Woody Herman Shaw Jr. (December 24, 1944 – May 10, 1989)[1] was an American jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, arranger, band leader, and educator. Shaw is widely known as one of the 20th century's most important and influential jazz trumpeters and composers. He is often credited with revolutionizing the technical and harmonic language of modern jazz trumpet playing, and is regarded by many as one of the major innovators of the instrument. He was an acclaimed virtuoso, mentor, and spokesperson for jazz and worked and recorded alongside many of the leading musicians of his time.[2][3]
Biography
Woody Shaw (1979)
Early life and background
Woody Shaw was born in Laurinburg, North Carolina.[4] When Shaw was a year old, his parents, Rosalie Pegues and Woody Shaw Sr., took their son to Newark, New Jersey,[4]. Shaw's father was a member of the African American gospel group, The Diamond Jubilee Singers. Both parents attended the same secondary private school as Dizzy Gillespie: Laurinburg Institute.[1] Shaw's mother and Gillespie were both from the same town, Cheraw, South Carolina.
Shaw began playing the bugle when he was 9 and performed in the Newark Junior Elks, Junior Mason, and Washington Carver Drum and Bugle Corps. Though not his first choice of instrument, he began studying classical trumpet with Jerome Ziering at Cleveland Junior High School at the age of 11.
In a 1978 interview, Shaw explained:
The trumpet was not my first choice for an instrument. In fact, I ended up playing it by default. When we were asked what we wanted to play in the Eighteenth Avenue School Band, I chose the violin, but I was too late since all the violins were taken. My second choice was the saxophone or the trombone but they were also all spoken for. The only instrument that was left was the trumpet, and I felt why did I have to get stuck with this "tinny" sounding thing.
When I complained to my music teacher that I didn't think it was fair that all the other kids got to play the instruments they wanted, he told me to just be patient. He said he had a good feeling about me and the trumpet, and he assured me I'd grow to love it. Of course my teacher was right, and it didn't take long for me to fall in love with the trumpet. In retrospect, I believe there was some mystical force that brought us together.[5]
As a teenager, Shaw worked professionally at weddings, dances, and night clubs. He eventually left school but continued his study of the trumpet under the influence of Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Booker Little, Lee Morgan, and Freddie Hubbard.[1] He later discovered that he had picked up the trumpet during the same month and year that Brown died: June 1956.
Paris and Eric Dolphy (early 1960s)
In 1963, after many local professional jobs, Shaw worked for Willie Bobo (with Chick Corea and Joe Farrell), and performed and recorded as a sideman with Eric Dolphy, with whom he made his recorded debut, Iron Man.[4] Dolphy, who was living in Paris, unexpectedly died in June 1964.[4] Shaw was nonetheless invited to Paris to join Dolphy's colleague, Nathan Davis, and the two men found steady work all over Europe. While living in Paris, they frequented the club Le Chat Qui Peche, and Shaw crossed paths with musicians such as Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Johnny Griffin,[1]Dexter Gordon, Art Taylor, other lesser-known musicians such as John Bodwin, and French musicians including Jean-Louis Chautemps, Rene Urtreger, Jacques Thollot and Jef Gilson. After some time, Shaw demanded that two of his contemporaries, organist Larry Young and drummer Billy Brooks, be relocated to Paris.[1] The four young musicians – Davis, Shaw, Young, and Brooks – continued living and performing in France, intermittently touring cities in Europe, including Berlin, Germany.
Blue Note Records (mid-to-late 1960s)
By the mid-1960s, Shaw had successfully absorbed the concepts and influence of his mentor and friend, saxophonist Dolphy, and was meanwhile exploring the harmonic innovations of saxophonist John Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner. Both musicians contributed greatly to the development of Shaw's style as a trumpeter and composer.
Shaw returned to the U.S. from Paris in 1965, and began his career as one of the Blue Note labels regular trumpet players, working steadily with their roster of artists. He replaced Carmell Jones in the Horace Silver quintet (1965–1966), and made his Blue Note debut on Silver's The Cape Verdean Blues,[4] followed by Larry Young's Unity (1965);[1] the album with Young featured three of his compositions ("Zoltan", "Moontrane", and "Beyond All Limits"). "Moontrane", dedicated to Coltrane, was written when Shaw was 18 years old and was his earliest composition.
