Wallace Roney Orchestra: Wayne Shorter's Universe

If this engagement was nothing more than an outing for a starry big band built around trumpeter Wallace Roney's working quintet, it would be a big deal. If said band was concentrating on music by Wayne Shorter, a jazz icon celebrating his 80th birthday this year, it would be an even bigger deal. But once you learn that Roney and his troops are playing the premiere of Universe, a long-lost, through-composed work that Shorter wrote during his six-year tenure with Miles Davis during the ’60s, then recovered and gifted to Roney—well, that you'd have to call essential.