Footprints by Michelle Mercer

Author:Michelle Mercer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Mozart told a story about this young composer who asked him, “How do you do what you do? How do you get creativity going?” Mozart said, “Well, first you start writing songs.” Then the guy said, “But you were already writing songs when you were very young, like six years old.” Mozart answered, “Yes, but I never stopped to ask anyone, “How do you do great things?”

Wayne’s instructive story of Mozart’s self-reliance implies a confidence that everyone has the same talent for music. “There’s a responsibility that lies within but also an arrogance when you say, ‘I’m not going to ask anyone, ’ ” Wayne said. “I thought I could hear anything and everything in music. I never did ask anybody, ‘How do you do this, or that?’ Whenever I had a question, I thought, Let me see if I can hear it myself. Like, Stravinsky sure got it together . . . how did he get that beauty and that boom, boom, in Rite of Spring?”

Wayne trusted Joe’s leadership, even when it came to the hallowed ground of his own music. “Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end,” Stravinsky once said. Joe made sure that Wayne’s music never finished too long after the end—or began too soon before the beginning. In Weather Report’s first few years, Wayne began to write longer compositions, sometimes of twenty or thirty pages. “All of it was good, fabulous stuff,” Joe said. “I’d play it on the piano, like classical music. It was very intricate, beautiful, and well thought out. Wayne could sit with chords for a long time, but when he was done, it was masterful. I played all of his music for hours, and he’d say cut where it needed to be cut, when it was too long. I never changed a note, a chord, or anything. But he trusted me to edit it down, because the only thing I did was cut it down so we could put it on the record. I said, ‘Wayne, you’ve got to write stuff for chamber ensembles, for orchestras.’ ” Joe had an opposite compositional style. He improvised, recorded what he improvised, and later wrote it all down without any changes.

Following Weather Report’s 1971 European tour, Eric Gravatt replaced Alphonse Mouzon. (Conveniently, if ironically, Alphonse took Eric’s place in McCoy Tyner’s group when Eric joined Weather Report.) Eric was an imaginative drummer whose questing intellect suited Wayne’s own. “The Weather Report drummer who was the all-around hippest one was Eric Gravatt,” Wayne said. “He did trigonometry on the train, or wrote plays. Eric had a way of playing that was open and free, with the cymbals set high, like he was reaching up to the sky to play sometimes. He had some stuff going.” Eric played with Weather Report on its next record, I Sing the Body Electric, which was actually two records in one: side one was a studio album recorded in December 1971, and side two was a show recorded live in Tokyo in January 1972.

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