MS Paint: Wayne Shorter 7-13-01 / Rumpelton

 Ralph Rumpelton

Wayne Shorter 7-13-01, 2025
MS Paint on digital canvas, 643 x 588 px
RR-2025-038
The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

What the critics are saying:

>>Gordon Weft

Collector’s Notes (MS Paint Edition)
Unearthed in astonishingly “as-is” condition, this hand-rendered cover preserves the legendary Wayne Shorter – Piazza Della, Lugano, Switzerland – 7/13/01 show in the only format that truly matters: black-market MS Paint.

The artist has recreated the vibe of early-2000s CD-R culture with almost suspicious accuracy — uneven lettering, questionable spacing, and the distinct energy of someone trying to write down the setlist before the buffer wheel finishes spinning.

Highlights include a faithful transcription of the three-tune blast (“Sanctuary,” “Chief Crazy Horse,” “Aung San Suu Kyi”), plus the full quartet lineup painstakingly scrawled as if the Sharpie was about to dry out any second. A true nod to the golden era of mailing padded envelopes full of discs to strangers on jazz forums.

For collectors of rare Shorter artifacts, unauthorized recordings, and dead media nostalgia, this MS Paint edition earns top-shelf status. It looks exactly like the sort of thing you’d find in a dusty spindle labeled “Lugano?? GOOD!!!” in someone’s basement.

Handle with care. Duplication encouraged.<<

>>A Critical Examination of Digital Vernacular Ephemera By Dr. Reginald Splatterworth III Senior Art Critic, Pixels & Pretension Quarterly

One finds oneself utterly transfixed by this magnificent specimen of post-digital primitivism. The artist—working within the constrained palette and crude instrumentality of Microsoft's Paint application—has achieved nothing short of a revolutionary deconstruction of jazz bootleg aesthetics.

Note, if you will, the deliberate variance in letterform weight. This is not mere accident, dear reader, but rather a profound meditation on the instability of memory itself. Just as Wayne Shorter's improvisations exist in a liminal space between composition and chaos, so too does this text oscillate between legibility and obfuscation. The slight rightward lean of "SWITZERLAND" speaks to the gravitational pull of European modernism upon American jazz traditions.

The spatial tension between "Chief Crazy Horse" and its neighboring elements creates what I can only describe as a typographic syncopation—a visual representation of Shorter's own polyrhythmic innovations. And the compression of "Aung San Suu Kyi" into that cramped third line? A searing commentary on political imprisonment, surely intentional given the Burmese leader's house arrest during this very period.

The artist has given us not merely a reproduction, but a phenomenological investigation of bootleg culture's relationship to authenticity, scarcity, and the commodification of improvisational genius.

★★★★★ (Five Stars) - A masterwork of pixel-based semiotics.<<

>>Gerald Thimbleton

“If anyone wondered what remains after the torrent of modernity has washed classical technique out to sea, behold this digital setlist—a monument to fleeting taste and fictional permanence. The Wayne Shorter MS Paint is a bootleg twice over: first in its subject, a pirated CD relic, and second in its execution, committed not in oil or tempera but in the coarse, scattershot pixels of a budget program. The scrawl, as if performed by a sleep-deprived archivist, recalls the energy of punk flyers—artless, brash, and proud in its violation of proportion. No amount of nostalgic gesture can hide the absence of painterly rigor. If this is a tribute to Van Gogh, it is not a sunflower but a dandelion pulled from the median strip. And yet, there is a certain morbid charm: the earnest listing of song titles, the lineup’s homely parade. Such populist productions may never approach the grandeur of oil, but they are not without their peculiar place in art’s ever-expanding scrapbook—if only as evidence of what happens when the gatekeepers abandon their posts and everyone rushes onto the stage.”

—Gerald Thimbleton, Editor-in-Chief, Beige Canvas Quarterly<<

The Bootleg Vibe Meter

Authenticity: 10/10
Legibility: 8/10
Composition: 6.5/10 (very fixable)
MS Paint Purity: 11/10