For the first half of day one at the 59th annual Newport Jazz Festival, you didn’t need sunglasses. An umbrella and a jacket would do you well against the drizzle that cast itself down in fits and starts, and the sharp breeze coming in off the cove. But then at some point the clouds parted, eyes flashed open, ears got comfy. You were at Newport all of a sudden.
It happened right around the time Herbie Hancock returned to the main stage to join Wayne Shorter for one final tune. He sat at the piano beside Danilo Pérez, the regular pianist in Shorter’s quartet, and the two locked into an exchange of mutual admiration, playful entanglement, and then finally a flash of splintered resolution. A few bars at a time, they took turns on what might be jazz’s most difficult and enriching duty: wrestling with the hard, beautiful magic of Shorter’s saxophone.
