David S. Ware Quartet - Great Bliss Vol​.​2 (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"Along with his potent tenor, Ware's rugged flute work is particularly noteworthy." 

Milo Fine, Cadence, June 1993 

"Despite the major muscles this quartet flexes, I still find my favotite track to be Saxelloscape One, a sassy, acidic virtuoso solo that's got to be the definitive statement on the instrument." 

John Baxter, Option, March-April 1993

The 1980s saw the rise of new ways of structuring unnotated improvisation. Conductor Butch Morris spontaneously orchestrates the music of his players with an extensive and eloquent vocabulary of hand gestures. Anthony Braxton's compositions often contain detailed instructions to a performer, without prescribing actual pitches. John Zorn organizes elaborate game plans for improvisers. A few weeks after David S. Ware's Great Bliss project was recorded, at a performance by his bassist, William Parker's sextet, when one of the four horn players was soloing, the others would confer verbally and via hand-signals to concoct varied hacking figures. (Which is a modern version of the way Kansas City swing bands would set background riffs.) It's been a long time since improvised music – jazz – has been simply a matter of blowing on changes or pure...  more

1. One Two Three 12:28

2. Emptiness 04:20

3. Primary Piece III 08:18

4. Saxelloscape Two 05:30

5. The Child Without - The Child Within 11:28

6. Strichland 12:36

7. Low Strata 06:10

8. Reign of Peace 11:10

David S. Ware flute, tenor sax, saxello, stritch

Matthew Shipp piano

William Parker bass

Marc Edwards drums, tympany, chimes, gongs

David S. Ware Quartet - Great Bliss Vol​.​1 (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"Ware says of this music, 'Just empty yourself and let the music take you.' And with this recording, his unit delivers heart-felt, adventurous music that captivates throughout. The session captures a striking ensemble playing with impassioned energy and decisive empathy." 

Michael Rosenstein, Cadence, May 1993

You'd have to be deaf not to hear this music's power spirit. I'd once written that David S. Ware's music is a form of jazz revivalism, "except that what he revives is the scalding-scrawling-sprawling free style of the '60s." These improvisations pack the same sort of excitement many of us first encountered in the break-through music of that time – the sound of old barriers falling and new towers going up: the sound of new spirituals. Still, I now know that that characterization of Ware's music was naive – not least because David himself set me straight.

"The way I play the saxophone now is the same way I've been playing it since I picked it up in 1959," Ware told me during a break in recording the two-volume Great Bliss project. "Of course I listened to all the great musicians of the '60s – Ornette Coleman, Coltrane, Rollins, Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Roland Kirk, Albert Ayler. But my music addresses itself to a universal kind of feeling that transcends decades and everything else. That's not to say that other musics don't do that. But I'm totally into the spiritual value of the music." That roster of greats aside, however, David S. Ware is not one of those musicians who carries a checklist of role models around in his head, ticking off one after another as he proceeds from derivative piece to derivative piece. You can attribute specific aspects of Ware's style to one or another of the players who've caught his ear over the years – if you don't feel vibrations in the air, Jack, you're dead. But Ware always sounds like himself. Multi-instrumentalism lets him expand his concept, even as he attends to each of his instruments' particular strengths. 

Great Bliss – which was conceived as a two-installment project, by the way; the second volume will be every bit as strong as this one – marks the first time Ware has played flute on records. But his douhle-and triple-tonguing, and the clear, reedy sound he gets, sets him apart from most saxophonists who take up that instrument. Ware has been working hard on the flute for several years, and the woodshedding has paid audible dividends. Listen to the first few minutes of "Forward Motion" for proof.

I'm particularly taken by Ware's stritch and saxello work here; on either horn his sound is a throaty, compelling holler that raises the hairs on the back of your neck. Stritch, and the saxello's cousin the manzello, are of course closely associated with Roland Kirk. David says both horns date from the 1930s, when about 500 of each were made for use as band instruments. Both are fingered exactly like saxophones, and have conical bores like saxes. The saxello is really a B-flat soprano, except that the bell juts out at a 90-degree angle, and there's a slight crook at the neck.

