The bright airy, home of jazz legend Wayne Shorter in the hills above Studio City, Calif., has a comfortable, lived-in feeling.
It is a house in which the fashionable furniture, the relaxed environment, the thicket of framed pictures on top of a baby grand piano and the profusion of artwork all attest to a warm family environment.
Seated on a sectional couch in his study, Shorter gestures around the room, noting its openness, a light-filled wall of French doors and the smooth integration of an electronics-filled workstation and screening room.
“My wife designed it,” Shorter says. “Everything in here was her idea.”
But Shorter no longer shares the house with his wife. In July 1996, while he was in Nice, France, waiting for her to join him for a vacation in Europe, Ana Maria Shorter and their niece, Dalila Lucien, were killed in the explosion of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island. And the numerous photos and paintings are constant reminders of that tragedy _ as well as another, in 1986, when their 14-year-old daughter, Iska Maria, died after a grand mal seizure.
Shorter, 63, a medium-sized, stolid man, elegantly dressed in a patterned silk shirt and conservative dark trousers, remains one of the most important jazz artists in the world today. For four decades _ from a stint as musical director for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers to a run with Miles Davis’ classic quintet of the ’60s, from the co-founding (with Joe Zawinul) of Weather Report to the leadership of his own numerous groups _ the saxophonist has been a vital, creative leader in the jazz community.
Much of his long career was accomplished with Ana Maria, his wife for 26 years, at his side. A sense of her continuing presence, in photo after photo, is everywhere throughout their home.
“My wife still comes to me,” he says. “That’s the mystery. And it’s like she keeps helping me to open new doors. It’s as though she’s prepared the way for me.”
His continuing connection with her clearly transcends her material presence.
It’s not hard to understand why. Ana Maria Shorter was her husband’s biggest fan.
“Ana Maria had been listening to jazz practically since she was born,” says longtime friend and musical associate Herbie Hancock, “and she was already into his music when she met Wayne. And she was so much in love with his music _ more than anybody _ that she literally knew it from top to bottom, knew just what it was all about. It fit her perfectly, and she loved the man that the music came from, because Wayne’s music perfectly reflects him.”
Ana Maria’s flight aboard TWA 800 was the first leg in a trip to join her husband for a European vacation with their niece, the daughter of singer Jon Lucien and concert producer Maria Lucien, Ana Maria’s sister. When Shorter was informed of the accident, he immediately returned to Los Angeles. But he knew that he was faced _ two weeks later _ with making a previously planned Japanese tour with his group. Shorter went ahead with the tour. He uses the word “discovery” frequently when he discusses the feelings he has experienced since his wife’s death.
“It was that discovery thing all the time,” he says, “that mystery of discovery. I’d be stumbling through something, and it was like I could sense the voice of my wife, saying, ‘Don’t repeat, do something different.’ Like a gate to eternity. It’s almost as though she was saying, ‘Do your work _ that is the way we find each other, eternally.’ And the fuel for that happiness to be eternal is in the work that you do, in the work that transcends earthly money and earthly finance.” Shorter’s new album, 1 + 1 on Verve, is an innovative duo outing for the saxophonist with Hancock, and Shorter’s first recording since his wife’s death.
“Ana Maria is all over the record, from beginning to end,” says Hancock, who himself lost a family member, his sister Jean, in the 1985 crash of a Delta Airlines L-1011 at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. “And not just in Wayne’s playing, but in my playing, in the sound of the whole thing. But not in any kind of reference to the plane crash. It felt more like Ana Maria was on the record, inside both of us somehow. And, in that sense, it captured her spirit, or maybe not captured, but had her spirit as a part of the music.”
