Wayne Shorter - 1966 - Adam's Apple

Wayne Shorter

1966

Adam's Apple

01. Adam's Apple 6:40
02. 502 Blues (Drinkin' And Drivin') 6:30
03. El Gaucho 6:25
04. Footprints 7:25
05. Teru 6:10
06. Chief Crazy Horse 7:30

Bass – Reginald Workman
Drums – Joe Chambers
Piano – Herbie Hancock
Tenor Saxophone – Wayne Shorter

Recorded on February 3, 1966 (track A1) and on February 24, 1966 (tracks A2 to B3).

If you just want to know whether or not you should buy this album, you get a yes from me. It's a nice piece of work from some truly great musicians, and while it doesn't get into any really deep explorations of musical ideas, it will give you hours of listening pleasure.

The songs on this album tend to be bluesier and more lyrical than most Shorter offerings. On the title track, I get the sense that Shorter is taking his cues from the R&B tunes that were filling the radio waves and climbing the pop charts in the mid-60s. It's upbeat, fun and, as noted by other reviewers here, not particularly adventurous. 502 Blues also seems to be strongly influenced by popular music. I can almost hear some Sinatra or Tony Bennet-like stylist crooning some lines about lost love and late nights at the bar in place of Shorter's sax work.

El Gaucho reminds me of typical Shorter fare from the years just prior to this album's release, the sort of work you'll find on albums like Speak No Evil. Still, I get the sense that I'm listening to supremely accomplished musicians playing with ideas they have long ago mastered. It's a good composition, well played, but it isn't attempting to explore any new territory.

Footprints is the gem of this collection. I even think it might be the conceptual center of the album. This is one of Shorter's greatest and most enduring compositions. You'll also find it on the album Miles Smiles, by Miles Davis' second great quintet, and numerous live recordings by that group, and in quite a few more live clips from Shorter, dating into the early 2000's. Here, in its debut recording, the song has a certain swing that you won't hear in many (if any) other versions (and certainly not in any of the recordings by the Davis Quintet). As with most of the songs on this album, Shorter's style is lyrical. That, in combination with the swing-like rhythm, makes this rich composition exceptionally approachable. If I were to choose one song to introduce someone to the mid-60s hard bop / post bop sub genre, it might have to be this recording of Footprints. Oh, and as an added bonus, since this recording is by a quartet, Hancock gets a good portion of space for his solo, and he makes marvelous use of it.

Teru is a lovely ballad. Shorter's playing here is soulful and sweet. The final cut of the original album, Chief Crazy Horse, strikes me as a variation of Footprints, almost like a reminiscence to close out the set.

The bonus cut, The Collector, is a real outlier. Composed by Herbie Hancock, it is more stylistically adventurous than the rest of the set and it does seem to presage Shorter's next album, Schizophrenia, but it also just doesn't seem to fit with the rest of this album. I'd recommend making a playlist of Adam's Apple's original six songs and adding this to another playlist of various and sundry Shorter songs from the same period.

With the possible exception of its song, "Footprints," which would become a jazz standard, Adam's Apple received quite a bit less attention upon its release than some of the preceding albums in Wayne Shorter's catalog. That is a shame because it really does rank with the best of his output from this incredibly fertile period. From the first moments when Shorter's sax soars out in the eponymous opening track, with its warmth and roundness and power, it is hard not to like this album. It might not be turning as sharp of a corner stylistically as some of his earlier works, like Speak No Evil, but its impact is only dulled by the fact that Shorter has already arrived at the peak of his powers. Taken in isolation, this is one of the great works of mid-'60s jazz, but when Shorter has already achieved a unique performance style, compositional excellence, and a perfectly balanced relationship with his sidemen, it is hard to be impressed by the fact that he manages to continue to do these things album after album. But Shorter does shine here, while allowing strong players like Herbie Hancock to also have their place in the sun. Especially hypnotic are two very different songs, the ballad "Teru" and Shorter's tribute to John Coltrane, "Chief Crazy Horse," both of which also allow Hancock a chance to show what he could do.