SOMEBODY BUY THE MAN A WATCH:

Wayne Shorter: 'Happening,' and Meandering, a Burst at a Time (BEN RATLIFF, 12/24/04, NY Times)

THERE'S a classic story about Wayne Shorter in "Footprints," a new biography by Michelle Mercer. It's told by Hal Miller, a jazz historian who sometimes traveled on tour with Weather Report, the band Mr. Shorter played with from 1971 to 1985.

"I remember I asked Wayne for the time," Mr. Miller recounts. "He started talking to me about the cosmos and how time is relative." The band's keyboardist, Joe Zawinul, advised Mr. Miller not to bother asking the saxophonist and composer things like that. "It's 7:06 p.m.," he snapped.

Mr. Shorter, 71, may get oracular in his everyday conversations, but jazz musicians are often this way, to one degree or another. And while there is no better way to find out what's going on in their music than to ask, you have to find the right way in. Talking about music objectively, while not listening to it, is to superimpose one form over another: it pits the literary or critical endeavor against the musical. Asking a creative musician pointed questions about his discography can be dull, and asking him about the implications of an interval that he has written, or a solo he has improvised, can be nearly rude: he didn't make it to talk about it, he made it to play it.

After reading "Footprints," which may be the closest we will come to an autobiography of one of the greatest composers and improvisers in jazz, I contacted Mr. Shorter. I proposed that we listen together to something that he admired, as long as it wasn't his own, as a way into having a conversation about music and, ultimately, about his own work. ("Footprints," a new two-disc retrospective of Mr. Shorter's music, was released by Sony to coincide with Ms. Mercer's biography, which is being published by Tarcher/Penguin.)

Last month, when Mr. Shorter finished a European tour with his quartet, we got together at his home in Aventura, Fla., a thicket of tall condominium towers near the ocean.

Since going back on the road with an acoustic jazz quartet in 2001, Mr. Shorter has built up a consensus of awe seldom encountered in the stylistically splintered world of jazz. He has been playing his own compositions - from his days with the mid-60's Miles Davis Quintet to his pieces from later solo records - and reminding everyone that there is a way of writing tunes for a hardcore jazz group that have a much broader imagination. Many of his melodies, dressed in odd phrase lengths and piquant harmonies, seem to come from a rarefied place outside jazz and seem too fragile to be bruised in a nightclub setting. But they have become part of the current jazz musician's basic vocabulary.

"I've got something good for you," he said, shortly after showing me the view from the living room and pointing out where Whitney Houston and Sophia Loren had apartments. He held up an EMI Classics boxed set of Ralph Vaughan Williams, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.

I had been expecting classical music; some of his recent works have been rearrangements, for orchestra and jazz quartet, of Villa Lobos and Sibelius. I thought he might pick Stravinsky, the bebopper's idol. But this choice made sense, too: the English composer Vaughan Williams, directly or indirectly, influenced many postwar film composers, and if there's one artistic stimulus that Mr. Shorter always seems open to, it is the movies.

Small and cheery, dressed in I'm-not-going-outside-today clothes and bedroom slippers, Mr. Shorter struggled to set up his Krell home-theater pre-amp to play a CD. I was forming a suspicion that he didn't often listen to music. "Hey, man, the Krell: you ever see the movie 'Forbidden Planet'?" he asked. "There was this planet full of people called the Krells. The explorers from Earth didn't see anybody when they arrived. But they all went to sleep one night in their spacecraft, and you hear the first sound of special effects that really came to the fore in movies - this Chrrmmm! Chroooom! And you see the ground that's been depressed by huge footprints. ..."

He first chose the opening of Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 1: "A Song for All Seas, All Ships" (1910), with orchestra and choir singing lines taken from Walt Whitman. After the fanfare, 20 seconds into the piece, as the strings began to rise dramatically, Mr. Shorter smiled. "Life, that's what he's saying," he said. "It's a metaphor for life."