Shaw also collaborated frequently and recorded with Corea (1966–67, 1969), Jackie McLean (1967), Booker Ervin (1968), Tyner (1968), Andrew Hill (1969), Herbie Hancock, and Bobby Hutcherson.[1] In 1968–69, he worked intermittently with Max Roach, touring with him in Iran. Shaw also worked as a studio musician, in pit orchestras, and on Broadway musicals.
Contemporary and Muse (early-to-mid 1970s)
In 1970, Shaw recorded his first album as a leader, Blackstone Legacy, for Contemporary Records.[1]Blackstone Legacy featured Bennie Maupin, Ron Carter, George Cables, Gary Bartz, Clint Houston, and Lenny White. This was followed by a second release under Shaw's name, entitled Song of Songs. During this time, Shaw moved to San Francisco to explore new opportunities and became closely associated with musicians on the West Coast such as Bobby Hutcherson, Eddie Moore, Eddie Marshall, and Henry Franklin.
After working frequently with Hutcherson, Art Blakey, Tyner and others, Shaw emerged as a band leader during the early 1970s, which was a time when many jazz artists began to explore jazz-rock. A younger statesman among his elders, Shaw saw himself as an heir to the musical legacy of trumpeters such as Gillespie, Navarro, and Brown, and, being an alumnus of Blakey's Jazz Messengers, felt responsible for upholding the integrity and appreciation of the tradition.
Rosewood was nominated for two Grammys and was voted Best Jazz Album of 1978 in the DownBeat Readers' Poll, which also voted Shaw Best Jazz Trumpeter of the Year,[1] and No. 4 Jazz Musician of the Year.
By the late '80s, Shaw was nearly blind from retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable degenerative eye disease. A heroin user throughout his adult life, Shaw was in poor health when he returned to the U.S. in early 1989 from a lengthy stay in Europe and needed a wheelchair at the airport.[8] On the morning of February 27, 1989, Shaw was struck by a subway car in Brooklyn, New York, which mangled his left arm and caused other injuries including head trauma; doctors were forced to amputate his arm.[9][10] The night before the accident, Max Roach sent a limousine to Newark where Shaw was staying, to bring Shaw to the Village Vanguard to hear Roach play. After the set, Roach put Shaw into a taxi around midnight with enough money to get back to Newark. Shaw did not go to Newark; it is unclear what led to the accident later that morning. During his hospital stay at Bellevue, Shaw suffered kidney failure, was put on a respirator and lost consciousness for more than a month. He died from kidney failure May 10, 1989, at age 44.[8][7][11][1][12]
Awards
Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, Downbeat International Jazz Critics Poll (1977)
Jazz Album of the Year, Downbeat Readers Poll: Rosewood (Columbia 1978)
Best Trumpeter, Downbeat Readers Poll (1978)
Grammy Nomination – Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist: Rosewood (1979)
Grammy Nomination – Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Group: Woody Shaw Concert Ensemble, Rosewood (1979)
Best Trumpeter, Downbeat Readers Poll (1980)
Downbeat Hall of Fame (1989)
Legacy revival
The years between 2003 and 2013 saw a resurgence of interest in, and recognition of, Shaw's music. In 2003, Shaw's son, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III, launched The Official Woody Shaw Website, which helped to bolster appreciation for Shaw's contribution to music. Since then, many of Shaw's long-out-of-print recordings have been reissued, remastered and repackaged, under the curatorial oversight of Shaw's son and long-time producer Michael Cuscuna.
Shaw III, the primary inspiration for Shaw's third Columbia album, Woody III (dedicated to Shaw's father and newborn son), is the sole heir to his father's legacy. Today, Shaw III preserves the Shaw legacy through the production, management, archiving and preservation of his father's life's work. Shaw's legacy is kept active and relevant through the use of social media and the official website.
