Wayne Shorter: Phantom navigator

Jazz saxophone players have a tendency to speak like they play. Sonny Rollins delivers intricate, painstakingly deliberate sentences, whose descending clauses follow the same precise logic as his solos, but at approximately one-tenth of the speed. The late Joe Henderson was an elegant stylist with a penchant for decorative rhetorical flourishes. Jan Garbarek is slow and spiritual. Ornette Coleman doesn't make much sense. And Wayne Shorter?

Well, the great Miles Davis and Weather Report tenor and soprano man – who celebrates his 70th birthday this year with a new album and a world tour with his new superstar band – embarks on a conversational solo with impressive seriousness, eyes sparkling as he draws grand analogies or searches for the exact word or phrase. Then, as the initial head of steam wears off, Shorter begins to drift a little, and drift some more, and lose a bit of focus... before you know it, you're into deep interior space. That is exactly how he plays, too, moving laterally away from the theme, and away from the obvious pathways from it, toward some obscure personal goal.

"I hardly ever remember Miles counting off, or starting something, starting a tempo and all that," Shorter tells me, shortly before he goes on stage at Birmingham's Symphony Hall. "He'd walk by the drums and do like this [he raps the table with his knuckles] and Tony Williams would know what he meant. He didn't want formality or ritual to take place over substance, I know that now.

"I can see many times that formality is deified, and this deification comes in many disguises, like social register. It's an academic thing, and substance is invisible, never brought to the surface, or sometimes it comes late, like a late bloom, not that the substance is a late bloomer but the perceiver is... It's a practice to perceive. It's like someone who thinks they can perceive, they think they've got it there... there's a lot of walking around, especially now."

We're sitting in his dressing room backstage. When the tour manager first shows me inside, Shorter is doing his Buddhist prayers in front of a makeshift shrine set up on the table. A glass of red wine stands on a nearby shelf, and the tour manager and Shorter confer about the main course selections on the late-night menu back at the hotel before completing the ritual of chanting together.

He tells me how he first got into Buddhism through his friend and professional colleague, Herbie Hancock. "Herbie started chanting six months or so before, and then my wife who passed away started [Ana-Maria Shorter was killed on TWA flight 800, which exploded in mid-air after taking off from New York in 1996], and then I did." I ask whether the discovery of Buddhism confirmed intuitions that Shorter had experienced already. "Yes, things I felt when I was very young and didn't have any words for, and I went, like, 'Hey!' There's nothing simple on the planet. Sometimes things are made to seem simple in order to have people come to a halt, to stop investigating. It looks simple because of all the complex work put into it to appear simple, like a great ballerina; technique and all that stuff."

For Shorter, technique and all that stuff goes back a long way. Even before he joined Miles Davis in 1964, he was a star, as a sideman with Horace Silver, Maynard Ferguson and Art Blakey, and as a solo artist recording for Vee-Jay and Blue Note. Readers of Downbeat voted him No 1 tenor saxophonist, and No 2 composer (after Duke Ellington) in 1962. After six epoch-making years with Miles, he formed Weather Report with Joe Zawinul, which quickly became the most popular jazz act in the world. A solo deal with CBS yielded the superb Native Dancer in 1974, a Brazilian fusion album with Milton Nascimento that reached the lower ranks of the pop charts. There were also sessions with Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan; Mitchell is due to perform at a special 70th-birthday tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl in August.

But only in jazz do young lions become elder statesmen overnight. Shorter's arrival at the latter stage seems almost indecently sudden, partly because we haven't heard that much from him over the past 20 years or so; certainly not as much as from Hancock, the more commercially canny of the two. There is also a sense that for Shorter the second half of his career would never be able to duplicate the incredible success of the first. This also fits in with what has happened to jazz more generally; as the forward momentum of modernism stopped, Shorter characteristically went sideways.

The new band, however, has instantly returned Shorter to the top of the tree, as well as confirming his status as a veteran by teaming him up with players from a younger jazz generation. Their album, Footprints Live! (named for Shorter's most famous composition) was a big critical hit, winning five stars from Downbeat, and the follow up, Alegría, is his first new studio album in eight years.

Produced by Robert Sadin, Alegría is a high-toned, intensely worked set of 10 very varied compositions, including five Shorter originals. Its mixture of hard-edged, swinging and bluesy playing with dense, Gil Evans-like arrangements and orchestrations for an augmented small band also make it a kind of summation of Shorter's declared interests so far.

The band – the pianist Danilo Perez, the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Brian Blade – is also composed of musicians who are all leaders in their own right. I wonder if Shorter, who never appears to take a leading role on stage, has developed any particular strategies or tactics.

"The only thing is, leave everybody alone," he says. "That's the thing. That's where Miles was. We never had any rehearsals with Miles. Everybody was on their own, like university. Anyone who acted like high school wouldn't even be in there." Accordingly, Shorter offers no direction whatsoever, beyond providing the tunes and the arrangements. "All that conditional stuff; it's a judgemental thing, like, 'Why don't you do this? I think you should do that.' It's like people thinking they're the professor, the same as saying, 'Achtung!' or, 'Seig Heil!'"

Then we're into deification and the wider philosophical reaches, about which Shorter is obscure but fascinating. He's also very entertaining, with a repertoire of funny cartoon voices, although he keeps returning to the Miles Davis rasp. "Music is a drop in the ocean of life; it's a mistake to say that music or baseball or whatever is your life," he says. "You can't say, 'I don't do this, I don't do that, I don't do windows,' or, 'Oh, that hip-hop stuff, aaargh!' You can't get mad at music, music is neutral. It's like the dog barking at the stick the guy's hitting it with... get the guy, dog!' It's like the Americans with Bush; they voted for the stick."

Shorter also makes you feel the shortcomings of conventional critical discussion. "The difference between this and that in relation to what? In relation to taste? Then taste in relation to no taste?" The experience of Buddhism has, he says, allowed him to accept the death of his wife, and the other tragedies he has suffered (years before, his 12-year-old daughter died from a freak reaction to a childhood immunisation jab).

"There's no such thing as beginning and end; just the journey, but the thing about the journey is that it has both the joy and the sadness. If you have a high life-condition, the road of enlightenment tells you that this tragedy is temporary. You'll see her again; she's going to be on that road, the road of life's journey. It's an adventure."

At the end of the interview, I mention that on the road with Miles, he must have had some fun. "Oh, we had some times," Shorter says, wistfully.

'Alegría' is out now on Verve. The Wayne Shorter Quartet play at the Barbican Hall, London EC2 tomorrow (020-7638 8891)