David S. Ware: Pastor at the Church of Jazz

Avant garde sax man David S. Ware passed away in October.  I confess that I didn't find out about his passing until last week.  NPR had a tribute to Ware and Lol Coxhill and Von Freeman, all of whom we lost last year.  I would note that I got to hear Freeman in Chicago a few years back, in a small club just north of the river.  

I don't know Coxhill, but I do have a healthy collection of David S. Ware in my library.  Most of Ware's music is what I call Page Four Jazz.  Someone who likes hard bop (Page Three) will recognize Page Four as music, but may find it very challenging.  Ware played a very muscular, frenetic horn.  You'll like it if you like the scratchy texture of his sax (I do) and if the way he slices and reassembles musical ideas does that avant garde thing to you (it does to me).  

You can watch a very interesting short film about David S. Ware produced by the David Lynch Foundation.   It includes Ware's voice along with William Parker.  "Now Jazz is one of the world's greatest churches, for sure," Ware tells us.  Don't miss it.  You can also read a fine obituary at the Guardian. 

Ware recorded Sonny Rollins' 'Freedom Suite' twice, once on an album of that title and again on Live In The World, a splendid avant garde document by the David S. Ware Quartet.  Either is a good place to start for the wary looking for something accessible.  These are fine examples of jazz in a classical format.  I am playing the third movement from the Freedom Suite album.  Here are the usual suspects:

• Arranged By – David S. Ware
• Bass – William Parker
• Composed By – Sonny Rollins
• Drums – Guillermo E. Brown
• Piano – Matthew Shipp
• Tenor Saxophone – David S. Ware

I am also playing 'Mikuro's Blues' from Go See The World, the studio album released just as the tour documented in the album above was going.  It is a very accessible blues number and gives you a pretty good idea of Ware's brilliance.  I just downloaded this recording tonight, so I can't give you a review.  No surprises on the score card:

• Bass – William Parker
• Drums – Susie Ibarra
• Piano – Matthew Shipp
• Tenor Saxophone, Producer – David S. Ware

 Meanwhile, what I really want to talk about is an Andrew Cyrille album that features Ware: Special People (1980).  I was already up to the eyelids deep in love with Cyrille.  He is one drummer who can lead a band the way a catcher directs the diamond.  Special People is so bloody good I can't believe I didn't have it until today.  Every single number is toe curling delicious.  Here is the lineup:

• Bass – Nick De Geronimo*
• Percussion – Andrew Cyrille
• Tenor Saxophone – David S. Ware
• Trumpet, Flugelhorn – Ted Daniels* 

Just from the first listen, I would have guessed that Nick De Geronimo was the leader.  His bass supports the other instruments the way the treads support an armored personnel carrier.  He knows just how to find his footing in each musical topography and how to reach for the delicious push.  Cyrille's percussion frames the music and keeps the horns on top the tread.  Ware is magnificent, playing with the heart of a war horse.  The same goes for Ted Daniels on brass, who is lighter afoot but just as poetic.  This album is simply superb.  Get the darn thing!

Kenny Dorham Comes To Mind

A little bit of exquisite hard bop from the golden period of exquisite hard bop: Kenny Dorham: 'Round Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia (1956).  I noticed a review of this recording in the latest incarnation of the Penguin Jazz Guide and realized with a shock that, although I bought a copy of Vol. 1 decades ago, it somehow wasn't in my iTunes library.  Well, I fixed that. 

Cafe Bohemia is one of the great Blue Note live recordings.  It has distinctly Jazz Messengers sound, what with Dorham and Bobby Timmons on piano.  I have the title cut playing on my L365 station.  It will make your day.  

Here is the lineup:

• Bass – Sam Jones
• Drums – Arthur Edgehill
• Guitar – Kenny Burrell
• Piano – Bobby Timmons
• Tenor Saxophone – J.R. Monterose
• Trumpet – Kenny Dorham

Being in a Dorham mood, I also posted the title cut from Una Mas (1963).  It's a very nice, slightly Latin bop.  Here is the lineup:

• Bass – Butch Warren
• Drums – Anthony Williams
• Piano – Herbie Hancock
• Tenor Saxophone – Joe Henderson
• Trumpet – Kenny Dorham

You can't beat that group.  Anything with Tony Williams on it is a treasure.  Dorham's playing is superb all the way through. 

