Jazz Great Wayne Shorter Gets His Due in ‘Zero Gravity’ Doc
variety.comJon Burlingame Dorsay Alavi spent nearly 20 years following jazz great Wayne Shorter 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. “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.
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