1980 · Album
Etcetera
Recorded June 14, 1965 · Blue Note · Produced by Not specified in available sources
Fifteen Years in the Vault: Wayne Shorter's Patient Quartet
A low-key session that builds to 'Indian Song,' where Shorter and Hancock create something genuinely hypnotic.
Etcetera opens quietly — Wayne Shorter's tenor saxophone drifting over Herbie Hancock's sparse, deliberate piano, Cecil McBee's bass moving like shadows, Joe Chambers keeping space rather than filling it. This is a quartet working in restraint, in suggestion. The tempos are moderate, the themes economical. Nothing shouts. Shorter's horn has a reedy, almost vulnerable quality here, far from the aggressive cutting he could deploy elsewhere. Hancock sounds reflective, playing around the edges of melody rather than pushing into it.
The album consists of four Shorter originals and an arrangement of Gil Evans' "Barracudas." What strikes you across these tracks is how deliberately this group refuses the obvious move — no one is trying to impress by speed or volume. Instead there's a kind of nocturnal quality, a late-night, nearly private feel. AllMusic reviewer Stacia Proefrock noted that the short, repetitive themes and the soulful playing call to mind John Coltrane's approach, but this quartet develops its own identity, weaving something intricate without ever announcing itself.
The closer, "Indian Song," is where the session justifies its existence. Shorter and Hancock circle each other in what Proefrock described as a hypnotic dance, McBee anchoring everything with a grounded, nocturnal pulse while Chambers creates space around them. It's the payoff a listener senses the whole album has been building toward. Recorded in June 1965 but shelved for fifteen years before Blue Note finally released it, Etcetera feels like a conversation that was never meant for immediate broadcast.
Who's playing
Where next?
More by Wayne Shorter
All 24 albums →
The musicians on this record
Future Shock 1983
Herbie Hancock
plays piano here
plays piano here
Double Exposure 1978
Joe Chambers
plays drums (drum set) here
plays drums (drum set) here
