Quartet for the End of Time (Page 3)

There's some older material here--"Elder's Path" from Passage to Music, "Co Co Cana" from the mid-1990s--but Ware's approach has become more open and loose-limbed, his sound less clotted, particularly in the quartet's joyful rendition of Sonny Rollins's classic 1958 "Freedom Suite." In a nearly twenty-minute performance of "The Way We Were," the band transforms the song made famous by Barbra Streisand into a thing of brooding, turbulent majesty. Throughout the record, Ware and his bandmates call on a shared pool of ideas and structures. Shipp is a masterful accompanist, offering the kind of harmonic sophistication McCoy Tyner brought to the Coltrane quartet, but also something of Cecil Taylor's rhythmic dissonance. In recent years, Shipp has flirted with electronic keyboards, but the miracle of his approach is that he is able to create the same ambiguous tonality and multilayered sound on a conventional (and sometimes, as on one of these dates, a not very responsive) piano. He bends and splits the harmonies in exactly the way that percussionists multiply their rhythms. He and bassist William Parker put in especially strong solos on the second and third parts of "Freedom Suite," but it's their ensemble work that's most impressive.

The same applies to Ware himself. One of the more obvious differences between the 1998 material and the Italian concerts five years later is how even and contained his articulation has become, how fluidly it meshes with the rhythm section. There's no less fury, but his lines have become much less abstract, and he seems more interested in playing with his band than in towering above it by the sheer force of his horn. Like a number of critics, I cynically assumed that the more "inside" approach on Ware's disappointing Surrendered, his last record for Columbia, reflected the wishes of the label. Judging by these performances, he was moving in that direction entirely on his own--and without compromising his art in the least.

Live in the World is a valuable document from a musician who is now in his mid-50s but still too often treated like an up-and-coming talent. Lord Ganesh seems exactly the right tutelary deity for the record and for the career as a whole. The son of Shiva and Parvati, he is the god of success, knowledge and education, the sweeper away of evils and obstacles. The broken tusk he carries in his right hand is the instrument he used to inscribe the Mahabharata, a damaged symbol of sacrifice. He rides on the back of a mouse, a surreal and anomalous image but a reminder of the elephant god's basic humility and his unexpected lightness.

Like the elephant and his trunk--depicted as a saxophone on the cover of Live in the World--the man and his horn now seem indivisible. Ware's music breaks down the artificial obstacles that still separate "avant-garde" jazz from the mainstream. He can journey for many illuminating minutes on a pop theme as common as a mouse. And in the course of a career that has involved considerable sacrifice and humility, he has created a body of work that is--uniquely on the current scene--epic. His work doesn't just fulfill the mission his mother bequeathed him but extends it: not just to see the world, but to live in it, fully and intensely, aware that it's not the only reality, simply the most immediately pressing one.

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