David S. Ware Live
Whether acknowledged or not, David S. Ware is the preeminent tenor sax player on the planet, the reigning genius of the instrument. But this kind of absolute mastery is not something that was gained easily or overnight?Ware's whole statement-of-purpose is the voyage itself. He's a multifarious channeler of the different scenes, sights, sounds he's experienced and contained along the way. In the mighty bleat of his sax are all the various stopping-off points that he's called home, whether that's driving a cab or accompanying Cecil Taylor, the gig where he earned his wings as one of the hep new free-jazz gods back in the late 70s.
As the leader of his own quartet, he was responsible for some of the major eruptions of the last decade?from the brain-flaying opuses like Cryptology and Dao he made for the indie-rock label Homestead before it unceremoniously went under, to his stabs at major label occupancy with Go See the World and Surrendered, released by Columbia in 1998 and 2000, respectively. These records, based on a piano/drums/bass/sax format much like the classic Coltrane quartet, were the next logical step to the free-form spaceflights of the original avant-garde avatars, and Ware at this point has flown higher than just about any of them.
I saw him last year for the second time, under a tent at some swank affair in Boston, out on the green on a Saturday afternoon. Surrendered had just come out, and Ware was being feted by academia like many other jazz artists had been in the past. To the polite applause of the eggheads and esthetes, here in Ken Burns country, Ware simply shredded for 40 minutes straight. He seemed pissed off?indeed the irony of the situation must have brought out the demon spirit in him. These creeps who were now paying homage were the same ones who flipped him crumpled dollar bills when they were down in New York for some academic conference a dozen years ago and Ware was cabbying them to La Guardia.
If you're David Ware, and you've been on this journey since you were a young man, there must be a bittersweet taste to all this recent "success." As Michael Brecker writes in the liner notes of Live in the Netherlands: "I remember how completely wowed I was the first time I heard David play. We were at a special Berklee summer course together when we were about seventeen or eighteen. Even back then his playing communicated not only a technical and intellectual level, but also a highly emotional and spiritual one. His sound seemed to capture some of the mysterious, almost metaphysical qualities of Coltrane, incredibly unique for someone so young."
Ware's been on a quest ever since he saw Coltrane in the summer of '66 and felt, as Ware says, his "unearthly presence." He feels that presence almost all the time, and makes it palpable to his audience. You can feel it on this album. It was recorded live at the Netherlands Jazz Festival in 1997, and it's Ware's first solo record. This is just man and horn, and it's as close to the unadorned spirit of Ware's music as you're ever likely to hear. Consisting of four movements, Live in the Netherlands twists its way through some of the most gut-wrenching horn-blowing ever captured on disc. The obvious comparison is to Anthony Braxton's For Alto, but Ware's playing is more lyrical, less concerned with sound-as-space than with space-as-density. On "6th Dimensional" we hear the transcendent duality of Ware's playing, alternating between full-throated blows and lathe-like spirals. On "7th Dimensional," the longest and final movement, he uses a more broken-up cadence to once again demonstrate his immense instrumental prowess. As this international date proves, when it comes to saxophone, David S. Ware is the heavyweight champion of the world.