Herbie Hancock: The Imagine Project (2010)

Herbie Hancock's Imagine Project is an unprecedented international recording and film project featuring collaborations between music legend Herbie Hancock and a dozen superstars from every region of the planet. It utilizes the universal language of music to express its central themes of peace and global responsibility. The album combines Herbie s genre defying musical vision with the local musical identities of cultures from around the world.
Herbie s last two eforts, 2008 S Gramy Album of the Year River: The Joni Letters sold over 750,000 units worldwide, and 2005 S Possibilities sold over one milion units INTERNATIONALLY.
Tracklist:
1. Imagine (Featuring Pink, Seal, India Arie & Jeff Beck)
2. Don t Give Up (Featuring Pink and John Legend)
3. Tempo De Amor (Featuring Ceu)
4. Space Captain (Featuring Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks)
5. The Times, They Are A Changin (Featuring The Chieftains and Lisa Hannigan)
6. La Tierra (Featuring Juanes)
7. Tamitant Tilay/Exodus (Featuring K Naan and Los Lobos)
8. Tomorrow Never Knows (Featuring Dave Matthews)
9. A Change is Gonna Come (Featuring James Morrison)
10. The Songs Goes On (Featuring Chaka Khan, Anoushka Shankar and Wayne Shorter)
The Imagine Project
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Wayne Shorter: Adam's Apple (2003)

"Adam's Apple" finds tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter returning to a quartet setting after the avant-garde, multi-horn experiments of "The All-Seeing Eye" (see my review). Recorded during two sessions in February 1966, the album features Wayne with the rhythm trio of Herbie Hancock on piano, Reggie Workman on bass and Joe Chambers on drums. These players all knew each other well as Wayne and Herbie had been members of the Miles Davis Quintet for more than a year, not to mention their prior Blue Note collaborations. Furthermore, Wayne and Reggie had both been in the Jazz Messengers in the early 60s, and Wayne had partnered with Joe Chambers on his previous two Blue Note sessions. All this added up to a great deal of musical rapport and chemistry that translated directly to the tunes. Of Wayne's three quartet albums for Blue Note, this is arguably the best. As great as "JuJu" and "Etc" are, they have their flaws -- "JuJu" comes off sounding a little too Coltrane-like (it's hard not to when you play with both McCoy and Elvin) while "Etc" was often uneven (it did sit in the vaults for years). With "Adam's Apple," Wayne had reached the pinnacle of his style and expression in modal jazz, and shortly he would go searching for new frontiers both with Miles and on his own. But at this stage in his career he simply gets an A+ for "Adam's Apple."

Adam's Apple
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Wayne Shorter: Alegria (2003)

Following the release of the critically acclaimed Footprints Live!, this CD is saxophonist/composer Wayne Shorter's first studio recording as a leader since the Grammy-winning 1994 release, High Life. Shorter is joined by pianists Danilo Perez and Brad Mehldau, bassist John Patitucci, drummers Terri Lyne Carrington and Brian Blade, and percussionist Alex Acuna. Backed by a superb woodwind and brass ensemble, this project offers a comprehensive and sophisticated presentation of Shorter's music, from the Andalusian airs on "Vendiendo Alegria" by Antonio Molina to a reincarnation of "Capricorn II" from his mid-'60s Miles Davis days. Shorter's soprano and tenor playing is his most expressive in years, and producer Robert Sadin (who worked on Herbie Hancock's Gershwin's World and Kathleen Battle's So Many Stars) has provided Shorter with his most poignant sonic setting on record. --Eugene Holley, Jr.

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Alegria (RS) / Alegria (HF) @ 320K

V.S.O.P.: Live Under the Sky (2000)

Recorded Live at Denen Coloseum, Tokyo on July 26, 1979. Featuring Jazz Legends: Freddie Hubbard (Trumpet and Fluegelhorn), Wayne Shorter (Soprano and Tenor Saxophones), Ron Carter (Bass), Tony Williams (Drums) and Herbie Hancock (Piano). Includes the Songs: 'One of Another Kind' (Hubbard), 'Teardrop' (Carter), 'Pee Wee' (Williams) and 'Domo' (Hancock).

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Live (RS) / Live (HF) @ 320K

Wayne Shorter Quartet: Beyond the Sound Barrier (2005) mp3 @ 320K

Recorded live on three different continents (Europe, America, and Asia) from 2002-2004, Beyond the Sound Barrier finds Wayne Shorter leading the same acoustic-oriented post-bop quartet he led on his 2001 recording, Footprints Live!; the veteran tenor and soprano saxophonist is joined by pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade. But if Beyond the Sound Barrier should be considered a sequel to Footprints Live!, it is far from a carbon copy. While Footprints Live! contained several Shorter pieces that have become jazz standards (including "Atlantis," "Footprints," and "Juju"), Beyond the Sound Barrier places more emphasis on new material. Half of the eight selections are new, and the rest of the CD ranges from Arthur Penn's "Smilin' Through" (the theme from the 1941 movie) to two pieces from Shorter's Joy Ryder album of 1988: "Over Shadow Hill Way" and that album's title track. No one will accuse Beyond the Sound Barrier of being standards-oriented, and the quartet doesn't go out of its way to be accessible; this is definitely one of Shorter's more cerebral releases. But the material is rewarding if one is broad-minded enough to appreciate Shorter and his younger colleagues at their most intellectual, and the audiences' enthusiastic applause — not just polite applause, but enthusiastic applause — indicates that they have no problem comprehending all the abstraction and angularity that is taking place. Beyond the Sound Barrier falls short of essential, but it's a solid demonstration of the fact that Shorter — who was in his late sixties and early seventies when these performances were recorded — wasn't afraid to be challenging and keep taking chances in the early 2000s.