Wilbur Ware

[paul secor]

Did a search and couldn't find a thread devoted to Wilbur Ware, so I thought I'd start one.

I'll start with some quick thoughts about his playing in the hope that others will add their thoughts/ideas/feelings about his music.

Whenever I listen to a record that Wilbur Ware plays on, I'm amazed/surprised by the complex simplicity of his playing.

There are a lot of records with great Wilbur Ware on them. One of my favorites is Johnny Griffin Sextet (Riverside/OJC) - enjoy his short duets with Griffin on "Woody'n You" and especially on "Catharsis".

From 1957 into early 1958, Wilbur Ware played on a slew of jazz record dates. Then it seems to have fallen apart.

If there were such a thing as a musical heartbeat, Wilbur Ware's playing might be it.

To my ears, and in my listening experience, Wilbur Ware's musical heir was Malachi Favors. I have no idea if they knew each other, or if Malachi Favors acknowleged Wilbur Ware as an influence. It just sounds that way to me.

[Chuck Nessa]

To my ears, and in my listening experience, Wilbur Ware's musical heir was Malachi Favors. I have no idea if they knew each other, or if Malachi Favors acknowleged Wilbur Ware as an influence. It just sounds that way to me.

The answers are yes and yes. Malachi also mentioned Israel Crosby.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I supose, one way or another, I have a fair few albums featuring Wilbur Ware. But the one that always makes me sit up is Grant Green's "Remembering" (aka "Standards"). That's one of the most beautiful albums in my collection and the connection between GG & WW is what makes it so.

MG

[mikeweil]

Monk's sides with Wilbur Ware are essential, although Ware left after some argument.

That huge rubbery sound is something I miss from today's bass players.

[Larry Kart]

There are a lot of records with great Wilbur Ware on them. One of my favorites is Johnny Griffin Sextet (Riverside/OJC) - enjoy his short duets with Griffin on "Woody'n You" and especially on "Catharsis".

Great Ware on that album, also on its Riverside/OJC prequel Johnny Griffin Quartet with the same rhythm section partners as on Sextet, Kenny Drew and Philly Joe. What a team! I think they recorded together only one other time, on Drew's Riverside (and I hope OJC) album of music from "Pal Joey." On the other hand, don't be fooled into getting the Drew-Ware OJC duo album, originally on Judson I think (a Riverside subsidiary), of tunes by Harry Warren and another composer (Harold Arlen?) Drew's playing on this one is not only quite "straight" but also almost Carmen Cavallaro-like in its flamboyant, cheesy stiffness (would like to know the story behind this date, because Drew, left to his own devices on ballads, could be at once fairly florid/romantic and damned interesting). As for Ware, he is both wholly underwraps here and virtually inaudible.

[Chuck Nessa]

What Larry said.

[AllenLowe]

personal story - in 1969 or 1970 I went to see Monk at the Vanguard and he had Wilbur Ware and Pat Patrick in the band - aside from the fact that Monk kept announcing "Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone," it was a good night musically. I was with a friend who knew Ware (I was only 15 or 16); I was very excited about maybe meeting him - he had a big, dark, sound and incredible musical charisma in person - between sets we're standing around and my friend says we'll talk to him - Ware walks over, and for about 30 minutes he just keeps asking my friend if he can borrow money from him - no other topic of conversation. It was a little strange.

oh well - I still have the music -

[Spontooneous]

I know a pianist who played with Ware in Chicago in the '50s. One day I tried to steer the conversation toward him: "How was he to work with?" I was shut down by the answer: "Strung out."

[Kalo]

Too bad about the junk, but the man's playing was deep.

I love Wilbur Ware, especially with Monk and Griffin.

[brownie]

Wilbur Ware exploded in my ears when I first listened to him on the Sonny Rollins at the Village Vanguard BN album.

Even wrote an article about him (and another bass newcomer Scott LaFaro) back in 1959 for the French review 'Jazz Magazine'.

[ValerieB]

personal story - in 1969 or 1970 I went to see Monk at the Vanguard and he had Wilbur Ware and Pat Patrick in the band - aside from the fact that Monk kept announcing "Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone," it was a good night musically. I was with a friend who knew Ware (I was only 15 or 16); I was very excited about maybe meeting him - he had a big, dark, sound and incredible musical charisma in person - between sets we're standing around and my friend says we'll talk to him - Ware walks over, and for about 30 minutes he just keeps asking my friend if he can borrow money from him - no other topic of conversation. It was a little strange.

oh well - I still have the music -

because i really don't have anything to contribute to this thread aside from knowing the talent this man had, i haven't posted, especially because my experience reflects what was posted above. i only "knew" him when he was in trouble. very sad. a daily struggle for him while possessing the "gift". an all t6o common story, especially in those days. for me it was meeting him and his wife in the '60s through elvin jones and keiko.

