This "Insider" piece ran in this month's Downbeat.
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What About Ware?
The recent discovery and release of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane's At Carnegie Hall was accompanied by sustained applause in the jazz press, including essays by five important critics in the CD booklet itself. It is a great record: Coltrane and Monk are thrilling and it has the most aggressive Shadow Wilson on tape. Ahmed Abdul-Malik is solid, but stays firmly in the background.
Not all bass players who played with Monk stayed in the background. The most radical Monk bass player was Wilbur Ware, who was with Monk for much of ’57 including a month in the quartet with Coltrane and Wilson. This band recorded three tunes in the studio: “Trinkle Tinkle,” “Ruby My Dear,” and “Nutty.” A comparison of the studio “Nutty” with the live “Nutty” at Carnegie Hall is revealing: Abdul-Malik is fine, but Ware is immortal. The dots are connected faster, the sonority is darker, and the swing is harder with Ware. “Trinkle Tinkle” from the studio date is even better than “Nutty.”
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Like his musical forebear Israel Crosby, Wilbur Ware was from Chicago, where he was born in 1923. Orrin Keepnews’ liner notes to Ware’s own album The Chicago Sound provides an interesting history of Ware’s youth playing homemade basses in churches. (Keepnews produced all of Ware’s recordings on Riverside, and graciously consented to be interviewed for this article.) From ’56 to ‘58 Ware’s discography is extensive, but then he vanished from the scene, reappearing for a few dates in ’61, some obscure recordings in ‘69-’71, and passing away in ’79 of emphysema.
Ware played simply, strongly, and melodically, with a big, percussive sound. His recordings vary in quality; the discography by Michael Fitzgerald at www.jazzdiscography.com is helpful. Regrettably, Ware’s own album is disappointing, and many of the albums he made as a sideman are most interesting when he solos, like his two jaw-dropping blues choruses on “Johnny G.G.” from Johnny Griffin’s Sextet.
The most important Wilbur Ware records are three dates with Monk and the Sonny Rollins Village Vanguard set. The best sides with Monk are the three perfect quartet tracks with Coltrane and Wilson mentioned earlier, followed by the uneven all-star Monk’s Music date (great Wareian harmonic insight on “Well You Needn’t"). It is too bad that there is not more Monk and Ware on record together, since they both preferred clarity to ornamentation and felt the beat in a similar way. The last Monk/Ware recording was the so-so Gerry Mulligan collaboration Monk Meets Mulligan. The same night after the Mulligan session, Ware went down to the Five Spot, put down his bass, said he was going out for a sandwich, and failed to reappear. At 11 P.M. Abdul-Malik was hired as an emergency replacement.
Monk didn’t give up on Ware. Two more Monk/Ware record dates were attempted (one song is on Thelonious Monk: The Complete Riverside Recordings and the Clark Terry In Orbit disc was supposed to be Ware), but by mid-‘58 Ware had become too unreliable for supporters like Monk, Griffin, and Keepnews. He was not the only musician in his set to fall victim to the heroin-heavy lifestyle. As Leroy Jones/Amiri Baraka said in Black Music, “Ware had dues to pay that were just too strong.”
Ware’s greatest recordings are with Sonny Rollins and Elvin Jones at the Village Vanguard. At least two of the Vanguard performances, the blues “Sonnymoon For Two” and the standard "Softly As In a Morning Sunrise," are among the finest jazz performances ever recorded. The bass intro on “Softly” is natural avant-gardism, and the way Ware plays the head of “Sonnymoon” goes straight into Jimmy Garrison and Charlie Haden. Garrison, Ron Carter, and Haden - the bass players in the most important groups of the 60’s - all owe something to Ware. Garrison took the folklore and the independence. Carter comes mostly from P.C., but his clearly stated harmonic substitutions are Wareian. Haden owes the most, with melodic solos and diatonic walking lines with many repeated notes.
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As inspiring as this legacy is, the best Wilbur Ware was never recorded. In a 1958 interview with August Blume, Coltrane said:
"A bass player like Wilbur Ware, he’s so inventive, man…he plays things that are kind of - they’re 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 or something.”
What Coltrane is describing is nowhere on tape that I have heard. I’m sure it happened though, at the Five Spot with Monk, Trane, Ware, and Wilson, and that the experience taught Coltrane the bandleader to find a bassist (namely Jimmy Garrison) who would be an independent voice in the ensemble, just like Ware always was.
In all that was written recently about At Carnegie Hall, there were barely any mentions of Ware. Of course Abdul-Malik is on the record, but that record would be better if Ware had been present instead. Ware still seems to be paying those heavy dues.
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Coda:
After Ware, the bassists best to hear with Monk are Oscar Pettiford (Plays Duke Ellington, The Unique Thelonious Monk), Percy Heath (trios on Prestige, the four songs with Gigi Gryce and Art Blakey), and the underrated Butch Warren (the working quartet with Charlie Rouse and Frankie Dunlop is well documented).
To a civilian, it may seem absurd to fuss about these details - after all, Monk made hundreds of records, and almost all of his bass players do the job pretty well - but I assure you, jazz musicians actually discuss issues like "who were the best bassists for Monk?"
