Woody Herman Shaw Jr. (December 24, 1944 – May 10, 1989) was an American jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, arranger, band leader, and educator. Shaw is widely known as one of the 20th century's most important and influential jazz trumpeters and composers. He is often credited with revolutionizing the technical and harmonic language of modern jazz trumpet playing, and is regarded by many as one of the major innovators of the instrument. He was an acclaimed virtuoso, mentor, and spokesperson for jazz and worked and recorded alongside many of the leading musicians of his time.

thumb|Woody Shaw (1979)

Early life and background

Woody Shaw was born in Laurinburg, North Carolina. When Shaw was a year old, his parents, Rosalie Pegues and Woody Shaw Sr., took their son to Newark, New Jersey,.

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Ziering encouraged him to continue his study of classical trumpet playing and pursue an education at the Juilliard School of music with trumpet instructor William Vacchiano, but Shaw had a deep interest in jazz. His first influences were Louis Armstrong and Harry James. After skipping two grades, he began attending Newark Arts High School (alma mater of Wayne Shorter, Sarah Vaughan, Melba Moore, Savion Glover, Larry Young, and many others), from which he graduated.

As a teenager, Shaw worked professionally at weddings, dances, and night clubs. He eventually left school but continued his study of the trumpet under the influence of Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Booker Little, Lee Morgan, and Freddie Hubbard. He then recorded the albums Rosewood, Stepping Stones: Live at the Village Vanguard, Woody III, For Sure!, and United.

Health issues and death

By the late 1980s, Shaw was nearly blind from retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable degenerative eye disease. A heroin user throughout his adult life, Shaw was in poor health when he returned to the U.S. in early 1989 from a lengthy stay in Europe and needed a wheelchair at the airport. On the morning of February 27, 1989, Shaw was struck by a subway car in Brooklyn, New York, which mangled his left arm and caused other injuries including head trauma; doctors were forced to amputate his arm. The night before the accident, Max Roach sent a limousine to Newark where Shaw was staying, to bring Shaw to the Village Vanguard to hear Roach play. After the set, Roach put Shaw into a taxi around midnight with enough money to get back to Newark. Shaw did not go to Newark; it is unclear what led to the accident later that morning. During his hospital stay at Bellevue, Shaw suffered kidney failure, was put on a respirator and lost consciousness for more than a month. He died from kidney failure on May 10, 1989, aged 44.

Educational work

Throughout his career, Shaw gave clinics, master classes and private lessons to students around the world. During the 1970s, he and Joe Henderson were faculty members in Jamey Aebersold's jazz camp. NEA Grant recipients who studied with Shaw include Wynton Marsalis (musical director of Jazz at Lincoln Center), and Ingrid Monson (Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, Harvard University). Other students and apprentices include Chris Botti, Wallace Roney, and Terence Blanchard.

Awards

  • Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, Downbeat International Jazz Critics Poll (1977)
  • Jazz Album of the Year, Downbeat Readers Poll: Rosewood (Columbia 1978)
  • Best Trumpeter, Downbeat Readers Poll (1978)
  • Grammy Nomination – Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist: Rosewood (1979)
  • Grammy Nomination – Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Group: Woody Shaw Concert Ensemble, Rosewood (1979)
  • Best Trumpeter, Downbeat Readers Poll (1980)
  • Downbeat Hall of Fame (1989)

Image and legacy

The years between 2003 and 2013 saw a resurgence of interest in, and recognition of, Shaw's music. In 2003, Shaw's son, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III, launched The Official Woody Shaw Website. Since then, many of Shaw's long-out-of-print recordings have been reissued, remastered and repackaged, under the curatorial oversight of Shaw's son and long-time producer Michael Cuscuna.

In 2012, PopMarket, a division of Sony Legacy, released Woody Shaw: The Complete Columbia Albums Collection, and in 2013, Mosaic Records released Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions, for which NPR described Shaw as "the last great trumpet innovator".

Shaw III, the primary inspiration for Shaw's third Columbia album, Woody III (dedicated to Shaw's father and newborn son), is the sole heir to his father's legacy. Today, Shaw III preserves the Shaw legacy through the production, management, archiving and preservation of his father's life's work. Shaw's legacy is kept active and relevant through the use of social media and the official website.

Relationship with other musicians

As a musician and trumpeter, Shaw was held in high esteem by his colleagues and is seen as one of the most technically and harmonically advanced trumpet players in the history of jazz and of the instrument itself. Miles Davis, a notoriously harsh critic of fellow musicians, once said of Shaw: "Now there's a great trumpet player. He can play different from all of them." Trumpeter Dave Douglas stated: "It's not only the brilliant imagination that captivates with Woody Shaw – it's how natural those fiendishly difficult lines feel... Woody Shaw is now one of the most revered figures for trumpeters today."

Shaw is credited with having extended the harmonic and technical vocabulary of the trumpet. Upon hearing of Shaw's death in 1989, Wynton Marsalis stated: "Woody added to the vocabulary of the trumpet. His whole approach influenced me tremendously."

Style and influences

Shaw was noted for his mastery and innovative use of "wide" intervals, often fourths and fifths, which are considered relatively unnatural to the trumpet and difficult to employ skillfully due to (a) the technical facility required to do so, (b) the architecture of the instrument, (c) the trumpet's inherent harmonic tendencies based on the overtone series, and (d) its traditional association with intervals based more commonly on thirds and diatonic relationships.

