The Vanishing Afro-American

David S. Ware could be the last of a vanishing breed—those imposing tenor giants who once bestrode (a la Sonny Rollins’s “Strode Rode” and namesake Woody Strode in Once Upon a Time in the West) the earth as saxophone colossi. He’s distilled the unreserved, pathfinding stratagems of Rol­lins, the mystic envelope-pushing of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, the sputtering guttural rasp of Archie Shepp and the sensual one of early Gato Barbieri, into a pulsing wall of circular-breathing incantation. Ware’s enormous, keening tone and jaggedly breathtaking blocks of song and fury suggest an aural equivalent to Monu­ment Valley rock formations—or a black John Wayne galloping through them with the obsessive, im­passive swagger of a dinosaur on the trail of some ­equally primordial Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Ware’s dense, quavering lines and honking phrases loom over abstract harmonic landscapes like a force of mythological nature: an overblowing Minotaur or maybe a MIRV griffon (half warhead, half lion) performing a tumultuous reconciliation of intelligent design and chaos theory, roaring thoughtfully against the twilight. Which is a hyperbolic way of describing his romance with sound in its purest, most naked form. But the secret of his art (or at least a good chunk of it) has to do with the way he unrepentantly sculpts and finesses the hyperbolic qualities of free jazz itself, the over-the-top, out-of-their-heads, squall-and-scrawl qualities that can otherwise result in one interminable, unmodulated freak-out after another.

Thus “Acclimation” on Ware’s 1997 album Wisdom of Uncertainty opens with him sinking his chops into a wonderfully declamatory head, an R&B riff that’s been twisted into an almost classical shape, giving it a subtly misshapen grandeur. He proceeds to launch into a series of jolting yet deeply controlled variations on the theme, on the tenor saxophone’s timbre, and on what you might call the time-space discontinuum. Ware seems suspended inside a tight penumbra of dramatic effects—crashing nineteenth-century piano chords, sweeping drumrolls, low bass plunks—and manages to carve out a poised, meditative area inside all the commotion: a “Rapturelodic” tact and/or attack, to borrow the title of a lesser composition.

Pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker have been with him for about twenty years; only the drummers in his quartet have changed (my favorite has been Susie Ibarra, a pint-sized Cézanne of the skins). So there’s a tremendous sense of continuity, focus, and hard-won refinement to his music. Outside of a brief period in the ’70s as a sideman in Cecil Taylor’s unit (which can be instructively sampled on the clamorous, near-impenetrable Dark to Themselves) and a few scarce guest shots, he has devoted himself strictly to his own music. There’s an almost monastic ceremonial quality supporting his great...