TT 298: Wilbur Ware Centennial
Dark Avant Folk Melody in the Bass
(Wilbur Ware was born one hundred years ago, September 8, 1923.)
There’s no one way to play the blues. At the bass, the great Ray Brown exemplifies a virtuosic, professional, funky approach. Few bassists would want to challenge Ray Brown to a blues showdown in G.
Perhaps Wilbur Ware stands in opposition to the Ray Brown lineage. Ware was non-virtuosic and non-professional. While Ware was funky, he wasn’t urban funky. His soulful thing seems older and even primitive, more of a “gather around a campfire at the edge of the forest” kind of funky. Ware was not laid-back and knowing. Ware was urgent, a clap right on the beat, a yodel at the moon.
In the ‘50s the bass took great strides in terms of being heard within the ensemble. The Sonny Rollins trio sessions at the Village Vanguard with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones in 1957 were decisive. In addition to being some of the best Rollins on record, this may have been the first time that that bass had so much influence on the sound of the music throughout the duration of a whole record. “Softly In a Morning Sunrise” is definitive.
Part of Ware’s gift was his sense of melody. Previous bass geniuses like Jimmy Blanton and Oscar Pettiford were also melodic, but their conception was inevitably influenced by pianists and horn players. Ware was less inspired by the fancy pianists and the bebop horn players. Ware stayed with percussive folk melodies on the bass.
It was a marvelous contrast to many brilliant players of the era. A perfect example is “Johnny G.G.” from Johnny Griffin Sextet. The all-stars (Griffin, Donald Byrd, Pepper Adams, Kenny Drew, Philly Joe Jones) bring their iron-clad bebop blues confidence to the table. But after all that, the bass solo has something else, something that makes the music far more folkloric. (Bass solo starts 7 minutes in.)
Thelonious Monk and Wilbur Ware were perfect for each other. Few other musicians are as recognizable in a single note. Unfortunately, there is not enough of them together on records made in ideal conditions. The best track might be “Trinkle Tinkle” from by a famous quartet with John Coltrane and Shadow Wilson.
Ware is one of the few musicians Coltrane commented on directly in technical terms. In conversation with August Blume:
Coltrane: Yeah, the bass player—I count on him, you know.
Blume: What does he actually do? Like when Wilbur would be playing bass, would he play like the dominant note in each chord? I don’t know how you phrase it.
Coltrane: Well, at times. But a bass player like Wilbur Ware, he’s so inventive, man, you know he doesn’t always play the dominant notes.
Blume: But whatever he plays, it sort of suggests notes that gives you an idea of which way the changes are going?
Coltrane: Yeah, it may be—and it might not be. Because Wilbur, he plays the other way sometimes. He plays things that are foreign. If you didn’t know the song, you wouldn’t be able to find it. Because he’s superimposing things. He’s playing around, and under, and over—building tension, so when he comes back to it you feel everything sets in. But usually I know the tunes—I know the changes anyway. So we manage to come out at the end together anyway.
Blume: Which always helps! (Both laugh.)
Coltrane: Yeah, we manage to finish on time. A lot of fun playing that way though.
I’ve heard a lot of Wilbur Ware but I haven’t heard too much where Ware is “superimposing things” in a manner that Coltrane suggests. Ware’s substitutions on record are usually well within the Tadd Dameron lineage of deceptive II/Vs, commonly tritones. (While I don’t have any proof, I suspect it was Ware’s choice — not Thelonious Monk’s choice — to make the fourth bar of “Well You Needn’t” E-flat instead of G-flat.) However, Ware undoubtedly went further afield in live situations, and when finalizing the personnel for his classic quartet, Coltrane decided on Jimmy Garrison, a “searching” bassist in the Ware lineage.
One thing that connects Monk and Ware is how they are both obviously avant-garde. Johnny Griffin and Kenny Drew are not avant-garde. They are totally awesome but their music is perfectly in place. Monk and Ware are avatars, returning from their journey with aviator goggles, ready to hand off a map of potential destinations to the next generation.
Photo of Monk, Ware and Shadow Wilson by Bob Parent:
Ware was influential. Jimmy Garrison is name-checked just above; probably most other bassists of note also listened to the singular Wilbur Ware.
The person who really took the Wilbur Ware concept and made it work everywhere with anybody for over 50 years was Charlie Haden. Haden loved Ware, carried his bag in person, and made that dark avant folk melody aesthetic his own.
(I knew Charlie a bit, and he told me the kind of story I rarely recount in print, but cannot resist in this case. Charlie went up to meet Wilbur Ware in Harlem to cop heroin. After they got high, they got on the subway together to meet friends at Sheridan Square in the West Village for the evening hang. When they woke up, they were at the end of the train line down at Coney Island. “Oh, dang, we are going to be late, fortunately another train is coming right now to go back to Manhattan.” When they woke up, they were at the end of the line up in the Bronx.)
Charlie Haden came to prominence with Ornette Coleman and the Ornette circle including Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, and Ed Blackwell. Wilbur Ware was also a part of that scene, at least tangentially. Amiri Baraka gives Ware a lot of space in his landmark collection Black Music. One chapter concerns the coffee-shop and loft scene 1963; Ware is almost omnipresent.
I’ve always wistfully wondered what Ware in trio with Don Cherry and Billy Higgins would have sounded like. Tellingly, the thought of other favorite ‘50’s era bassists like Paul Chambers or Percy Heath being in that trio doesn’t make my heart race in quite the same way. From that era, I’m really only interested in Ware meeting the Ornette circle. There’s no doubt in my mind that Ware could have played this gig in the exalted manner that Baraka describes.
It’s also true we have a lot of Charlie Haden with Cherry and Higgins on record. Indeed, there’s a clear argument that the teacher is subbing for the student in that 1963 Cherry/Higgins trio. At any rate, the right bassist (Haden) ended up making most of the Ornette circle gigs, so we can’t be displeased about that.
A decade ago a long-lost session of Ware, Cherry, Clifford Jordan, and Ed Blackwell was released by Gloria Ware. On “Wilbur’s Red Cross” Don Cherry lights up rhythm changes in C with Ware and Blackwell in swinging support. This is probably the closest we will have of Ware “taking on Haden’s role” in an Ornette-ish context.
Cherry’s solo is incredible and incredibly free; he’s playing something that seems tuned in to the greater rhythms of the universe yet still somehow inside the rhythm changes form. Ware’s grounded strut underneath fills the space perfectly.
Bonus tracks:
An extremely valuable 2002 dissertation by Karl Erik Haddock Seigfried, “AT ONCE OLD-TIMEY AND AVANT-GARDE”: THE INNOVATION AND INFLUENCE OF WILBUR WARE can be read online.
I’m posting twice today, once for the passing of Richard Davis, once for the centennial of Wilbur Ware. In one way they seem to be antipodes, for Davis was abstract while Ware was grounded. However, they are both also striking alternatives to the common practice “professional blues” of a Ray Brown, and in that sense are easily bracketed together. I love jazz.
To me, if Wilbur Ware played on it, it’s a Wilbur Ware record.