In both his improvisations and his compositions, Shaw frequently used polytonality, the combination of two or more tonalities or keys (i.e. multiple chords or harmonic structures) at once. In his solos, he often superimposed highly complex permutations of the pentatonic scale and sequences of intervals that modulated unpredictably through numerous key centers. He was a master of modality and used a wide range of harmonic color, generating unusual contrasts, using tension and resolution, dissonance, odd rhythmic groupings, and "over the barline" phrases, yet always resolving his ideas according to the form and harmonic structure of a given composition while adhering to the conventions of jazz improvisation and simultaneously creating new ones.

His "attack" was remarkably clean and precise, regardless of tempo (Shaw often played extremely fast passages). He had a rich, dark tone that was distinctive with a near-vocal quality to it; his intonation and articulation were highly developed, and he greatly utilized the effects of the lower register, usually employing a deep, extended vibrato at the end of his phrases. Shaw also often incorporated the chromatic scale, which gave his melodic lines a subtle fluidity that seemed to allow him to weave "in and out" of chords seamlessly from all "angles".

Shaw was also born with an extraordinary memory and perfect pitch. Max Roach once stated: "He was truly one of the greatest. I first had occasion to work with Woody on a trip to Iran. One of the most amazing things was his uncanny memory. I was just flabbergasted. After one look, he knew all of the charts, no matter how complex they were."

Shaw's improvisational and composing style bears the influences of his idols Dolphy, Coltrane and Tyner, as well as many European modern classical and 20th-century composers such as Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Erik Satie, Alexander Scriabin, Carlos Chavez, Ernest Bloch, Olivier Messiaen, Paul Hindemith, Charles Ives, Edgar Varese, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Colin McPhee.

With Nathan Davis

  • Peace Treaty (SFP, 1965)
  • Happy Girl (Polydor, 1965)

With Eric Dolphy

  • Conversations (Douglas, 1963)
  • Iron Man (Douglas, 1963)

With Dexter Gordon

  • Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard (Columbia, 1976) – live
  • Sophisticated Giant (Columbia, 1977)
  • Gotham City (Columbia, 1981) – rec. 1980

With George Gruntz

  • For Flying Out Proud (MPS, 1977)
  • GG-CJB (MPS, 1979)

With Louis Hayes

  • Ichi-Ban with Junior Cook (Timeless, 1976)
  • The Real Thing (Muse, 1977)

With Joe Henderson

  • If You're Not Part of the Solution, You're Part of the Problem (Milestone, 1970)
  • Joe Henderson Quintet at the Lighthouse (Milestone, 1970)

With Andrew Hill

  • Grass Roots (Blue Note, 1968)
  • Lift Every Voice (Blue Note, 1970)
  • Passing Ships (Blue Note, 2003) - rec. 1969

With Bobby Hutcherson

  • Bobby Hutcherson Live at Montreux (Blue Note, 1973)
  • Cirrus (Blue Note, 1974)

With Jackie McLean

  • Bout Soul (Blue Note, 1969) - rec. 1967
  • Demon's Dance (Blue Note, 1970) - rec. 1967

With Hank Mobley

  • Reach Out! (Blue Note, 1968)
  • Thinking of Home (Blue Note, 1970)

With Horace Silver

  • The Cape Verdean Blues (Blue Note, 1965)
  • The Jody Grind (Blue Note, 1966)

With Buddy Terry

  • Natural Soul (Prestige, 1968)
  • Pure Dynamite (Mainstream, 1972)

With Mal Waldron

  • The Git Go – Live at the Village Vanguard (Soul Note, 1987) – live rec. 1986
  • The Seagulls of Kristiansund (Soul Note, 1987) – live rec. 1986

With others

  • Gary Bartz, Home! (Milestone, 1970) – rec. 1969
  • Black Renaissance, Body, Mind And Spirit (Baystate, 1977) – rec. 1976
  • Walter Bishop Jr., Coral Keys (Black Jazz, 1971)
  • Joe Chambers, The Almoravid (Muse, 1974)
  • Stanley Cowell, Brilliant Circles (Freedom, 1972)
  • Booker Ervin, Tex Book Tenor (Blue Note, 2005) – rec. 1968. released in 1976 as part of Back from the Gig.
  • Sonny Fortune, Serengeti Minstral (Atlantic, 1977)
  • Kenny Garrett, Introducing Kenny Garrett (Criss Cross Jazz, 1984)
  • Benny Golson, Time Speaks (Baystate, 1982) – also with Freddie Hubbard
  • Lionel Hampton, Music of Charles Mingus (Philips, 1977)
  • Azar Lawrence, Bridge into the New Age (Prestige, 1974)
  • Pharoah Sanders, Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun) (Impulse!, 1970)
  • Neil Swainson, 49th Parallel (Concord, 1989) – rec.1987
  • McCoy Tyner, Expansions (Blue Note, 1968)
  • Carlos Ward, Lito (Leo Records, 1989) – rec. 1988
  • Tyrone Washington, Natural Essence (Blue Note, 1967)
  • Buster Williams, Pinnacle (Muse, 1975)
  • Larry Young, Unity (Blue Note, 1965)
  • Joe Zawinul, Zawinul (Columbia, 1970)

References

  • Official Woody Shaw website
  • Exhaustive Woody Shaw Discography
  • The Official Woody Shaw Discography
  • Woody Shaw discography at Discogs
  • Woody Shaw at All About Jazz