The stritch is an E-flat alto, shaped much like the saxello, except it has only a slight crook before the bell as well as at the neck. Both horns have a vocal quality similar to that of the traditional straight soprano; the sound seems to leap out of them. "Roland Kirk was really my catalyst to play the flute and the stritch," David says. "I appreciated so much what he did on them. I heard those instruments as an open field – an open sky. A sound that grabs the ear. The night before I bought the stritch, I had a dream that I was holding a note on an instrument, and that note was so fulfilling. I didn't know what that horn was. But I had seen a stritch hanging in a repair shop in Greenwich Village, and decided to get it. I went back and bought the saxello a month later.

His fascination with these relatively recent acquisitions aside, Ware is still best known as a tenor player – that's the horn he started with, the one he played during extended stints with Cecil Taylor and with Andrew Cyrille in the mid-'70s, the one featured on his own previous alhums for Hat Hut, Palm and Silkheart, Ware's darkly brawny and full-throated sound on tenor is partially explained by the fact that he uses the most open mouthpiece that'll play in tune – a cavernous #10 model he had to special order. (Ware is a barrelchested man with no shortage of lungpower.) But there's much more to this sound than the mechanics – every note conveys how seriously he takes his music. "You have to be very cautious with the saxophone,"David says. "The instrument is so powerful, sometimes the body cannot assimilate all that energy, sound and power your nervous system has to deal with. The flute is a very powerful instrument too – playing it involves a pure airstream.

"With wind instruments, you're always dealing with air. Air is a purifier. In yoga, they use the term prana. The closest translation we can come up with is 'the lifeforce that's in the air.' In yoga, there are thousands of breathing exercises used to purify the body. But you have to do them as prescribed; if you do them wrong, you could hurt yourself. 

"You could spend 100 percent of your time working on each of these instruments – the flute, the tenor, saxello and stritch – and I'm sorry I can't spend all day on each of them. But you've got to know how much you can practice every day – after that, you can go and relax. Everyone was amazed by the things Rahsaan played – circular breathing, and playing three instruments at one time – but now he's gone. I'm not saying he shouldn't have done that, but there's a risk involved." 

Ware's caution explains one of the appealing things about his playing: for all his passion, he leaves space in his lines; for all his force, he doesn't crowd your ears. Which is not to say that he's taking it easy. "It's great to have a challenge. In music, there are certain problems to be overcome, that are inherent in a composition or a certain instrument, problems you have to get through to play what you want to play. There's only one way to do that: you've got to practice, you've got to play, and lead a disciplined life. It takes thousands and thousands of hours alone with an instrument. I love solitude – it's a form of bliss for me.

"Along with the other changes happening in the world, regarding the possibilities of the human spirit – like the Berlin Wall coming down – a lot of things should be happening in the arts, music especially. The further we go into the next century, the less garbage we should see and hear. We should awaken to a higher purpose in music.

"Music should bring out the inner quality in individuals and in life. The first purpose of music is not to entertain, but to raise the human spirit. Music is really a science. In India, where circular breathing may have originated, the whole science of music comes through meditation, revealed through silence – seers and saints, sitting in silence." There's a dramatic illustration of his respect for quietude on "Sound Bound" – the six seconds of silence that arrives about nine minutes into the piece. Other musicians might have nervously filled the space. Ware and company understand that silence is a precious as sound. This is a good a place as any to touch on the extraordinary way this music was put together. (It'll be dealt with more fully in the notes to Great Bliss, Vol 2, Silkheart 128.)

The problem with most jazz records is that they're under-rehearsed: by the time the players settle in together, the recording is over. This three-day sesssion was very much the exception – Ware began rehearsing the members of the quartet over three months in advance, and they played for five davs straight before heading into the studio.