[JohnS]

A great bass player. Mulligan Meets Monk was probably my introduction. I never really warmed to his own Riverside album though. But looking at the lineup now it's probaly due for a reappraisal.

[paul secor]

On the other hand, don't be fooled into getting the Drew-Ware OJC duo album, originally on Judson I think (a Riverside subsidiary), of tunes by Harry Warren and another composer (Harold Arlen?) Drew's playing on this one is not only quite "straight" but also almost Carmen Cavallaro-like in its flamboyant, cheesy stiffness (would like to know the story behind this date, because Drew, left to his own devices on ballads, could be at once fairly florid/romantic and damned interesting). As for Ware, he is both wholly underwraps here and virtually inaudible.

Never heard that one, but I bought a Japanese Riverside reissue of Drew and Ware playing Jerome Kern tunes, and I remember it being much like your description of the Warren/Arlen recordings. I didn't keep the Kern record for long - sounded like something that might have been made for use as muzak. But why Drew and Ware? Very strange.

[paul secor]

The Steve Albin/Mike Fitzgerald Wilbur Ware discography: http://www.jazzdiscography.com/

[brownie]

On the other hand, don't be fooled into getting the Drew-Ware OJC duo album, originally on Judson I think (a Riverside subsidiary), of tunes by Harry Warren and another composer (Harold Arlen?) Drew's playing on this one is not only quite "straight" but also almost Carmen Cavallaro-like in its flamboyant, cheesy stiffness (would like to know the story behind this date, because Drew, left to his own devices on ballads, could be at once fairly florid/romantic and damned interesting). As for Ware, he is both wholly underwraps here and virtually inaudible.

Never heard that one, but I bought a Japanese Riverside reissue of Drew and Ware playing Jerome Kern tunes, and I remember it being much like your description of the Warren/Arlen recordings. I didn't keep the Kern record for long - sounded like something that might have been made for use as muzak. But why Drew and Ware? Very strange.

The two Drew/Ware albums on Judson were 'A Harry Warren Showcase' and 'A Harold Arlen Showcase'.

Judson was one of Riverside's subsidiary labels. It specialized in easy-to-listen music. Other albums on the label included 'Dance Time' (Chauncey Grey and his Orchestra play Gershwin, 'Dancing in the Dark' by Lenny Herman, 'An Evening with Offenbach', 'Chansons Populaires Françaises' by Françoise Prévost, 'Folk Music for People Who Hate Folk Music' by Herb Strauss, accompanied by Mundell Lowe and his Friends, etc...

Nice offbeat covers by Paul Weller/Paul Bacon.

Don't think these two Drew albums ever passed for strict jazz sessions.

[king ubu]

It took me quite a while to really dig Wilbur Ware... for a long time, I wondered what the fuss was about... but now I think I get it!

Thanks to this other thread I got the "Jenkins/Jordan/Timmons" album (with Ware & Dannie Richmond), and then somewhen in summer I finally picked up Ware's own Riverside album, as well as Johnny Griffin's "Sextet" and "Way Out" (part of my Fantasy/Concord panick acquisitions) and love all four of these albums right away! So it got time to revise my judgement of Ware... or rather just my perception of him had already changed, and I suddenly started to hear him.

He's great also on Rollin's Village Vanguard dates, with which I've been familiar for a loooong time (I think Vol. 1 of the old CDs was among the first 25 or 50 jazz CDs I had, in the mid 90s), but even there I just found Ware another good bass player (think: next to Chambers, Watkins, Mingus, Hinton, Marshall, Duvivier, Heath, and all the other great ones that were active around that time). Now if I hear him on "Softly As in a Morning Sunrise", it gives me the chills! (But it *is* hard to gain attention next to Rollins, who's simply stunning on all of that music!)

[king ubu]

Oh, and I do dimly remember some very enlightening thread about Ware... I first thought it might be the one about the Jenkins/Jordan/Timmons album, but that's not what I meant. I first thought it was a thread actually dedicated to Ware, but there seems to be none other that this new one. If anyone also remembers and has an idea how to find that older discussion, please do post a link to it here! It was that older discussion that together with the new CDs woke up interest for Ware again with me.

[AllenLowe]

I remember Bill Triglia telling me about a wedding he worked with Wilbur Ware, someplace in New Jersey in the 1960s - he said how amazing it was for someone in the rhythm section to be working with Ware - complete support and always musically brilliant - nice wedding band (and Triglia, by the way, has an amazing story about Bird sitting in with his band at a Jewish wedding - better than the Bird movie fiction) -

there's a very nice feature I heard Ware do recently, on a Matthew Gee CD, on Loverman (an OJC, I think) -

[Chuck Nessa]

The two Drew/Ware albums on Judson were 'A Harry Warren Showcase' and 'A Harold Arlen Showcase'.

