Where booted footsteps, bird tracks and “thonglines” meet…
In Perth, Western Australia, people generally do build their houses on sand – perforce, but generally successfully.
So much for the proverbial instruction that only fools do so!
However, in 2020, many so-called “building sites” may not see any actual building for quite a while.
Some now provide handy shortcuts for pedestrians…of more than one species.
(photo copyright Doug Spencer, taken 13 April 2020 on a West Leederville sandpatch which, until recently, had for many years been a house and garden.
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Footprints – which first appeared on disc in 1967 – is one of several early Wayne Shorter compositions that have long since become jazz “standards”.
The proverbial “everyone” has covered Footprints, so there are many, very varied, rewarding recorded versions.
However the man himself is perhaps the finest interpreter of his compositions.
Very possibly jazz’s greatest living composer, Shorter is also one of the genre’s most uncanny improvisers.
Very early this century, after nearly three and a half decades in “fusion/jazz rock” territory – lost in a musical desert, according to many critics – Shorter returned to highly improvisatory, small ensemble jazz, as leader of a superb new quartet.
That group is now widely regarded as our young millenium’s finest regular jazz ensemble.
In the 1980s and 1990s many opined that Shorter had “lost it”, or “sold out”.
His 2002 release (recorded in 2001) and his subsequent work as leader of the same quartet blew that misconception to smithereens.
Footprints Live! was Shorter’s first entirely “acoustic” album since 1967, and his first ever “live” album as leader.
Shorter was 68 at the time of this recording, on which he plays both soprano and tenor saxophones, with bassist John Patitucci, drummer Brian Blade, and pianist Danilo Perez.