Wayne Shorter - 1964 - Night Dreamer

It has been a good long while since I've dedicated some time for Wayne Shorter but things have changed - today in fact! I was browsing through records at some small record fair in town and I stumbled onto this album. It made me realize that even though I've been into Shorter's solo stuff for years now I don't actually own any of his albums in physical format. This was the album at hand and coincidentally it's one of my favorites as well!

Wayne Shorter is a commonly known musician in the jazz scene but perhaps for those who aren't following it he's not a very exposed one. Shorter got noticed by Miles Davis and got him to play in his groups for a long time, recording many hallmark albums with him. But perhaps to outsider audience Shorter is more known for his work in Weather Report than for his solo or Miles albums but for me Weather Report is too tacky for the most part. In any case when he was starting up his solo career he did three records for a label called Vee-Jay and they're perfectly fine. They're modern be-bop and not much else. If you're into it you'll like and won't if you don't. After those three albums he got picked up by Blue Note and things started cooking.

Night Dreamer was the second Blue Note album that got released (Juju being the first one the same year). On here Shorter and his crew are given much more creative freedom and it definitely shows. It's still a post-bop record in tune with the times but it sounds so much more matured and figured out than those past ones. This record also features Lee Morgan (trumpet) who also gets to stretch his skills by playing less conventionally and less commercially viable (I like the dude but all of his  solo -albums are too much by the book). The approach to the whole album is a more relaxed and perhaps more meaningful approach to playing. There are no maelstroms of chords and riffs here, the playing is more precise, more aimed and less bloated. A good nightly record that has a lot of unique intensity for the time. Good stuff.

Get it in FLAC.