Yahoo News Jazz Great Wayne Shorter Gets His Due in ‘Zero Gravity’ Doc
Dorsay Alavi spent nearly 20 years following jazz great Wayne Shorter around with a camera before she was ready to unveil her three-hour Amazon Prime documentary, “Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity.”
The 12-time Grammy winner was one of jazz’s most acclaimed composers and saxophone players. He died last year at the age of 89.
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“Wayne was just one of those people that invited you into his life,” Alavi tells Variety. “He was a spiritual mentor, a life mentor. He had such an interesting life story, but he was an interesting human being at the same time—one of those people that you don’t encounter very often in your life.
“He was very humanistic, and had such regard for every person that he met; he had a real desire to do good in the world and inspire others to dream big, to be fearless, and to make changes that are good for everybody,” she says.
Shorter collaborated with some of the greats. He played with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Miles Davis’s quintet in the 1960s, co-founded the jazz fusion group Weather Report in 1970, and frequently partnered with fellow jazz legend Herbie Hancock, who is interviewed throughout the doc.
“He was a genius,” Hancock says. “He was an explorer. ‘Zero Gravity’ kind of indicates his spirit, which was always to try something that seemed impossible. When I heard him with Art Blakey, he had an uncanny speed on the instrument, with all those amazing ideas.”
Joni Mitchell, Carlos Santana, Don Was, Sonny Rollins, Terence Blanchard and Joe Zawinul are among the other artists interviewed in the film. “There was something about Wayne that they all wanted to have on their albums,” Alavi notes. “He brought so much to the table; I think they were all enamored by Wayne’s abilities and his approach to the music.”
Shorter’s life was marked by tragedy. His daughter died of a seizure at age 14 and his wife Ana Maria was killed in the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. Hancock believes that Shorter’s Buddhist faith helped him navigate the shock and heartbreak. “He spent most of his time consoling his friends,” Hancock recalls.
One of the most unusual aspects of the film is its extensive use of animation to depict Shorter’s free-thinking and far-reaching sensibilities. “Wayne’s explorative nature, his love for science-fiction and the cosmos and his philosophical approach to life, all led to the choices that I made,” Alavi explains.
She used three different animators for the three segments (termed “portals,” as she “wanted to transport you into a certain period of Wayne’s life”). “His drawings were inspirational to me because Wayne was a visual artist, and I felt they best represented Wayne’s whimsical style, his spirit.”
Another surprise is the appearance of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who turns out to be a big Shorter fan. “They were almost like a comedy team,” Alavi says, “especially downstairs in Wayne’s fun room with all those figurines.” Shorter was a collector of miniature sculptures of fairies and various comic-book superheroes.
Shorter watched and approved the final cut of Alavi’s film. “Oh yes,” she notes, “Wayne saw the whole thing in its last cut because we were finished at the end of early 2019. I made sure that I was honoring his life because it was such a privilege that he gave me, to depict his life on screen.”
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