He was mostly unheralded outside of the jazz world but was a true giant of music. David Ware dies David S. Ware, a powerful and contemplative jazz saxophonist whose career began in the early 1970s but who did not make a significant name for himself until 20 years later when he helped lead a resurgence of free jazz in New York, died on Thursday in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 62.
The cause was complications of a kidney transplant in 2009, said Steven Joerg, Mr. Ware’s manager and record producer. The musical world in which Mr. Ware traveled has few breakout stars, but he was one. In 1995 a review of his album “Cryptology” received the lead slot in Rolling Stone, which rarely reviews jazz albums. In 2001, after the release of his album “Corridors & Parallels,” Gary Giddins of The Village Voice called Mr. Ware’s quartet “the best small band in jazz today.”
Mr. Ware was a large man with a big sound. Among his influences were the breadth of tone Sonny Rollins could invest in a single note and the ferocity John Coltrane could put into a hundred of them. He wrote his own music, performed some jazz and pop standards (“Yesterdays,” “Angel Eyes,” even “The Way We Were”) and sometimes improvised within standard harmony. But for the most part he played less conventionally, planning his strategies and diving in deeply.
“I’m not interested in chord changes,” he said in a recent interview for a short film produced by the David Lynch Foundation. “I don’t need that. I work on concepts.”..
