Schizophrenia is the eleventh album by Wayne Shorter, recorded on March 10, 1967, and released on the Blue Note label in May 1969. The album features five Shorter compositions and an arrangement of James Spaulding's "Kryptonite". The album features Shorter with alto saxophonist/flautist Spaulding, trombonist Curtis Fuller, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Joe Chambers.
Wayne Shorter was 33 on March 10, 1967, when he recorded Schizophrenia. It was his eleventh leader date overall, his eighth for Blue Note, and first in a little over a year, after having recorded the previous seven within the 17 months following Night Dreamer in April 1964. He was 30 months into a five-and-a-half-year association with Miles Davis, who had followed a half-year hiatus in 1965 by finding steady work for the Shorter-Hancock-Carter-Williams laboratory, resulting in the music documented two months after Schizophrenia on the astonishing Sorcerer, the date that clarified, as Todd Coolman wrote in the notes for Miles Davis Quintet: 1965-‘68, that Miles “had found and solidified the sound, style, and substance he had been searching for” and that the group, with Shorter as its “central compositional voice,” had become “the singular pivotal force in propelling jazz out of the bebop era and into the music of the ‘70s and beyond.”
On Schizophrenia, the leader deploys a less-traveled front line mix of his tenor saxophone, James Spaulding’s alto saxophone or flute, and Curtis Fuller’s trombone, and the same unitary Hancock-Carter-Joe Chambers “rhythm section” that coalesced Shorter’s October 1965 septet suite, The All Seeing Eye, into a visionary masterpiece. He feeds them such ravishing, harmonically ambiguous songs as “Go” and “Miyako” (for his daughter) and burners-with-an-edge like the title track and “Playground” to dig into. In sum, Shorter attains an equipoise between his first-half-of-the-‘60s achievements in “bish-bash, sock ‘em dead’ hardbop as musical director with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and the form-bending equations he was conjuring for his Davis bandmates to experiment with on a nightly basis.
Although it couldn’t be predicted in 1967, Schizophrenia would be Shorter’s last “straight-ahead jazz” album for a while. On his ninth Blue Note date, Super Nova, rendered 30 months later, Shorter incorporated multiple guitars and percussion (with a decidedly Afro-Brazilian orientation), offering his own perspective on the new sounds that Miles Davis was exploring on the 1969 recordings In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. “Miles called me later,” Shorter once told me. “He said,‘We covered a lot of ground, didn’t we.’ His saying that stayed with me. It was music for music’s sake. Miles realized that we had covered a lot of ground; somehow it touched his whole human essence.”
One of the albums that Shorter recorded while he was part of Miles’ second quintet, Schizophrenia is somewhat of a cornerstone or hinge in his solo discography. Indeed, while still entrenched in the standard jazz like his previous albums (like SNE, for ex), Wayne is definitely wondering about and sometimes daring to reach beyond himself, something that Miles was also doing, as clearly both men were pushing each other. The present album is still in the previous effort’s line, despite a psychedelic photo for artwork, with the usual suspects of Hancock, Chambers and Carter, but fronting a horn-trio with, perhaps, the less-expected Spaulding (flute, sax) and Fuller (trombone).
Track listing:
"Tom Thumb" – 6:16
"Go" – 5:42
"Schizophrenia" – 6:50
"Kryptonite" (James Spaulding) – 6:29
"Miyako" – 5:00
"Playground" – 6:20
Personnel:
Wayne Shorter – tenor saxophone
Curtis Fuller – trombone
James Spaulding – flute, alto saxophone
Herbie Hancock – piano
Ron Carter – bass
Joe Chambers – drums
