Wayne Shorter - Night Dreamer (2023 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series 180g Vinyl LP)

Wayne Shorter - Night Dreamer | Vinyl LP - 2023 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series Reissue (5552940, mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, pressed at Optimal Media)

• Shorter’s first album for Blue Note, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder at Englewood Cliffs on 29 April 1964 and released that November, by which time he had left the Jazz Messengers for Miles Davis.
• Lee Morgan with Coltrane’s rhythm section: McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, on loan from Impulse!, with Reggie Workman on bass, who had also played in Coltrane’s band.
• 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.

Shorter had already made three albums for Vee-Jay, but this is where his writing came into focus. He told Nat Hentoff that for his first Blue Note album he “had to say something substantial”, and he wrote five of the six pieces and arranged the sixth. The title track is in three, with Elvin Jones driving hard underneath while the harmony slides between major and minor. “Oriental Folk Song” is built on an old Chinese melody Shorter first heard as the theme for a commercial. “Virgo”, named for his star sign, is slow and lyrical. “Black Nile” is the one everybody knows now: a buoyant line meant to flow like a river, with a short, explosive Jones solo near the end. “Charcoal Blues” swings easily, and the closing “Armageddon” was the centre of the record for Shorter, who told Hentoff the album was about “a sense of judgment approaching”.

The band is a big part of it. Lee Morgan, a fellow Jazz Messenger, shares the front line, while Tyner and Jones were moonlighting from John Coltrane’s quartet and Workman had played with Coltrane before Jimmy Garrison. That rhythm section pulls Shorter somewhere darker and more inward than his Messengers writing, and it set up everything that followed on Blue Note, from JuJu and Speak No Evil through to Adam’s Apple. By the time the record came out in November 1964, Shorter was in Miles Davis’ quintet. 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, with Reid Miles’ cover design, Francis Wolff’s photograph and Nat Hentoff’s liner notes. This is the 2023 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series reissue, catalogue number 5552940.