This duo made a third album, I Love Jerome Kern, issued on Riverside.

[paul secor]

A friend of mine (a bassist) has played some gigs with Dick Johnson recently, and he asked him how it was to play with Wilbur Ware. According to my friend, Dick Johnson had nothing but praise for Wilbur Ware's playing.

Incidentally, the line up for that Dick Johnson Riverside session is somewhat unique: Johnson, Dave McKenna, Wilbur Ware, and Philly Joe Jones - though Johnson's playing is more bop influenced than the little what I've heard of his more recent playing. If I had heard "Lee-antics" from that Riverside session on a blindfold test instead of knowing what I was listening to, I'm sure I would have thought I was listening to some early Lee Konitz.

[Peter Friedman]

On the other hand, don't be fooled into getting the Drew-Ware OJC duo album, originally on Judson I think (a Riverside subsidiary), of tunes by Harry Warren and another composer (Harold Arlen?) Drew's playing on this one is not only quite "straight" but also almost Carmen Cavallaro-like in its flamboyant, cheesy stiffness (would like to know the story behind this date, because Drew, left to his own devices on ballads, could be at once fairly florid/romantic and damned interesting). As for Ware, he is both wholly underwraps here and virtually inaudible.

Never heard that one, but I bought a Japanese Riverside reissue of Drew and Ware playing Jerome Kern tunes, and I remember it being much like your description of the Warren/Arlen recordings. I didn't keep the Kern record for long - sounded like something that might have been made for use as muzak. But why Drew and Ware? Very strange.

The two Drew/Ware albums on Judson were 'A Harry Warren Showcase' and 'A Harold Arlen Showcase'.

Judson was one of Riverside's subsidiary labels. It specialized in easy-to-listen music. Other albums on the label included 'Dance Time' (Chauncey Grey and his Orchestra play Gershwin, 'Dancing in the Dark' by Lenny Herman, 'An Evening with Offenbach', 'Chansons Populaires Françaises' by Françoise Prévost, 'Folk Music for People Who Hate Folk Music' by Herb Strauss, accompanied by Mundell Lowe and his Friends, etc...

Nice offbeat covers by Paul Weller/Paul Bacon.

Don't think these two Drew albums ever passed for strict jazz sessions.

I had one of these on LP decades ago and didn't care for it so sold it.

More recently I tried another one in that series on CD. I should have learned my lesson, but took a chance as Drew and Ware are such good players. Disliked it and sold that one too. Think I have finally learned to pass these by.

Edited December 10, 2007 by Peter Friedman

[Larry Kart]

Don't think these two Drew albums ever passed for strict jazz sessions.

No, they didn't, but they're certainly weird in the sense that Drew doesn't, as one might expect for such an overtly Muzak-like date, merely damp down his normal approach to playing ballads -- which again could be quite floridly romantic though also very interesting/creative, a la Bud Powell's typical approach to ballads, in fact. Instead of doing that, which I'm sure would have filled the bill (such as it was) just as well as what he did end up doing, Drew IIRC adopts a wholly different approach that's so stiff and cheesy (like what you'd find in a circa 1932 ballroom) that it almost could be taken as parodistic, except that I'm pretty sure it's not. Was this Drew's idea or Orin Keepnews' or Bill Grauer's? (As I recall, Keepnews was the producer on one of these sessions and Grauer on the other.) Perhaps Chris Albertson would know. And if it was the producer's idea, how was it communicated to Drew? "No -- Kenny we don't want soft and pretty; we want total white-bread-and-mayonnaise-with-a-sprinkle-of-pearls-and-dog-crap-on-top stupid. Can you do that?"

[brownie]

Was this Drew's idea or Orin Keepnews' or Bill Grauer's? (As I recall, Keepnews was the producer on one of these sessions and Grauer on the other.) Perhaps Chris Albertson would know.

Bill Grauer produced 'A Harold Arlen Showcase'. Keepnews produced the Harry Warren, and also the Jerome Kern that Chuck mentioned.

The Kern is in a similar vein but it came out on Riverside. Was it recorded first with the other two getting released (earlier or later) on a parallel label?

[Elissa]

Tangentially Ware: Once I was talking to Leroy Williams, Barry Harris' drummer, who told me that one night when Monk was at the Vanguard, Wilbur Ware called him. Ware says: Monk needs a drummer. Leroy, still new to NY at that point I think, he shows up early. Well, Monk shows up late and says one thing to Leroy before they hit: "You start out swinging, you end up swinging. Take a solo and play anything you want."

I love that.

[AllenLowe]

good story - how is Leroy these days?