In 2000, Wayne Shorter formed a new acoustic quartet featuring Brian Blade on drums, Danilo Perez on piano, and John Patitucci on bass. The group explores a wide range of Shorter’s compositions from the 1950s through the present day. Yet, the group’s interpretations of this familiar material often deviate highly from expectations, reflecting a de-emphasis of formal and harmonic components that typically constitute elements that anchor and dictate the performances and interpretations by jazz musicians. Instead, Mr. Petrucelli proposes that motivic and rhythmic elements are used as gestures that allow the musicians to spontaneously generate a musical narrative while retaining a dialectical type of group cohesion. During the course of his presentation he will frame the discussion through the prism of individual song analysis. He will demonstrate “canonical” interpretations of songs such as “Masqualero,” “Footprints,” “Sanctuary,” and “Orbits” tracing their contextual changes through repeated performances and linking this back to an impulse toward free jazz as articulated by Shorter’s stylistic growth in other recordings of his career. 

The concept of motivic improvising can be re-contextualized as gesture with the ability to relate and change expressive content. In other words, the same gesture can be performed in several ways and reflect multiple meanings that can trigger new spontaneous formal elements within a single performance; this represents a supplanting of the previous chiasmus within form. Finally and most importantly is the observation that the perception of gesture is multi-modal: it can include and encompass the viewpoint and artistic intent of the performers who use them as well as be conceived as a multi-modal stimulus by spectators.