= 2 (Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock)

Abstract

Abstract Jazz duets got off to an awesome if taxing start, peaking early in 1928 with “Weather Bird,” Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines’s friendly fracas of capers and feints. We have long since grown too polite for that sort of thing. A contemporary duet between jazz musicians is more likely to represent an excess of understanding and support, often to the degree that one takes a backseat to the other—as in a sonata where the violinist gets all the good lines while the pianist props him up. In the last few years, the duet has become increasingly popular as a means of making diverse records at relatively low rent. Diversity, however, is not what Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock had in mind when they embarked on 1 + 1 (Verve), a suite-like meditation that rewards scrutiny but demands patience, much patience. A reunion of two bent romantics who have spent much of the past 25 years eluding the implications of their enormous impact on jazz in the 1960s (when they worked together in the Miles Davis Quintet and on sundry I referred earlier to the album as suite-like. But the suite is a form designed to abet variety, not a collection of adagios. What then to make of this odd disc? As an album, it is poorly paced and almost obsessively narrow. It can lay no claim to the ambiguities of mood music: The soprano is a penetrating instrument and Shorter uses high or strident notes to sculpt and mottle its sound. Taken whole, the album is as baleful as an overdose of Satie. Yet each piece on its own, some more than others, rewards attention for its depth of feeling and superb execution. In Ellington’s frequently misapplied adage, 1 + 1 is beyond category—a challenging landmark in the careers of two artists who specialize in confounding expectations.