Finally, I added a cut from one of those Sonny Rollins recordings that might be easily overlooked: Rollins Plays for Bird (1956), which has the subtitle: Sonny Rollins Quintet with Kenny Dorham and Max Roach.  The cut is 'Kids Know'. 

• Bass – George Morrow
• Drums – Max Roach
• Piano – Wade Legge
• Tenor Saxophone – Sonny Rollins
• Trumpet – Kenny Dorham

Roach is Roach and Rollins is Rollins.  Dorham is luminous. 

Early Rollins

Sounds like a country singer: Early Rollins and the Out House Orchestra!  I spent nine days in Glacier National Park where I saw exactly nine bears, all but two of them on the same day.  None of them expressed any interest in jazz.  

When I got back, a prize was waiting for me: almost all of a Sonny Rollins box set: The Complete Prestige Recordings.  I say almost all, because when you buy a box set at a suspiciously low price, sometimes you get less than what you bargained for.  I got precisely four of seven discs in that set.  The whole thing new costs over seventy bucks, and I got the first four discs for well less than half of that.  

Oh, but jazz babies, here is proof that the Gods of Bop are smiling on yours truly.  The material on the missing discs was released as Work Time, Sonny Rollins Plus 4, Tenor Madness, Sonny Rollins Plays for Bird, and Tour De Force, and Rollin's magnum opus, Saxophone Colossus.  I already had all of those recordings.  By contrast, I had almost nothing on the four discs that I did receive.  He shoots.  He scores.  Nothing but net.  

The whole box contains (I believe) all Rollin's appearances for Prestige  between 1949 and 1956.  That is most of the early Sonny Rollins, and it tells a story.  Rollins was brilliant from the get go.  Slip one of the better pieces from this era onto a later album, fuzz up the more contemporary stuff a bit to allow for advances in technology, and the early recording will fit right in.  This says something about Rollins, but something more important about the organic history of jazz.  As the music evolves, new stuff gets added to the old stuff, but the old stuff isn't discarded.  What is brilliant and timely in 1949 lives on, alongside what is unprecedented in 1962.  I am not saying that Rollins doesn't develop or explore new avenues of improvisation.  He certainly does.  I am saying that, while he learns much, he forgets nothing of value.  

Enough analysis; here is a sample.  It's from a 1953 recording made in New York City.  The band: Julius Watkins (frh) Sonny Rollins (ts) Thelonious Monk (p) Percy Heath (b) Willie Jones (d).  It appears on the album Thelonious Monk/Sonny Rollins.  It is so damn good it makes the tomatoes ripen in my garden.  Here is about half the number. 

Thelonious Monk & Sonny Rollins/Friday the Thirteenth/

 Have fun with that. 

Impulsive Rollins

Rollins' Alfie, which I last blogged on, was one of Sonny Rollins small number of recordings on Impulse!  Another, and possibly one of his best single recordings, was Sonny Rollins on Impulse!  The band includes Ray Bryant (p) Walter Booker (b) Mickey Roker (d).  If there is a point of perfection in modern jazz, a perfect expression of genius that promises amazing things and never fails to deliver on that promise, this would be it.  

Rollin's supple voice and fingers are guided by pure heart, but they are always digging deep into the human clay.  Everything is right here.  Rollins' tenor and the rest of the band always seem to be starring at the same thing.  

This isn't Rollins' best work.  That would be, I have come around to thinking, his Village Vanguard recordings.  It's not as good as his Saxophone Colossus.  But it's damn near both.  Or at least that's how it seems to me on this fine soft night in South Dakota.  

Here is a sample.  It might be my favorite interpretation of a great standard.  