In another sense, this music began forming long before that, when David and drummer Marc Edwards began playing together in Boston in 1968; Edwards has been on all but one of David's own dates, and played with him in a 1976 Cecil Taylor unit. Ware and Edwards first crossed paths with bassist William Parker in 1973, in a Taylor Big Band. Edwards and Parker were the rhythm section on Ware's previous album, the 1988 recording Passage to Music (Silkheart 113). When David made it known he was thinking of adding a piano player to the mix, Parker and fellow bassist Reggie Workman both recommended Matthew Shipp, who was 29 at the time of these recordings. His only previous record was a duo set (Sonic Explorations, Cadence Jazz 1037) with a Silkheart stablemate altoist Rob Brown. Shipp's one of the rare pianists who makes extensive use of extended techniques who isn't heavily indebted to Cecil Taylor. "People are going to find out about Matthew very soon," Ware says. "He's one of a kind, even now." 

About these sessions in general, David says "It takes a long time to prepare cats, the way I like to do things. The tenor pieces are more permanently structured. As you can hear, "Bliss Theme" and "Thirds" (the latter built on intervals of a third, obviously enough) are harmonized lines, even if David's tongue-talking tenor sails outside the chords. "But the pieces we did with flute, saxello and stritch are pure concept," he continues. "The rehearsals are a performance – we keep working on concepts till they crystallize. You have to know what to do with freedom – you can give yourself enough rope to hang yourself. But when you have the concept and the discipline, and a drug-free nervous system is there, you can really get it. It's an intuitive knitting and intertwining. Each thread comes together to make the fabric that is the piece."

Indeed, given the high spirits and raw edge that helps characterize this music, there's a wealth of wondrous detail to be heard as these pieces blossom. Take the way Parker's singing arco bass figure intertwines with Shipp's descending chords a little over seven minutes into "Forward Motion," their interplay eventually dissolving into Edwards' trap-set vignette. These pieces order themselves: on "Cadenza," the rhythm players drop out – to let the leader's stritch dance on its own – then dive back in, in spontaneous call and response. The subsequent solos evolve naturally out of the texture of the music. Indeed, the discovery of organic form in the playing is one of the marvels of improvised music, and one of the key pleasures of Great Bliss.

"I hope people take the time to sit down and listen to this music, to give it a chance," David S. Ware says as he brings our talk to a close. "Don't come to it with any preconceived notions. Just empty yourself and let the music take you. For those who like to travel, instead of getting on a bus or a train, put it on. It'll take you somewhere." 

Kevin Whitehead

cadenza 

crisp 

not the dull colors 

of this morning's 

sky 

crisp 

now in masses 

these colors disperse 

with the oncoming 

cold 

pushed 

the music bounces from one 

skin to another 

one human cloud 

to another 

moving eastward – moving northward 

moving 

the skin outward up & 

downward 

the crowd gathers for 

the matinee performance 

of GYPSY 

we – even the rooted – are gypsies 

crisp 

active sensing 

the cadenza pushing 

beneath the heart. 

Steve Dalachinsky 

1/10/90 

Sound On Sound Studios

1. Forward Motion 12:11

2. Angular 05:19

3. Bliss Theme 09:02

4. Cadenza 11:48

5. Sound Bound 12:08

6. Mind Time 04:28

7. Saxelloscape One 04:33

8. Thirds 13:55

David S. Ware flute, tenor sax, saxello, stritch

Matthew Shipp piano

William Parker bass

Marc Edwards drums, tympany, chimes, bells, percussion

David S. Ware Trio - Passage to Music (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"Ware's trio soars, moving through the reed man's straightforward, fairly open, or ingeniously labyrinthian tunes and arrangements. His tunes and approach seem to court catalyzation, a state into which Parker and Edwards seem eager to enter. Ware's trio not only digs in but, more importantly, lets go. And it is that action that makes for magic music." 

