Dorsay Alavi (‘Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity’) on how she structured her docuseries into 3 ‘portals’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

When Dorsay Alavi started working on what would become “Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity,” she had to confront how she was going to tell the story of a musician who had contributed 60 years to American music. “When I started the documentary, I really didn’t know where I was going to go with it. I was just going to let my subject lead me and Wayne just kept surprising me. I just couldn’t believe the amount of the body of work he was creating, the influence he had on so many musicians,” she tells Gold Derby during our recent Meet the Experts: TV Documentary panel (watch the exclusive video interview above).

As she kept shooting and more and more information kept being revealed, Alavi found a way to really capture Shorter’s life and artistic contributions. “I decided to do it in three portals and I call them portals because the audience is transported into three pivotal periods of his life that were influential to him and to others in music, but also his personal life.”

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“Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity,” which can currently be streamed on Amazon Prime Video, explores the life, music and influence that Shorter had over six decades. The saxophone player was known for being a key member of Miles Davis’ band during the late 1960s and starting the fusion band, Weather Report before achieving notriety as a solo performer. Over the years he has also appeared on a number of recordings by artists that include Steely Dan, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell, Carlos Santana, Freddie Hubbard, Don Henley, Norah Jones and Esperanza Spalding.

Despite being a consumer of jazz from early in her life, Alavi didn’t really know who Shorter was for the longest time even though she would be listening to things that he had composed. This all changed while she was working as a music video director. “My agent called me and said, ‘Hey, we want you to direct a music video. It’s on the jazz legend Wayne Shorter.’ I went, ‘Hmm, Wayne Shorter. Who’s that?’ And I started doing research and I went, ‘Wow, he is so influential! And why do I not know about him?’” After shooting the music video, Shorter and Alavi remained friends until Shorter’s death. “I grew to learn about Wayne’s music and started listening to it and hearing others talk about his influence. I fell in love with the sounds he created and I saw that he had vast sounds in different genres that I had no idea about and so I wanted to capture all that and visually translate it in the film.”