Sonny Rollins/On Green Dolphin Street/Sonny Rollins on Impulse!

 So good night jazz babies. 

Sonny Rollins' Alfie

I have been regrettably behind in listening to my friend Ken Laster's fine podcast.  I am catching up!  This weekend I listened to his Mother's Day show.  I was smokin' ribs outside, and turning the iPod back on when I came back into the kitchen.  Ken is a master of the mixer.  His selections always work well together, and he does a good job of blending contemporary jazz with classics from the archive.  

One of the cuts he included in this show grabbed me by the short and curlies.  It was Sonny Rollins doing the theme from the 1966 movie Alfie.  I haven't seen the movie, though I am a Michael Caine fan.  I didn't have the album, though I am a big Sonny Rollins fan.  Most of the titles in my Penguin Guide to Jazz have a little star by them, indicating that they are on my iPod.  

Well, Mr. Music Company search engine, guess what I did when I heard that cut on In the Groove?  I bought the damn thing from Amazon.  Under six buck for the album!  It is a treasure.  I am guessing that the 'soundtrack' category probably didn't help its position in the jazz world.  In fact, Rollins uses the sound track thing as a beautiful template.  The basic theme reoccurs, to be sure, but that is the marvel of the thing.  

This is a very solid hard bop document.  A fairly simple blues based line is elaborated and milked for all it's worth, and it's worth a lot.  Nobody ever played with a greater command of texture than Rollins.  Every breath is a lover's caress.  That we live in such a universe where walking meat wrapped in skin bags can produce such exquisite beauty, that is a central mystery of philosophy. 

Here is the lineup for the album, from the Jazz Discography Project: 

J.J. Johnson (tb -1,2) Jimmy Cleveland (tb -3/6) Phil Woods (as) Robert Ashton, Sonny Rollins (ts) Danny Bank (bars) Roger Kellaway (p) Kenny Burrell (g) Walter Booker (b) Frankie Dunlop (d) Oliver Nelson (arr, cond)

 That's a pretty impressive bunch.  J.J. Johnson on trombone.  Wow.  Phil Woods on alto.  Wow2.  I think that Kenny Burrell might be the most impressive player after Rollins.  Perhaps the real genius was Oliver Nelson (Blues and the Abstract Truth) who arranged the music and conducted the band.  Still, it's a Rollins album.  

Well, here are a couple of samples. God, but this gets me going.   Try these, and if you like 'em, buy the album.  Trust me.  Sometime you'll be sitting and listening to it when everything around you is crashing down.  Rollin's horn will save you.  

Sonny Rollins/He's Younger Than You Are/Alfie

Sonny Rollins/Alfie's Theme Differently/Alfie

 And while you are at it, drop me a line.  Especially you French readers.  I just noticed that I get almost as many readers from India as from France.  Aren't Les Francais supposed to be jazz fans?  Get with the program! 

Sonny Rollins Complete RCA

In 1960 Sonny Rollins disappeared. He returned to the jazz scene in 1962 with his famous album The Bridge. Over the next two years he would record a series of albums for RCA. I have just acquired The Complete RCA Victor Recordings. I am just now sampling it, but my initial reaction is one of immense satisfaction. This is Rollins at his most troubled and melancholy, but it everything I have sampled so far suggests a deep attention to texture. Okay, Ornette Coleman was happening, and there are some reflections of that. But Rollins is back and he is back to stay.

I have listened to The Bridge for a long time, and I still can't quite get across it. There is greatness in it, to be sure, but it is a very conflicted work. Here are a couple of pieces from the larger collection that did that jazz thing to me.

Sonny Rollins/'Round Midnight/Now's The Time

Sonny Rollins (ts) Herbie Hancock Ron Carter (b) Roy McCurdy (d)

NYC, February 14, 1964

Sonny Rollins/Lover Man/Sonny Meets Hawk

Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins (ts) Paul Bley (p) Bob Cranshaw (b) Roy McCurdy (d)

NYC, July 15, 1963

This is one box set worth puttin' on the iPod.