Craft cocktails and small plates begin at 6:00 pm. General Admission seating available on a first-come basis, with preferred seating for our Baby Grand members.
Released in the summer of 1966, Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil is widely regarded as a cornerstone of modern jazz. It frequently appears on shortlists of the greatest jazz albums ever recorded, representing a perfect storm of brilliant composing, a legendary lineup, and a critical bridge between two of the genre’s most crucial eras. Nearly every jazz musician born from the 1950s onward views the album as foundational for how to play with space, atmosphere, and modern harmony.
Speak No Evil stands as one of the ultimate blueprints for post-bop. It retained the swinging, bluesy, hard-driving groove of bop but infused it with the looser, harmonic language of free jazz. Shorter proved that jazz could be intellectually daring and abstract without abandoning melody and accessible swing.
The album is Shorter’s manifesto—compositions with an almost cinematic and folkloric atmosphere. Featuring songs that became immediate standards in the jazz canon, you’re swept up in the effortless shifts from the haunting and heavy, polyrhythmic drive of “Witch Hunt” to the breathtakingly tender, suspended intimacy of the ballad “Infant Eyes.”
The album was performed by the ultimate late-1964 “supergroup”: a staggering collection of talent at the absolute peak of their creative powers, including Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Elvin Jones.