Footprints

Saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter has not only left his footprints on our musical terrain, he has created a body of work that is a monument to artistic imagination. Throughout Shorter's extraordinary fifty-year career, his compositions have helped define the sounds of each distinct era in the history of jazz.

Filled with musical analysis by Mercer, enlivened by Shorter's vivid recollections, and enriched by more than seventy-five original interviews with his friends and associates, this book is at once an invaluable history of music from bebop to pop, an intimate and moving biography, and a story of a man's struggle toward the full realization of his gifts and of himself.Michelle Mercer is a New York Times bestselling author and a veteran music commentator for National Public Radio. Michelle is the author of Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter (Penguin), Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period (Simon & Schuster), and the ghostwriter of other titles. She’s the first woman to be a featured Hot Box critic for DownBeat magazine, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Village Voice, among many other publications. Michelle has won fellowships and residencies around the world, and has presented and reported on art, music, and culture in 20 countries.