# CD review: Alan Shorter – Mephistopheles To Orgasm Revisited – 2024: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2024/01/26/cd-review-alan-shorter-mephistopheles-to-orgasm-revisited-2024-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2024-01-26T00:04:35+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**“He was nomadic. The strongest and most lasting thing you can say about Alan is
that he was an original, as original as you can get. He didn’t want any academic
guidelines to equip him to reinvent the wheel. If he saw something like that, he’d
go the other way.” – Wayne Shorter**

What little we can say we know about Alan Shorter, brass player, composer, and writer,
older broth-er of Wayne Shorter, and enigmatic and only occasional figure on the 
edges of the avant scene from the mid-1960s until his death in 1988, comes primarily
from his brother, quoted above; information from poet and critic Amiri Baraka, a
friend from their adolescent neighbor-hood days in Newark and later as students 
at Howard University; and scattered reports from his sojourn in Europe.

(David Grundy’s extensive piece in the June 2020 posting of the online magazine 
Point of Departure collects these details and elaborates, interprets, and specu-
lates into the broadest portrait we have.)

The reality is, we may derive more about him from the evidence of his music, sparsely
document-ed but significantly represented here, than any second-hand source. Still,
there are clues to be gleaned from his brother’s comments. The description of him
as “nomadic” implies a restlessness, a dissatisfaction with one’s environment, and
an unfulfilled desire for that which is just beyond one’s reach.

A rejec-tion of pre-established conformity or “accept-able” solutions to questions
of intent and iden-tity confirms the impulsive nature of originality. And a creative
focus based upon contrary per-spectives and unpredictable decisions can achieve 
wondrous art but seldom results in popular success.

This, along with a seeming reticence, or inability, to adapt one’s own cre-ative
process to a shared give-and-take with others may, in part, account for Alan Shorter’s
neglect in light of his brother’s renown. Wayne acknowledged that, as youngsters
in late-‘40s, early-‘50s Newark (both playing saxophone at the time), choosing to
pursue the complex, audience perplexing innovations of bebop rather than a more 
accessible, danceable style of musical entertainment cast the brothers in the role
of “weird” and rebellious outsiders.

Separated in high school and by individual life choices thereafter, they proceeded
upon differ-ent career paths, Alan first appearing on Archie Shepp’s Four For Trane
in 1964, now alternating between trumpet and flugelhorn (the reason for his change
of instruments attributed, variously and unreliably, to either his not wishing to
com-pete with his brother or a hallucinatory experi-ence with spirit voices), and
the next year guesting on the already established Wayne’s album The All Seeing Eye
in a performance of his own composition “Mephistopheles.”

![](https://i0.wp.com/www.birdland.com.au/assets/full/752156116820.jpg?resize=640%
2C576&ssl=1)

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