Milo Fine, Cadence, October 1989

David S. Ware is a man who understands the communicative powers of the saxophone, the sonic weight and the translucence to harsh textures that have made the instrument so fundamental to the idiom of Afro-American improvising. The substantial girth of his tone, especially on the tenor, separates him from those who have no more than a counterfeit connection to the music which evolved in the wake of Ornette Coleman's quartet opening at New York's Five Spot in November of 1959. Ware draws such rich beauty from his instruments through the most rudimentary of all elements individual timbre. Within that timbre we hear a lyricism poignantly soured by the memory of times hard on the heart. But there is also wilfully primitive form given to an evident receptiveness to mystery, not to mention the feeling of disastrous disappointments, or of nearly hysterical jot. There is even a luminous stoicism that merges with the swallowed sobs of a far from insensitive soul.

But mush is never the subject here. The tears that foam up through that tone areas old as plantation field hollers, as old as even the barbaric recognition primitive man saw in the distance between pain and pleasure, between the acceptance of affection and the rejection of tenderness. The conditions of which Ware's music speaks are far beyond the most simple-minded contexts or the most literal explanations of human endeavor. Where there is struggle heard in the music, where there is perhaps anger, where there is deep mourning for an intangible body of elusive information, where the saxophone arches up over the rhythm section or merges with it for undulating blocks of sound, there is always the audible proof of great skill. This man is no charlatan; charlatans never get their instruments to sound as he does, nor are they capable of the calling, keening, singing passages served on such a big invisible platter of tone. Everything one hears in Ware's playing is the result of long hours of practice, great diligence and care in the production of sound.

Ware is clearly a man who has heard the sound of such masters as Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, John Gilmore, and the most ardent primitive of the '60s – Albert Ayler. I never believed that you could play if you didn't work on your saxophone technique. You just have to practice. That's all there is to it. I have always been like that, and people have always commented on my tone. I have always been into the sound of the saxophone. All of the saxophone players I have ever appreciated have that in their music. They all have a tone. I think I have one by now, too. But the most important thing about sound is how you use it in different situations. What I'm looking for now is all of the best ways to use my sound and to put that sound together with different moods and different kinds of grooves that will give me a chance to get at the kinds of elements I always appreciated in the people who gave something special to the music.

What Ware is after is the way to utilize the conceptions of musics he likes, not the literal ways in which those conceptions are executed. That is of the utmost importance in the fashioning of an individual style: knowing that there is a big difference between the way an idea is executed and the idea itself. In Ware's playing, never far below the surface is a substantial understanding of the way Coleman Hawkins got sound out of the saxophone, of what Sonny Rollins was after in all the remarkable permutations of his personality, of the shout that Coltrane brought (as Roy Haynes pointed out) from the church

Even though there aren't literal uses of the forms from the past, one almost always hears the contemplative intensity of the blues, the reverential vibrato of the spiritual, the rugged phrasing counterpointed by big sweeps of liquid tone, and always a determined appreciation of vitality, whether whispered or screamed, slipped up on or snatched. Such qualities are the ones that attracted master drummer Andrew Cyrille to Ware, whom he has known since the middle seventies and with whom he performed in his own band, from then through the early eighties. "He is a natural tenor player whose gifts are plentiful and just needs the opportunity to explore the gamut of his talents.

When he worked in my band, he brought some interesting ideas to the bandstand. He and I used to hang out together and we went to Europe for a couple of tours. He's on my albums Celebration, Junction, Meta-Musician Stomp, and Special People. David was one of the ones who was always on or before time to rehearsal. Technically, he was always on top of the music.

"David is a reflective and meditative type of personality, but at the same time full of fire, with a clear sense of direction. He's a reserved personality and somewhat reticent until you get to know him. David is also of the mystic breed. Sonny Rollins is his mentor. I have a tape of him and Sonny Rollins playing and there are places where you can't tell them spart. That's how talented and attentive to nuances he is. "David is also a clean liver and doesn't have any interest in smoking, drinking, drugs." 

