Singer Robbie Love covers Wayne Shorter's Infant Eyes on her debut EP Just Robbie

Robbie Love put Infant Eyes on Just Robbie, her debut EP, singing a piece that has spent 60 years as an instrumental. Wayne Shorter wrote it for his daughter Miyako and recorded it for Speak No Evil, the 1966 album that remains one of the most played records of his early career. SoulTracks covered Love's version on 22 August 2026, three days ahead of what would have been Shorter's 93rd birthday on the 25th.

Taking a vocal through Infant Eyes is a harder job than a lyric sheet suggests. The melody moves in long intervals designed for a tenor saxophone and a rhythm section that keeps the ground shifting underneath it, and singers who attempt it are working against a version most jazz listeners already know by heart. Love's reading is pitched as a tribute rather than a reinvention, and SoulTracks framed it partly as an introduction: a way of putting the tune in front of people who have never gone through Shorter's catalogue.

Shorter's catalogue is the reason the anniversary matters. He died in 2023 at the age of 89, at the end of a career that ran more than six decades and changed shape several times. He came up in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, joined the Miles Davis quintet of the 1960s and wrote a large share of what that band played, then co-founded Weather Report and spent the fusion years pushing the music somewhere else again. The solo records ran alongside all of it.

Speak No Evil sits early in that arc and Infant Eyes is its quiet centre. The piece has since become one of the tunes players reach for when they want to test whether a group can hold a ballad without filling it, and it turns up on student recital programmes and on records by musicians who never met him. Writing a song for a child and having it outlive you by decades is not the usual route into the standard repertoire, but it is the one this one took.

Reinterpretation is a busy corner of jazz at the moment. Jason Moran put out a whole album of Duke Ellington pieces this year, and the saxophonist Miguel Zenon and the pianist Luis Perdomo reached a third volume of their bolero project. What separates Love's from those is scale: a first EP, one track, a singer with no catalogue of her own yet, taking on a composer whose name carries the weight it does.

For a debut that is a deliberate gamble. A new singer's first record is usually where an audience decides what she sounds like, and Love has spent one of those slots on somebody else's song, in a genre where the comparison is instant and unforgiving. The rnb-soul side of her singing is what she brings to it that the horn version never had. Release dates as they land go into the release calendar.

Shorter has been gone for three years and musicians are still working through what he left behind. Love's contribution to that is small and specific: a melody he wrote for his daughter in the 1960s, sung out loud on a first EP in 2026.