Wayne Shorter - The Soothsayer (Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series 180g Vinyl LP)

Wayne Shorter - The Soothsayer | Vinyl LP - 2025 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series Reissue (LT-988 / 6807007, all-analog mastering by Kevin Gray, 180g pressing at Optimal Media)

• A shelved masterpiece from Shorter's extraordinary 1965 run, recorded two months after Speak No Evil with a sextet featuring Freddie Hubbard, James Spaulding, McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter and Tony Williams
• Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series reissue, mastered all-analog from the original tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal Media in Germany
• Produced by Alfred Lion, engineered by Rudy Van Gelder, produced for release by Michael Cuscuna with liner notes by Cuscuna

Wayne Shorter recorded The Soothsayer on March 4, 1965, barely two months after cutting Speak No Evil and six weeks after recording E.S.P. with Miles Davis. The session sat in Blue Note's vault for fourteen years. The reason it was shelved had nothing to do with quality. Shorter was simply recording faster than the label could release, with Night Dreamer, Juju and Speak No Evil already queued for pressing. The sextet here is unusual for Shorter, who mostly led quartets and quintets on Blue Note. Adding both Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and James Spaulding on alto saxophone gave him a three-horn front line, and the writing takes full advantage. "Lost" opens with a modal theme that lets each horn stretch out, Spaulding's Bird-rooted alto offering a different angle from Hubbard's brighter attack. "Angola" is a harder-driving piece with a more conventional bop structure, and "The Big Push" is the most rhythmically complex writing on the date, Carter and Williams pushing the tempo around while the horns navigate a winding melody.

The title track on Side B is the album's centrepiece, a buoyant, soaring piece where Shorter and Spaulding trade phrases with a looseness that the structured A-side compositions don't quite allow. "Lady Day", Shorter's tribute to Billie Holiday, is a ballad played with real patience, Tyner's chords pulling colour from the harmony while Shorter keeps his solo spare and melodic. The closing "Valse Triste" is the one piece Shorter didn't write, an arrangement of Jean Sibelius's waltz that sits oddly and perfectly at the end of the record, the trio format (Tyner, Carter and Williams drop out for stretches) creating space after the density of the preceding tracks. Alfred Lion produced the original session. Michael Cuscuna produced it for release in 1979 on Blue Note's LT series, with cover design by Toshikazu Tanaka and liner notes by Cuscuna. This Classic Vinyl Series edition was mastered all-analog by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, with lacquers cut by Gray, and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal Media in Germany.