By Martin Schray
With the first sound
of David S. Ware’s saxophone you can see it coming. It seems to be far out in
the sea but it is there. You know it, you hear it, you feel it. You can watch
the waves mount up, towering. It is coming at high speed to get you, it is
inevitable. Whether you choose to submerge yourself in this music and explore its subtexts or try to defy its power and its fury, it's an elemental roar that nails you to your seat.
Free jazz at its best
is like a wave just about to break, this is the moment the players have to make
last - the moment of the greatest power, the highest concentration, the purest
communication. Usually it takes some time to build up that wave (or to find
that moment) but Planetary Unknown - David S. Ware (sax), Cooper-Moore (p), William Parker
(b) and Muhammad Ali (dr) – only need a few seconds.
They seem to start from scratch, as if they could not wait to begin. You
are immediately confronted with the wonderful tone Ware has, one of the real
voices in jazz. He knows what he is capable of, a master of his instrument (which
is an extension of his soul to him) being aware of the huge reservoir of music
there is in his world, feeling absolutely free to play what he has to play -
strong, uncompromising, trying to get to the “essential essence of sound” (as
William Parker put it). And then there is his new band. Just listen to Parker
and Muhammad Ali and how unbelievably tight they play (who says a free jazz
combo can’t swing?). With Cooper-Moore playing clusters and Taylor-like lines you
are hit by a storm of whiplashes and hailstones dropping on glass. They create
an immense wall of sound.
Not only is the band tight, they are also incredibly fast, almost
breathless in what they do. Cooper-Moore once said that you have to have heart
and stamina to play this music, you have to have the will to play it because
the music is hard, it is not easy. And William Parker added that this music was
a journey, you could not resist it, you had to allow it to flow through you.
You had to let it meld with what you don’t know so that it becomes another
entity. All of it is in Planetary Unknown’s sound: in one sequence they can be full,
rich, earthy, and warm but also boisterous, shrill, Ware is overblowing his sax
when he is shrieking in the high registers, they sound like angry 25-year-olds
when they combine pure outbursts of energy with instrumental mastership.
After 15 minutes Ware
takes a break, leaving space for the piano trio to excel, which proves that the
trio itself is a wonderful collective, they could be a marvelous group on their
own, although Ware is definitely the leader, the one who is focused, who drags
the others along - he is the captain of the ship. When the track literally
calms down, when it comes down to the bass accompanied by some spare chips of
piano and drums, it almost stops, stripped to the bone. Then Ware comes back
and gives orders for a new direction (in this case a sax trio). With Cooper-Moore
re-entering the wave builds up again and what Ware plays here is simply
incredible, he pulls out all the stops (for example in an awe-inspiring
circular breathing part which ends part one). Here the band is playing on a
level only to be compared with Cecil Taylor’s legendary Unit.
The pieces on this
album are called “Precessional 1 – 3”. Precessional
means “a comparatively slow gyration of
the rotation axis of a spinning body about another line intersecting it so as
to describe a cone”. If you replace “slow” by “high
speed” then this is what this album is about on the one hand. But on the other
hand it is (as every Ware album) about spirituality, about finding a spiritual
reality that exists out there in contrast to materiality. In times of a
financial crisis this album (and with it spirituality) has a political
dimension as well, it gives the world meaning. This can be heard in
“Precessional 3”, a dark blues of John-Coltrane-dimensions, mournful, proud, of
majestic beauty.
Ware says that spirituality is what you are and music is what you do. Just because
there is a lot of experience in this band their music can be 100 percent
intuitive, very refined, and spontaneous.
I really felt sad when Ware came to an end with his legendary quartet with Matthew Shipp, William Parker and Guillermo E. Brown. But – my god – he has replaced it with another supergroup.
© stef
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