One thing that emerges in Dorsay Alavi’s three-part documentary “Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity” (out on Amazon Prime this Friday) is that the late, great jazz saxophonist and composer was, not to put too fine a point on it, a nerd. Born in Newark in 1933, he grew up a devotee of comic books and fantasy movies, and, with his older brother, Alan, created a theatre of cosplay in a nearby vacant lot, which, he recalls in the film, served sometimes as the Sahara Desert and sometimes as Mars. He was a precociously talented child, although that talent initially expressed itself not as musicality but as a prodigious gift for art. When he was twelve, he won an art contest and was accepted to Newark Arts High School. He copied images from comic books, then started drawing comics himself. A surviving specimen seen in the movie is impressive in its elaborate and intricate artistry but, most of all, in its sheer copiousness.
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