Woody Shaw - Musical Style

Musical Style

Woody Shaw was noted for his mastery and innovative use of "wide" intervals, often fourths and fifths, which are considered relatively unnatural to the trumpet and difficult to employ skillfully due to (a) the tremendous technical facility required to do so (see embouchure), (b) the architecture of the instrument, (c) the trumpet's inherent harmonic tendencies based on the overtone series, and (d) its traditional association with intervals based more commonly on thirds and diatonic relationships.

In both his improvisations and his compositions, Shaw frequently used polytonality, the combination of two or more tonalities or keys (i.e. multiple chords or harmonic structures) at once. In his solos, he often superimposed highly complex permutations of the pentatonic scale and sequences of intervals that modulated unpredictably through numerous key centers. He was a master of modality and used a wide range of harmonic color, generating unusual contrasts, using tension and resolution, dissonance, odd rhythmic groupings, and "over the barline" phrases, yet always resolving his ideas according to the form and harmonic structure of a given composition while adhering to the conventions of jazz improvisation and simultaneously creating new ones.

His "attack" was remarkably clean and precise, regardless of tempo (Shaw often played extremely fast passages). He had a rich, dark tone that was distinctive with a near-vocal quality to it; his intonation and articulation were highly-developed, and he greatly utilized the effects of the lower register, usually employing a deep, extended vibrato at the end of his phrases. Shaw also often incorporated the chromatic scale, which gave his melodic lines a subtle fluidity that seemed to allow him to weave "in and out" of chords seamlessly from all "angles."

Shaw was also born with a photographic memory and perfect pitch. Max Roach once stated: "He was truly one of the greatest. I first had occasion to work with Woody on a trip to Iran. One of the most amazing things was his uncanny memory. I was just flabbergasted. After one look, he knew all of the charts, no matter how complex they were."

Woody Shaw's improvisational and composing style bears the influences of his idols Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner, as well as many European modern classical and 20th century composers, such as Bela Bartok, Zoltán Kodály, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Erik Satie, Alexander Scriabin, Carlos Chavez, Ernest Bloch, Olivier Messiaen, Paul Hindemith, Charles Ives, Edgar Varese, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Colin McPhee and others. Shaw also listened closely to traditional Japanese music, Indonesian Gamelan, Indian classical music, Brazilian music, and various other musics of the world.