Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity’ on Prime Video, A Docuseries Celebrating The Jazz Great’s Legendary Playing And Expansive Mind

Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity is a three-part docuseries that explores the life, work, and restless creative spirit of the jazz saxophonist, composer, and innovator. And though Shorter died in March 2023 at age 89, the interviews director and writer Dorsay Alavi conducted with him are a big part of Zero Gravity, as it’s a documentary project that’s been gestating for quite some time. Executive produced under Brad Pitt’s Plan B imprint, the doc also includes numerous interviews with Shorter’s friends, peers, and collaborators – Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell, Don Was, Carlos Santana (also an exec producer), Sonny Rollins – as well as biographers, writers, and jazz critics. And Zero Gravity is not presented only in parts, but rather in three “portals,” a hearty nod to Shorter’s fertile mind and resonant spiritual connection to the universe.      

WAYNE SHORTER: ZERO GRAVITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: “There are two great events in one’s life,” Wayne Shorter says over a rendered image of the moon. “One is being born, and the other is knowing why.” And a boy appears as Shorter at a young age, walking into the celestial heavens as a solemn orchestral fanfare plays.

The Gist: Zero Gravity covers the entirety of Shorter’s life over its three parts. “Zero Gravity,” the third portal, concerns the saxophonist’s later career and collaborations; “Faith is to be Fearless” explores his middle years and career, which included work that both defined and broke open genres as well as personal setbacks and tragedies; and “Newark Flash in NYC,” which starts at the very beginning. Before the New Jersey native got his jazz world nickname, Wayne Shorter was just a kid with a vivid imagination enlivened by radio mysteries and sci-fi, comic books, and a symbiotic relationship with his brother, the late free jazz musician Alan Shorter. “Within this ironbound land of steel and bricks,” Shorter biographer Michelle Mercer says of Newark in the 1930s and 40s, “Wayne’s mother cultivated he and Alan’s creativity, almost like hothouse flowers.” And that encouragement combined with Shorter’s undeniable artistic talent led him to attend Newark’s Arts High School.

With periodic interview drop-ins from Shorter himself, Herbie Hancock, and jazz greats from the bebop and hard bop eras, Zero Gravity weaves a searching visual narrative that incorporates illustration, animation, stock footage, clips of old Hollywood films, and reenactments that feature actors playing Shorter as both a child and a young man. He started on clarinet at Arts High, moved quickly to tenor sax, and started playing bebop as a teen alongside Alan in a group they dubbed “Doc Strange & Mr. Weird.” He heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on the radio, and thought “These are the new guys; they were the new Superman and Captain Marvel.” And he enrolled at NYU to study classical composition while playing pickup gigs in Jersey, where jazzman Sonny Stitt first noticed the speed and dexterity of “The Newark Flash.” 

Art Blakey noticed, too, and as a member of the drummer and bandleader’s Jazz Messengers in the late 1950s, Shorter soared to new professional heights as a saxophonist and composer. He also issued solo work on Blue Note, impressing his fellow musicians, and in 1964 was recruited by Miles Davis for the trumpeter’s Second Great Quintet. (Shorter’s compositions were the only ones where Davis wouldn’t change a note.) Hancock, the Quintet’s pianist, knew even then about Shorter’s inherent vibe. “Wayne was weird. Intriguing, interesting, but a little weird. I had said, ‘I gotta find out if he’s a genius or if he’s just crazy.’ Not only was Wayne a genius, but he thought everybody else was, too.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? You can watch all ten episodes of Jazz, Ken Burns’ terrific Emmy-winning documentary series from 2001, either through PBS or Prime Video. And the artful visuals and elliptical storytelling of Zero Gravity have a fellow traveler in The New Bauhaus, filmmaker Alysa Nahmias’s 2019 doc about another visionary and innovator, the painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy.   

Our Take: As the musicians and artists interviewed in Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity will tell you, the tenor saxophonist, composer, and bandleader was recognized to be at the top of his game from the moment he entered into it. Don Was, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell: as they all say, nobody sounded like Wayne. Which certainly plays into the storyline of the documentary series’ first “portal,” as Shorter finds himself quickly ascending into the bebop and hard bop stratosphere. There’s a ton of super cool footage here, of Shorter throwing it down at Birdland in NYC with the Jazz Messengers, of their 1961 tour of Japan – they were treated to ecstatic screams rivaling the Beatles’ reception – and lots of audio, too, particularly of Shorter’s pioneering solo efforts from the early 1960s, stuff like Introducing and Night Dreamer. And Zero Gravity immerses us in it all. Wonderfully unpredictable editing layers drawings, animation, movie clips, and reenactment, so that the result is expansive and even dreamlike; it strives to reach the creative heights that Shorter so often found, and often does.

Zero Gravity also has the benefit of interviewing Shorter himself, and his recollections of his early professional era are vivid and equally layered. He became close to John Coltrane, because of course he did, and the two would jam for hours in Coltrane’s New York City apartment. “He had a piano,” Shorter remembers in one incredible passage. “And he would crush the lower part of the piano, and you get like what you call a tone cluster.” (Here he makes a deep, rushing noise.) “Like an explosion, and he would ask me, ‘See what you can find. No matter what sound you hear, try to find the face. A face. Find the person, find the story.’ And we started talking about the tone as a way of taking you places.” Zero Gravity takes us there, too.

Sex and Skin: Nothing here, though Shorter’s relationship with his first wife Teruko Nakagami and their daughter Miyako is explored here, particularly as to how the marriage fared and faltered in the midst of his work as a touring musician.  

Parting Shot: Veteran jazz bassist Dave Holland remembers one of the first conversations he ever had with Shorter, and it was one quite typical of his wavelength. “Wayne asked, ‘I wonder what happens when you get to the end of the universe?”

Sleeper Star: In the interviews for Zero Gravity, Shorter is thoughtful, expressive, sharp, funny, and always ready to add a wrinkle of personality, which he does whenever Art Blakey and Miles Davis come up. With a gleam in his eye, Shorter impersonates both men, Blakey’s gruff, authoritative growl, and Davis with his infamous hubris. The latter’s phone call to join him in the Quintet went something like this: “When you ready, let me know.” 

Most Pilot-y Line: Reggie Workman, who joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1962, says the bandleader knew exactly what he had in Shorter. “Art always wanted [Wayne] and allowed him to be in the forefront,” where his playing and composing would come to define a group that was already populated with elite musicians. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Look, it’s almost autumn, and everybody knows that autumn goes great with jazz. With a wealth of archival performance footage and an intriguing visual style, Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity is an open door to exploring the saxophonist’s legacy, but also creativity as a beacon of light.  

BLURB