By NATE CHINEN - Published: January 8, 2013
At one point during the memorial service for David S. Ware, at St. Peter’s Church in Midtown Manhattan on Monday night, a slide show provided a visual record of his commanding presence. It opened with a black-and-white snapshot from when he was 5, sometime in 1955, and ran chronologically up to his final performances, in 2011. Most images showed him with a saxophone, either at the ready or held aloft, in midcry. In almost all of them he looked intensely self-possessed, exuding gravity even in repose.
With Mr. Ware, who died of an aggressive blood infection on Oct. 18at the age of 62, there was sound and there was spirit: both inviolable, each inextricable from the other. A musician of great physical force and deep, ruminative intention, he was a larger-than-life hero in avant-garde jazz, a living lodestar.
The memorial — organized by his manager and producer, Steven Joerg, and his widow, Setsuko S. Ware — was a bittersweet confirmation of his legacy, in words and images but especially in music. Inevitably, it felt like a satellite distillation of the Vision Festival, an annual gathering built around the aesthetic that Mr. Ware championed and the artistic circle (and core audience) that he helped galvanize.
Free improvisation, strenuous and illuminated, plays a crucial role in that aesthetic, and so it did here. What immediately followed the slide show was a duet consisting of the drummer Muhammad Ali, who played with Mr. Ware in recent years, and the alto saxophonist Darius Jones, who studied his example. They began prayerfully and built to a superheated trance, Mr. Jones rushing columns of air through his horn.
Another spontaneous invention featured Daniel Carter on alto saxophone and piano; Joe Morris on bass; and Andrew Cyrille, a former employer of Mr. Ware’s, on drums. They aligned themselves as a triangle, tilting in toward one another, as if to uphold the act of listening as an athletic feat. Mr. Cyrille kicked up a cyclonic stir with his cymbals and drums, while the others ranged widely and feverishly. The homestretch of their 10-minute set landed on a simple rhythmic displacement, and they attacked it with relish.
Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/arts/music/memorial-service-for-david-s-ware-jazz-saxophonist.html?_r=0
0 Comments:
Post a Comment