Wayne Shorter's blazing 🔥🎷 solo on Free For All

🚨 Correction - This newsletter initially was delivered with the incorrect observations. It has been corrected below. Sorry about that, copy/paste malfunction!

Reader,

Free For All is my favorite Art Blakey album. Admittedly though, hard-bop intimidates me. From my understanding of history, that intimidation factor was one of the reasons the artists played it in the first place. So, there’s that.

The lead track, Free For All, was written by the late, great Wayne Shorter, and today we’ll take a look at his blazing solo.

I struggled even to identify what some of the changes were. In many cases I inferred them from the lines Wayne was playing, but he plays outside so much that I’m frankly not that confident. So, I didn’t include the changes in this transcription.

Friday Workshop - Georgia on My Mind

Over the past few weeks we've been working on 2-handed voicings we can use to comp behind a soloist. But what about when we want to play the melody, or take a solo ourselves? This week we'll talk about how to adapt these voicings to let us do just that, over Georgia on My Mind.

On Zoom at 1pm Eastern, this Friday, Feb 7.

Today's 2-5-1

Each week I share 2 transcribed phrases, 5 ideas observed from 1 featured jazz recording.

Here are 5 observations I have about this tune as a whole.

1. This solo is pure raw energy—driven by passion and emotion.
2. While this isn’t strictly a modal tune, the solo maintains a consistent tonal center, giving it a modal-like quality.
3. As is often the case in hard bop, the solo doesn’t strictly outline the chord changes. Instead, it leans into chromaticism and focuses on creating and resolving tension.
4. Pay attention to how Shorter’s solo interacts with Blakey’s drumming. Both are blazing in their own right, yet they continuously fuel each other’s intensity.
5. In the second example, notice how the motif creates a hemiola effect, with each note lasting three beats against the 4/4 meter.