The body of material Wayne Shorter created during his stint with the Miles Davis band brought a number of innovations to small-group jazz writing. As noted previously, until Shorter's entrance into the Miles Davis Quintet, the vast majority of Davis's repertoire consisted of what we now refer to as jazz standards: Stella By Starlight, Round Midnight, On Green Dolphin Street, My Funny Valentine, etc. Following the release of E.S.P. – the first album recorded by the Second Great Quintet – would record only original music, largely written by Shorter, though augmented by pieces written by all of the other band members, including Davis. It's easy to overlook the significance of this today; before this group, few post-bop bands played mostly original works, preferring instead to differentiate themselves through interpretation of standards. Of the bands that did prefer to write their own music – those lead by Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, and Art Blakey – Shorter's name appears on the roster of one. Prior to talking about the technical details of the music though, it is important to make note of his greatest strengths: his ability to maintain multiple compositional personalities.
If you look at the songs Shorter wrote throughout the 60's – E.S.P, Yes Or No, Sincerely Diana, and El Gaucho as some examples – it wouldn't be a stretch to think they were the products of different writers. Shorter had the ability to write music that exemplified his surroundings. For Art Blakey, he wrote modernistic blues and latin pieces that allowed the drummer to maintain his both earthy and commercial roots while remaining relevant in the forward-looking jazz world of the 60's. On his early solo albums, he showed a personality that fused the pentatonic-based musics of John Coltrane and the popular music world. Finally, when writing for Miles Davis, Shorter created dark, expressionistic portraits of the trumpeter, providing the brooding atmospheres that Davis already had the ability to turn a simple standard in to. The importance of this is the philosophy of composition it portrays in Shorter. This wide variety of styles displays a writer concerned more with the overall effect of a piece than the fine details of it; while Shorter established many new harmonic standards in jazz writing, it was his attention to overall concept that put him so far ahead of his contemporaries. Moreover, as he broke accepted harmonic rules with the intention of the overall effect and mood, the changes he made were a result of dedication to general concept.
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It's interesting to hear shorter on an album like speak no evil and compare it to another album created the same year with a different band (err w/o miles). Your very right that he resembles Coltrane at times. I wonder if mccoy tyner had anything to do with that. If I didn't know that shorter was the composer of 'yes or no' i would think it was a coltrane tune mainly because of mccoy tyners use of fourths chords and shorters use of pentatonic scales which resembled coltrane at the time. But I notice his sound is almost completely different when he is with miles. You do not hear much of the same improvisation on his solo records. I would say that he is very consistent with his improvisation on miles davis records.
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