The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Remembering Wayne Shorter (1933-2023) I pay tribute to a great artist and share the inspiring open letter he wrote with Herbie Hancock in 2016. Ted Gioia Wayne Shorter (Photo by National Jazz Archive/Heritage Images via Getty Images) We’ve lost one of the great masters of American music. Wayne Shorter leaves us at age 89 . He had a transformative impact on jazz, and in the most challenging circumstances. Shorter came of age at a time when jazz saxophone had seemingly been pushed to an endpoint. After the innovations of John Coltrane—as well as Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Stan Getz, Warne Marsh, and others—who could envision any further stage in its development? Yet Shorter somehow escaped this endgame. Despite the constraints surrounding him—both aesthetic and economic—he invented a fresh new conception of improvisation and composition. While so many others imitated or stagnated, Shorter found new paths of exploration and new forms of expression. I will talk more ab

Why Was King Tut Buried with a Trumpet? "Whenever someone blows into it, a war occurs" Ted Gioia Why was King Tut buried with a trumpet? Was he planning to party in the next life? In fact, Tut had two trumpets in his tomb. One was made of silver and the other of bronze or copper. (It hasn’t been submitted to a metallurgical analysis to determine which.) The silver trumpet was clearly more important to Tut—and not just because he had his name included in the delicate design. It was found in the burial chamber itself—while the bronze or copper horn only made it as far as the antechamber. Both trumpets are quite long, but the silver trumpet is the longest—58.2 centimeters compared to 49.4 centimeters for its partner. King Tut’s silver trumpet with wooden insert ( Wikimedia Commons ) The trumpets from Tut’s tomb are not only the earliest surviving trumpets from Egypt, but are actually the oldest operational trumpets anywhere in the world. And we know they’re operational, because