7. “Footprints,” Wayne Shorter, from Adam’s Apple (1966)

In 1959, at the age of 26, Wayne Shorter joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Over the next four years, the young tenor sax player became indispensable as the band’s musical director and primary composer. Shorter would go on to write a number of enduring standards and help change the direction of jazz not once but twice—first with Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet, which came to define post-bop and presaged the shift to fusion; then with keyboard player Joe Zawinul in the band Weather Report through the ‘70s, taking elements of funk, world music, and electronically processed sounds into rock arenas worldwide.
 
Here, in a stripped-down quartet, with sympathetic backing on piano from frequent collaborator Herbie Hancock, Shorter demonstrates how simple or familiar structures—in this case, a 12-bar blues, albeit one mostly set in elliptical-sounding 6/8 time—could offer space for players to develop brooding abstract moods and textures. Shorter and Hancock would go on to record this composition again a year later on an album with Davis, who arguably opened the door for these types of sounds in 1958 with his pioneering modal jazz album Kind of Blue.