Most of Wayne Shorter’s life can be tracked in terms of the bands he worked in. After a brief stint with trumpeter Maynard Ferguson in 1959, he served as musical director in the greatest-ever edition of drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Then he joined Miles Davis for five years beginning at the end of 1964, supplying the final element for the trumpeter’s second great quartet. Later, he co-founded Weather Report.

Another way to chart the 50-year arc of his professional life is by the songs that he wrote. Other tenor saxophonist-composers – notably Jimmy Heath and Benny Golson – have made a substantial contribution to jazz literature in the last 40 years. But none has been so universally lionized as Mr. Shorter, and as time has passed, he has become increasingly devoted to the writing, rather than the playing, side of jazz.

From the start, Mr. Shorter wrote brilliant compositions at an incredibly prolific rate for both Blakey and Davis. At the same time, he made a series of recordings for Blue Note Records – including “Night Dreamer,” “Juju,” “Speak No Evil” (all 1964), “Etcetera,” “The Soothsayer,” “The All-Seeing Eye” (all 1965), “Adam’s Apple” (1966), “Schizophrenia” (1967), and “Super Nova” (1969) – under his own leadership. These, in my opinion, represent the apogee of his career.

Whichever way you choose to look at Mr. Shorter – as the ultimate team player or the solitary composer – there are two new ways to do so: A new biography, “Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter” by Michelle Mercer (Tarcher-Penguin, 272 pages, $24.95) and an accompanying double-disc CD, “Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter” (Sony Legacy C2K 89150). Both go a long way towards furthering our understanding of Mr. Shorter’s personal and professional lives.

“Footprints” is aimed at general readers and is thus perhaps shy on musical specifics. Ms. Mercer tells us that Mr. Shorter’s music is “unique,” but I wouldn’t have minded a little more elaboration about the unusual structures and major-to-minor trajectories that make them so. What Ms. Mercer does provide us with is a map of Mr. Shorter’s music from his own point of view, explaining how the music fits within the context of his life and his elaborate system of cultural, religious, philosophical, and (occasionally) musical reference points.

Ms. Mercer gives Mr. Shorter a pulpit that he uses, if not to “explain” his philosophy and his music, at least to let us into his world. The funny thing is how much that still leaves in need of explanation. Two of Mr. Shorter’s biggest influences, the late John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, were notoriously tight-lipped about the meaning of their music. Mr. Shorter’s longtime employer, Miles Davis, took delight in confounding critics and even audiences who would try to ascertain his motives.

Mr. Shorter is far more verbose, but what he says generally adds to the confusion rather than clearing it up. He is full of conversation-stopping aphorisms, like “the long way is the short way” and “a fish is too busy swimming to tell that it’s in the water.” Much of what he says can be classified as bebop fortune cookies. In general, Mr. Shorter – and, by extension, Ms. Mercer – would much rather talk about the philosophical implications of a composition than its musical construction.

Take her discussion of Shorter’s first notable composition. “Lester Leaps Town” (introduced by the Jazz Messengers in 1959 and later memorably revived by Stan Getz, one of Mr. Shorter’s early inspirations). Here he merged the two most common forms in jazz, the blues and the popular standard.

Anyone else would have written “Lester” as a basic minor blues, one of the most familiar of jazz forms. As composed by Mr. Shorter, however, it is in roughly AABA form, with each of the “a” segments being a 14-bar blues in minor (each with a different ending), which descends chromatically and slowly and then rushes back up in thirds.

Ms. Mercer doesn’t tell you this. What she does do is give Mr. Shorter’s own perspective on the tune, tell how it was inspired by Lester Young (whom Mr. Shorter met on several occasions) and how he based the rhythmic gait of the piece, which lopes unusually for a hard-bop Art Blakey classic, on Prez’s own distinctive walk. This is certainly invaluable information, but I still feel there is room for an account that both tells the story of the life and brings the music itself to life.

The close adherence to Mr. Shorter’s point of view may also explain peculiarities of emphasis. I don’t understand, for instance, why his 1974 album “Native Dancer” (a fusion of jazz, rock, and Latin American exotica that sounds comparatively dated today) rates a whole chapter while classic albums from the 1960s, such as “The All-Seeing Eye” and “Speak No Evil,” are only given a few paragraphs.

Likewise, as a retrospective album, “Footprints” is underwhelming: I personally prefer the 2002 double-disc compilation “Wayne Shorter: The Classic Blue Note Recordings,” which is less comprehensive but gives us more of the good stuff: “Tom Thumb,” “With Hunt,” “Adam’s Apple.”

Mr. Shorter’s lack of ego, and his compliancy with strong-willed bandleaders, has been both a strength and weakness. He followed Davis into the realm of electrified jazz, a medium he stayed with for at least 20 years. After leaving the trumpeter in 1970, the obvious move would have been to form his own band, a job for which his credentials as both soloist and composer qualified him.

Instead, he created Weather Report, in which he co-starred with the gifted keyboardist-writer Joe Zawinal and, later, the flamboyant electric bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorious. Weather Report quickly became the flagship of the entire fusion movement. But just at that time, Mr. Shorter set music aside to pursue his practice of Buddhism, a religion that appealed to his sense of other-worldliness. He was, essentially, a sideman in his own band.

Weather Report disbanded 20 years ago, but many of the same problems have bedeviled his work since: his own increasing reluctance as a soloist and an over-reliance on electronics. Most of his own albums of the 1980s and early 1990s continued to pursue a jazz-rock agenda of the Weather Report years, in which the sound of his own tenor and soprano saxophones took a backseat to his creation of elaborate acoustic-electric soundscapes.

Mr. Shorter returned to straight-ahead jazz about 10 years ago, partly in reaction to the death of his wife on TWA Flight 800 in 1996. And his contemporary music can be brilliant, even though he seems intent on pushing the concept of introspection to its furthest boundaries. He remains a strikingly withdrawn player, a recluse even when he is standing on stage fronting his own band.

In this, however, the most recent part of his career is of a piece with the rest. He is virtually the only important jazz musician of his generation who plays his own compositions almost exclusively – no standards by Monk or Ellington or Coltrane, let alone Gershwin or Berlin. And his motivation is always to create a wholly new melody, rather than build upon the works of others, as Coltrane and Charlie Parker did.

In Bob Blumenthal’s notes to the Blue Note compilation, Mr. Shorter declares, “Until I go through the red door at the end of the tunnel, I’m going to the end of the line, celebrating all humanity and the eternity that we all possess.” That’s Wayne Shorter, and I wouldn’t want him any other way.