For Carolina Shorter, June 9, 2025, was an emotional day. A climate-controlled truck drove away from her home in the West Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, carrying the extensive personal archives of her husband — Wayne Shorter, a towering figure in jazz and American music more broadly — who died in 2023 at 89.
The ultimate destination of the 128 linear feet of scores, photos, correspondence, audio recordings, original artwork, business papers and more: the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where the materials will be preserved and made available for public viewing as part of the Music and Recorded Sound Division.
After the truck left, Carolina said in a recent video call, she spent the day at home, playing Wayne’s music at a high volume, crying and chanting in the mode of their longstanding shared practice of Nichiren Buddhism. Her mood, she said, was “sad and celebratory at the same time.”
“I felt like a piece of him was being taken away,” she added, “but the overwhelming feeling of mission accomplished was underlining everything.”
Her husband had expressed to her that he wanted his archive to be available to “people from all walks of life,” rather than hidden away in a private collection. It had been a priority for him that, after he was gone, “people would truly be able to dive into his universe.”
Speaking on a video call, Roberta Pereira, executive director of the performing arts library, emphasized the institution’s commitment to that mission.
“We’re going to keep it,” she said of the Shorter archive, “and then we’re going to make sure that people have access to it.” The collection is still being cataloged, a process that could take around two years. But researchers and curious viewers can look forward to a chance to take a serious journey into Shorter’s mind, revealing him both as a boundlessly imaginative artist and a deeply engaged citizen of the world.
Reflecting on the significance of the archive, Danilo Pérez, a pianist who had worked closely with Shorter for the last two decades of the saxophonist’s life, said he hoped that artists would learn from Shorter’s process.
“I can tell you, playing that music, it’s a life-changing experience,” he said in a video call. “I think it’s not just about preserving the jazz history, but it’s about preserving the body of work of somebody who wrote music that transforms life.”
The archive encompasses Shorter’s entire professional career, housing scores, onstage photographs and publishing receipts from his star-making tenure with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, which began in 1959; manuscripts for celebrated ’60s pieces such as “Nefertiti,” “Night Dreamer,” “Footprints” and “Speak No Evil,” marking the era when he became a standout bandleader and anchored Miles Davis’s landmark second great quintet; and candid road shots with the keyboardist Joe Zawinul and the bassist Jaco Pastorius, his bandmates in Weather Report, the eclectic, commercially successful ’70s and ’80s fusion outfit.
It also chronicles his adventures in classical music and hybrid styles, via scores for pieces such as “Universe,” an orchestral suite conceived for Davis’s band in the mid-60s but never recorded by that group; “Iphigenia,” his first and only opera, co-written with Esperanza Spalding, which debuted in 2021 (“This is fun!” reads a line in a 2018 letter, from the archive, that Spalding wrote to Shorter on the progress of the libretto); and a never-performed piano concerto, written near the end of Shorter’s life. (The latter piece, Carolina recalled with a smile, had been a particular challenge for Shorter: “He said no other piece of music that he has ever written has kicked his ass like this concerto.”)
Showing off key items from the collection at a Library facility in Long Island City, Queens, Kevin Parks, curator of the Music and Recorded Sound Division — where the Shorter materials will join valuable archives from Lou Reed, Arthur Russell, Lesley Gore, John Cage and others — conveyed the staggering breadth of the holdings. He invoked a famous story about how Davis, inviting Shorter to the studio early on in their partnership, instructed the saxophonist to “bring the book,” indicating his already robust collection of original pieces.
“So what this archive is, literally, is the book,” Parks said. “It’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts from every single phase of his career. So that’s the thing that sort of stands out to me, is that it’s scores that he wrote going all the way back to the Blakey days, and even before, to there’s a score somewhere in the collection dated a month before he died.”
Many Shorter pieces have long been enshrined in the jazz canon, but the archive affords the opportunity to view them in the composer’s own hand, and to savor the idiosyncrasies of his process. For example, many scores feature copious numbers of corrections, made using Wite-Out, evidence of his preference for boldly setting down his ideas in pen.
“One of the reasons why he never even wanted to learn how to use a computer to write music was, through his life’s philosophy, he believed that every note he put down on the paper would carry the intention that he always said about raising — hoping to raise — the nobility of the human spirit,” Carolina said. “And he always thought that he wanted every person who plays each and every note to feel that intention, and to carry it out and then to spread into the hearts of the listener.”
