Wayne Shorter - Odyssey of Iska (Blue Note Tone Poet Series 180g Vinyl LP)

Wayne Shorter - Odyssey of Iska | Vinyl LP - 2024 Blue Note Tone Poet Series Reissue (BST 84363 / 602438963607, all-analog mastering by Kevin Gray, 180g pressing at RTI)

Wayne Shorter recorded Odyssey of Iska at a turning point. It was August 1970. He had just left Miles Davis's band and was weeks away from forming Weather Report with Joe Zawinul. The album was dedicated to his daughter Iska, who had been born the year before with severe brain damage. Four of the five pieces carry one-word titles that read as states of being rather than compositions: "Wind", "Storm", "Calm", "Joy". Shorter plays both tenor and soprano saxophone across the date, threading long lines through a rhythm section built on density rather than swing. There are two bassists, three drummers and a percussionist, and the overall texture has more in common with Super Nova (1969) than with the hard bop records that made Shorter's name on the label. Gene Bertoncini's guitar adds a further layer, opening "Storm" with a figure that briefly flirts with rock before the ensemble pulls it somewhere else entirely.

The centrepiece is the B-side opener, "De Pois do Amor, o Vazio (After Love, Emptiness)", an eleven-and-a-half-minute reading of Bobby Thomas' Brazilian piece that points toward the direction Shorter's music would take over the following decade, influenced in part by his wife Ana Maria Patricio. Dave Friedman's vibraphone and marimba carry much of the colour across both sides, sitting between Shorter's horn and Bertoncini's guitar in a way that gives the record an unusual timbral palette for a Blue Note date. The session was produced by Duke Pearson and engineered by Tony May. This Tone Poet edition was mastered all-analog by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, with lacquers cut by Gray and Joe Harley. It was pressed on 180g vinyl at Record Technology Incorporated in Camarillo, California, and packaged in a deluxe tip-on jacket by Stoughton Printing. New liner notes by Syd Schwartz accompany Leonard Feather's original sleeve notes from the 1971 release.