed at Optimal Media in Germany.

Four months after the dense, ambitious The All Seeing Eye, Shorter pulled back to a quartet. Adam’s Apple was recorded at Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio in February 1966 with Herbie Hancock, Reggie Workman and Joe Chambers, and it covers a lot of rhythmic ground, from straight-eighth funk and swing to a slow drag and Brazilian feels. “El Gaucho” rides percolating samba rhythms under a wide-open melody. “Teru” is a ballad Shorter plays with almost no vibrato, so it lands more like an art song than a blowing vehicle. “Chief Crazy Horse”, a nod to Coltrane, closes the record with a soaring, tightly controlled solo. And then there is “Footprints”, a minor blues he recorded here first. The Miles Davis Quintet, with Shorter and Hancock in it, cut its own version for Miles Smiles that October and turned it into a standard. Jimmy Rowles’ “502 Blues” is the one tune he didn’t write.

Shorter had joined Miles Davis in September 1964 and his tunes were already central to that band, yet his Blue Note run kept coming: Night Dreamer, JuJu, Speak No Evil, The All Seeing Eye and this record all come from roughly two years. Mark Gardner, reviewing it in Jazz Journal, called it “a tour de force for Shorter the soloist as distinct from Shorter the composer”, which is the right way in. The tunes are strong, but it’s the tenor you remember, and Hancock, Workman and Chambers give him plenty of room. This Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series edition was mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio from the original analogue tapes and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal Media in Germany. Reid Miles designed the cover around a Francis Wolff photograph, and Don Heckman’s original liner notes come with it. This is the 2022 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series reissue, catalogue number 4579756.