Woody Shaw


Woody Herman Shaw Jr. was an American jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, arranger, band leader, and educator. Born with a photographic memory and perfect pitch, Shaw is credited with advancing the technical and harmonic conventions of modern jazz trumpet playing. In his time he was viewed as a leading innovator on his instrument. He was an acknowledged virtuoso and mentor among musicians, and worked and recorded with many notable jazz legends."

Biography

Early life and background

Woody Shaw was born on December 24, 1944 in Laurinburg, North Carolina. He was taken to Newark, New Jersey by his parents, Rosalie Pegues and Woody Shaw, Sr., when he was one year old. Shaw's father was a member of the African American gospel group known as the "Diamond Jubilee Singers" and both his parents attended the same secondary private school as Dizzy Gillespie: Laurinburg Institute. Shaw's mother was from the same town as Gillespie: Cheraw, South Carolina.
Shaw began playing the bugle at age nine and performed in the Junior Elks, Junior Mason, and Washington Carver Drum and Bugle Corps in Newark. 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.

Ziering encouraged him to continue his study of classical trumpet playing and pursue an education at the Juilliard School of music with trumpet instructor William Vacchiano, but Shaw had a deep interest in jazz. His first influences were Louis Armstrong and Harry James. After skipping two grades, he began attending Newark Arts High School, from which he graduated.
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. 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 and performed and recorded as a sideman with Eric Dolphy, with whom he made his recorded debut, Iron Man. Dolphy, who had moved to Paris around this time, unexpectedly died in June 1964. Shaw was nonetheless invited to Paris to join Dolphy's collaborator, Nathan Davis, and the two 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, Dexter Gordon, Art Taylor, other lesser known musicians such as John Bodwin, and notable French musicians like 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 brought to Paris. The four young musicians – Davis, Shaw, Young, and Brooks – continued living and performing in France, intermittently touring other cities in Europe, including London and Berlin.

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 a roster of respected artists. He replaced Carmell Jones in the Horace Silver quintet, and made his Blue Note debut on Silver's The Cape Verdean Blues, followed by Larry Young's Unity ; the album with Young featured three of his compositions. "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, Jackie McLean, Booker Ervin, Tyner, Andrew Hill, Herbie Hancock, and Bobby Hutcherson. In 1968–69, he worked intermittently with Max Roach, touring with him to Iran. Shaw also worked as a studio musician, and worked in pit orchestras and on Broadway musicals.

Contemporary and Muse (early-to-mid 1970s)

In 1970, Shaw recorded his first featured album as a leader, Blackstone Legacy, for Contemporary Records. 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.
In 1974, Shaw returned from California to New York, beginning an association with Muse Records that produced four of his most notable albums – The Moontrane, Love Dance, Little Red's Fantasy and Iron Men, with musicians from the mid-western creative black arts scene such as Anthony Braxton, Arthur Blythe and Muhal Richard Abrams.

Columbia Records (late 1970s)

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 and fewer bands performed in the tradition of hard bop as a result of the popularity of and demand for more "commercial" music. 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 of "straight-ahead" jazz.
After releasing several albums for the Muse label, Shaw signed to Columbia Records in 1977 following an endorsement from Miles Davis. He then recorded the albums Rosewood, , Woody III, For Sure!, and United.
Rosewood was nominated for two Grammys and was voted Best Jazz Album of 1978 in the Down Beat Readers' Poll, which also voted Shaw Best Jazz Trumpeter of the Year and No. 4 Jazz Musician of the Year.

Collaborations (1980s)

Throughout the 1980s, Shaw continued performing and recording as a leader with sidemen such as pianists Onaje Allan Gumbs, Mulgrew Miller, and Larry Willis, bassist David Williams, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and trombonist Steve Turre, recording a number of more "traditional" but highly lyrical albums consisting predominantly of standards and tunes from the hard bop repertoire. During this time he also worked on projects with saxophonists Kenny Garrett and Dexter Gordon, as well as fellow trumpeter Freddie Hubbard on three albums, the latter two later reissued on Blue Note as The Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw Sessions.

Death

By the late 1980s Shaw was nearly blind from retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable degenerative eye disease. A user of heroin 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—he needed a wheelchair at the airport. On the morning of February 27, 1989, Shaw was struck by a subway car in Brooklyn, New York, which severed his left arm and caused other injuries including head trauma. The night before the accident, Max Roach sent a limousine to Newark where Shaw was staying, to take Shaw to the Village Vanguard to see Roach play. After the set, Roach put Shaw into a taxicab at around midnight with enough money to get back to Newark. Shaw did not go to Newark; it's 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 heart failure on May 10, 1989. He was 44 years old.

Awards

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 reinvigorate Shaw fans and 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.
In 2012, PopMarket, a division of Sony Legacy, released ', and in 2013, Mosaic Records released ', for which NPR described Shaw as "the last great trumpet innovator".
Shaw III, the primary inspiration for Shaw's third Columbia album, Woody III, is the sole heir to the Shaw family legacy. Today, Shaw III preserves the Shaw legacy through the production, management, archiving and preservation of his father's life's work. As of 2013, he is stated to be authoring the first official biography on his father's life and music. Shaw's legacy is kept active and relevant through the use of social media and the official website. The Shaw name and legacy are administered by Woody Shaw Legacy LLC.

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 the technical facility required to do so, the architecture of the instrument, the trumpet's inherent harmonic tendencies based on the overtone series, and 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 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. 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 a photographic memory and perfect pitch. 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."
Shaw's improvisational and composing style bears the influences of his idols Dolphy, Coltrane and Tyner, as well as many European modern classical and 20th-century composers, such as Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Erik Satie, Alexander Scriabin, Carlos Chavez, Ernest Bloch, Olivier Messiaen, Paul Hindemith, Charles Ives, Edgar Varese, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Colin McPhee. Shaw also listened closely to traditional Japanese music, Indonesian Gamelan, Indian classical music, Brazilian music, and various other musics of the world.

Educator

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, and Ingrid Monson.
Other students and apprentices included 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 today 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." 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." 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."
Multi-genre producer, instrumentalist and rapper, Madlib, also cites Shaw as an inspiration for his music. 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."

Spirituality

Shaw was a devout practitioner of a Chinese martial art known as T'ai chi ch'uan. He also practiced meditation or self-hypnosis, and Sirsha-Asana – a form of Yoga.

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 the Czech Republic.
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."

Discography

As leader/co-leader

With Gary Bartz
With Walter Bishop Jr.
With Art Blakey
With Roy Brooks
With Joe Chambers
With Chick Corea
With Stanley Cowell
With Nathan Davis
With Eric Dolphy
With Booker Ervin
With Sonny Fortune
With Kenny Garrett
With Benny Golson
With Dexter Gordon
With George Gruntz
  • For Flying Out Proud
  • GG-CJB
With Lionel Hampton
  • Music of Charles Mingus
With Louis Hayes
  • Ichi-Ban with Junior Cook
  • The Real Thing
  • Lausanne 1977
  • The Real Thing
With Joe Henderson
  • If You're Not Part of the Solution, You're Part of the Problem
  • Joe Henderson Quintet at the Lighthouse
With Andrew Hill
  • Grass Roots
  • Lift Every Voice
  • Passing Ships
With Bobby Hutcherson
With Azar Lawrence
  • Bridge into the New Age
With Jackie McLean
With Hank Mobley
With Pharoah Sanders
With Horace Silver
With Buddy Terry
With McCoy Tyner
With Mal Waldron
With Carlos Ward
With Tyrone Washington
With Harry Whitaker
With Buster Williams
With Larry Young
With Joe Zawinul