Innovations
Shaw was noted for his mastery and innovative use of "wide" intervals, often fourths and fifths, which are considered relatively unnatural to the trumpet and difficult to employ skillfully due to (a) the technical facility required to do so, (b) the architecture of the instrument, (c) the trumpet's inherent harmonic tendencies based on the overtone series, and (d) its traditional association with intervals based more commonly on thirds and diatonic relationships.
In both his improvisations and his compositions, Shaw frequently used polytonality, the combination of two or more tonalities or keys (i.e. multiple chords or harmonic structures) at once. In his solos, he often superimposed highly complex permutations of the pentatonic scale and sequences of intervals that modulated unpredictably through numerous key centers. He was a master of modality and used a wide range of harmonic color, generating unusual contrasts, using tension and resolution, dissonance, odd rhythmic groupings, and "over the barline" phrases, yet always resolving his ideas according to the form and harmonic structure of a given composition while adhering to the conventions of jazz improvisation and simultaneously creating new ones.
His "attack" was remarkably clean and precise, regardless of tempo (Shaw often played extremely fast passages). He had a rich, dark tone that was distinctive with a near-vocal quality to it; his intonation and articulation were highly developed, and he greatly utilized the effects of the lower register, usually employing a deep, extended vibrato at the end of his phrases. Shaw also often incorporated the chromatic scale, which gave his melodic lines a subtle fluidity that seemed to allow him to weave "in and out" of chords seamlessly from all "angles".
Shaw was also born with an extraordinary memory[14] and perfect pitch.[15] Max Roach once stated: "He was truly one of the greatest. I first had occasion to work with Woody on a trip to Iran. One of the most amazing things was his uncanny memory. I was just flabbergasted. After one look, he knew all of the charts, no matter how complex they were."[16]
Throughout his career, Shaw gave countless clinics, master classes and private lessons to students around the world. During the 1970s, he and Joe Henderson were faculty members in Jamey Aebersold's jazz camp. NEA Grant recipients who studied with Shaw include Wynton Marsalis (musical director of Jazz at Lincoln Center), and Ingrid Monson (Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, Harvard University). Other students and apprentices include Chris Botti, Wallace Roney, and Terence Blanchard.
Admiration among musicians
As a musician and trumpeter, Shaw was held in high esteem by his colleagues and is seen as one of the most technically and harmonically advanced trumpet players in the history of jazz and of the instrument itself. Miles Davis, a notoriously harsh critic of fellow musicians, once said of Shaw: "Now there's a great trumpet player. He can play different from all of them."[17] Trumpeter Dave Douglas stated: "It's not only the brilliant imagination that captivates with Woody Shaw – it's how natural those fiendishly difficult lines feel... Woody Shaw is now one of the most revered figures for trumpeters today."[18]
Shaw is credited with having extended the harmonic and technical vocabulary of the trumpet. Upon hearing of Shaw's death in 1989, Wynton Marsalis stated: "Woody added to the vocabulary of the trumpet. His whole approach influenced me tremendously."[5] Multi-genre producer, instrumentalist and rapper, Madlib, also cites Shaw as an inspiration. In an interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Madlib listed Shaw as his favorite trumpet player, saying of his music: "It’s electric and acoustic, traditional and non-traditional — that’s what I’m all about."[19]
Travels
Throughout his life, Shaw travelled all over Europe. He first moved to France at 19. As a sideman with Roach, he traveled to Iran in 1969. He also toured such places as Japan, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia.
During a 1980s tour for the United States Information Service, Shaw ventured to such countries as Egypt, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. Recently, it has been discovered that Shaw spent significant time performing and giving clinics in India, working in cities such as New Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, and Calcutta. When asked by film producer Chuck France in an interview whether he thought traveling was important, Shaw responded: "Most definitely. I think every great artist should share his music with the world."[20]
^Ramsey, Doug. "Recent Listening: Woody Shaw". Retrieved August 20, 2013. Shaw reached a level of expressiveness, headlong linear development and freedom from post-bop conventions that was not only ahead of his time; this music from three and four decades ago is ahead of much of the rote, formulaic jazz of our time. The Mosaic box set makes it clear to what an extent Shaw was at once a liberator of the music and a preserver of tradition.
