https://youtu.be/c0PqKOqbhrg
If you’re an 88 year old living jazz legend whose health has dictated retirement from performing, what remains on your list of unsummitted challenges? How about writing an opera? If you have Wayne Shorter’s composing chops, that’s what you do. And for your librettist, how about a future legend like esperanza spalding? She might be the most brilliant artist of her generation, and she’s offered to take a year off of work to get the work finished. The source material? The last extant work of Euripides.
Before Shorter & spalding wrote ...(Iphigenia), before Shorter retired his horn, before spalding released Emily’s D+Evolution, they played the Solidarity of Arts festival in Gdańsk. With them on this tune are Herbie Hancock, Terri Lyne Carrington (who had previously recorded with all three), and Leo Genovese, spalding’s frequent pianist.