Those talents and concerns were nurtured through a long process of development. Born November 7, 1949 in Plainfield, NJ., Ware began playing music around the age of eleven, performing on alto and baritone saxophones as well as bass in the Scotch Plains-Fanwood School System. On his own, Ware took up the tenor and worked on it away from school. At school, however, Ware was always progressing and getting experience in marching bands, dance bands, concert bands, all-state bands and orchestras. At the age of 14, in the summer of 1964, Ware spent a good number of evenings listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five Spot in Manhattan, or at the Village Vanguard, or the Village Gate. "Every time he played, I tried to be there. Sonny was very nice to me and was always encouraging me. He would write me letters around that time. I don't remember now what was in them except that they were helpful in keeping me serious about music. He was really an inspirational musician." 

Ware continued his studies and moved to Boston, where he lived from 1967 to 1973, playing at Boston University, on college radio, local music festivals, and at The Black Avant Garde Coffee House. During the early 1970s, he began practicing with Rollins, who was then living in Brooklyn. "Quite a few times, we practiced at his place in Brooklyn, or he would rent a loft and we would practice there, or when I had a place on Canal Street in New York.

He even invited me down to play with my band opposite him for a set at the Vanguard in 1972. But when we were practicing together, we would just play. No tunes or anything. He never plays any things that had traditional melodies. Even if I did, he would just blow. Those where definitely inspirational experiences. Sonny Rollins – what else can you say?" 

From that point on, Ware began to move into the higher echelon of the period's avant garde. He performed with Andrew Cyrille's group, with Cecil Taylor's big band at Carnegie Hall in 1974, including US, European and Canadian tours in 1976 and 1977, with the bands of Milford Graves, Beaver Harris, with Cecil Taylor's Unit as a regular member, and with his own groups at lofts like Studio RivBea and Environ. 

Ware began to get something of a reputation as one of the most powerful younger players, but most importantly, he was able to show off, particularly in his own bands, the interest in creating his own version of the traditional elements of the music. His experience playing with musicians in Boston such as Michael Brecker and Bob Neloms had given him another angle from which to look at the music, given the involvement each of them had with more traditional styles than the one Ware was then working on. His lessons with Joe Viola and Charlie Mariano were also helpful, as were his experiences in big bands conducted by Herb Pomeroy.

At this point, Ware has at his command a size-able talent and is intent on making good use of it. "Over the last few years I have been working on slowing my stuff down and writing music that will give me the variety I hear in my head. I have always listened closely to the masters and have always wanted to let something I like come in through my ears and get put together another way through the forces of my own musical nervous system."

This recording is good proof of what Ware has under control at this point. One of the most interesting things about it is that though he had only been playing the stritch and the saxello all of six months when he took his trio into the studio, he already had superbly broad and controlled tones on each of them, tones that sat well next to that of his tenor saxophone.

The moods of the songs are interesting in that a number of them start out of tempo, either with a grieving songfulness or a mood of majesty quite unusual for the school Ware is associated with; then the music usually moves into a faster tempo, sometimes even a different meter. The title track is a good introduction to his work, not only for Ware's improvising but for the almost obesely pungent sound of bassist William Parker and the totally sympathetic drums of Marc Edwards.

Throughout, Ware shows that what he is after is much more demanding of him and of his musicians than the random saxophone playing projected by the limited owners of instruments who have so obscured the careers of many of their betters.

But David S. Ware is not to be daunted. He knows just what he wants to get from music and from his instruments. If the listener is patient and diligent, close listenings to this music will reap a much bigger reward than you might expect. 

Stanley Crouch
1988/April 9

1. An Ancient Formula 05:50

2. Ancient Visitors 07:35

3. Passage to Music 10:51

4. African Secrets 10:52

5. The Elders Path 13:24

6. Phonetic Hymn 09:06

7. Mystery 11:47

David S. Ware tenor sax, saxello, stritch

William Parker bass

Marc Edwards drums