Footprints

The melody moves like something alive and low to the ground — not a walking line but a sinuous, coiling shape in 6/4 time, that waltz feel creating an unusual weight and swagger simultaneously. Wayne Shorter wrote this piece as a kind of tonal riddle, a minor blues at heart but dressed in a harmonic language that resists easy classification. When Miles Davis recorded it with the second great quintet, the piece transformed into something even stranger and more spacious, the rhythm section playing around the beat rather than on it, creating pockets of silence that felt loaded. Shorter's tenor saxophone has a particular quality on this recording — oblique, slightly veiled, stating the melody as if it were a secret being shared rather than announced. The groove that Tony Williams creates beneath it is almost impossible to analyze; it swings and it doesn't swing, it pushes and it suspends, and it somehow makes the whole piece feel like it's moving through deep water. The emotional effect is one of mystery and inevitability, the feeling that something important is about to happen or has just happened and you're not sure which. There's also a physical dimension to it — the 6/4 feel creates a rolling sensation in the body, unhurried but forward-moving. This is music for long drives at night through unfamiliar territory, for the moment when you're no longer sure where you are and have decided that's acceptable.