Shorter’s preference for the handmade also comes through deeply in another set of artifacts in the collection: two original comic books he wrote and illustrated as a teenager, when he was already immersed in his lifelong love of sci-fi and superhero tales. One, “Other Worlds” — created in 1949 and gorgeously depicted in elaborate drawings, also made in pen — tells the story of an expedition to the moon, focusing on an extraterrestrial woman who falls in love with an astronaut.
Carolina highlighted the story’s wealth of strong female characters, including key members of the spaceship crew, which she saw as a tribute to Shorter’s mother, Louise, a strong supporter of his early creative endeavors.
“He was already making conscious decisions about the kind of story that he wanted to see out there, because all the comic books, they were all about men,” she said, “and Wayne was raised by the most strong and amazing woman.”
One page in Shorter’s hand, which Carolina said was research for a composition that had never been completed, features the heading “Black Women Inventors,” and catalogs innovators including Ellen Elgin, a 19th-century Washington, D.C., housekeeper who designed a clothes wringer that streamlined the washing and drying process, and Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist who in the 1980s developed a device that used lasers to remove cataracts.
The correspondence in the archive, both personal and official, attests to Shorter’s vast personal network, spanning all areas of culture. One letter addresses Maya Angelou, putting forth a request to use a portion of her poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” written for Bill Clinton’s 1993 inaugural address, in a 2010 piece he composed for the soprano Renée Fleming. “We would like to incorporate a section and/or sections which maintains the essence and integrity of your poem,” Shorter wrote, with typical gravity and grace, “along with music which embraces the global call for the world to become more human.”
One folder contains a wealth of correspondence “w/ Sensei + From Sensei,” indicating Daisaku Ikeda, founder and president of Soka Gakkai International, the Buddhist organization that Shorter belonged to for around 50 years, while other letters find him in contact with various presidents. In one, Shorter wrote Barack Obama, requesting that he consider Ikeda for a Presidential Medal of Freedom, while in another, from 1996, Bill Clinton offers condolences to Shorter after the TWA Flight 800 crash, in which Shorter’s second wife, Ana Maria, and niece both died.
A series of striking double-exposure art photographs taken by Joni Mitchell — and given to Shorter in 1978 with the inscription “Love and Happy Birthday, Wayne” — commemorates his enduring friendship and creative partnership with that iconic singer-songwriter, who enlisted him regularly for recordings from the late ’70s on. And numerous photos of Shorter beaming alongside his closest friend, Herbie Hancock, speak to the richness of their 60-plus-year rapport and collaboration.
“It was almost like if they were one, somewhere in another dimension,” Carolina said of her husband’s bond with Hancock, and were “split in two for two different missions in this lifetime.”
Miles Davis also turns up frequently, in photos and correspondence. In one striking letter to Ebony magazine Shorter sharply dresses down the publication for relegating the trumpeter’s death, in September 1991, to the final page of the December issue, while touting the R&B star Luther Vandross’s dieting journey on the cover. Davis, Shorter wrote, “should be adequately documented, if not by Ebony, then by a magazine with insight, guts and pride enough to risk losing a few commercially conditioned readers for the purpose of striking a lethally enlightening blow upon the bank vault door of mediocrity.”
More large-scale concerns also activated Shorter’s social conscience. Carolina said that he often composed with TV news playing in the background. When visiting collaborators would ask if he wouldn’t prefer a more tranquil work environment, he would reply, “No, I need to know what I’m writing the antidote for.” One note, written on a random sheet of paper dating from near the end of Shorter’s life, after Russia invaded Ukraine, reads, simply, “What about people in Ukraine?”
One of the most striking items in the collection is another note of a much more personal nature. Late in his life, Shorter was hospitalized and suffering from internal bleeding. Intubated and unable to speak, he wrote a note to Carolina that read, “We are going to have big fun!” — with “Eternally” written on an adjacent page.
“To me, it depicts what really impressed all the doctors and nurses and everyone around him while he was struggling,” Carolina said, “because it’s so magnanimous, really, the amount of life force that this man displayed in times of challenge.”
“And for him, life was about having fun,” she added. Laughing, she quoted one of Shorter’s trusty mantras, “He used to say, ‘If you don’t have fun with life, life is going to have fun with you.’”
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