Customer Reviews

Freedom Suite

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Remaking a classic disc is always a dicey prospect. Inevitably the project has the aura of a tribute album and comparisons to the original flow naturally and are usually not terribly flattering. It is particularly difficult to attempt such a project when the subject of the project is a figure of the monumental stature of Sonny Rollins and the work you are redoing is one of the most impressive and ambitious of the tenorman's works of the 50s. That David S. Ware has managed to turn in an individual performance with this material would be astounding enough. That he has created a disc that lives on its own, without needing the references to the Rollins disc is a major achievement.

Rollins' original Freedom Suite was released in 1958, at the height of the saxophonist's most creative period. The album was one of Rollins' first studio trio albums, and conspicuous for it's lack of a harmonic instrument. The way from the original Freedom Suite to the work of Ornette Coleman in the 60s was just a short jump indeed. Ware has taken the compositions from the first and most ambitious cut on the album and arranged them for his quartet, one of the finest working ensembles in free jazz today. The Rollins' heads are rethought, playing up their similarity to the compositions of Ornette Coleman and other great jazz composers of the 60s. Shipp is given material that compliments the original compositions while keeping the harmonic structure open. He is back to his best style of playing, highly intellectual and "constructivist" blocks of sound. It is a welcome return from his ill advised dabbles with electronica. Parker of course is a wonder...as always. There is no finer bass player working today. His tone is as substantial as a redwood an his musical energy fairly pulses through the speakers. The grooves that he locks down with Guillermo Brown are infectious. Brown is uniformly good, though has never to my ear reached the heights of inventiveness that Susie Ibbara brought to the group

Ware is amazing on this album. It is the complete return to form from the post-Ayler wonder that was hinted at on Corridors and Parallels and a much fiercer performance than his work on the Sony albums. Ware's tenor is gigantic in sound. He has a sharp edged tone that own not a little to Sonny Rollins, but his approach to improvising is closer to late Coltrane and Ayler. He seems to live somewhere in between the conventional western tempered scale and the pure sound of Ayler. It's a fascinating and very individual approach to the instrument and the results are always arresting and often reach the transcendent. Soon into the work you forget the references to the Rollins original and accept the album on its own terms.

The only down side of this recording is the length. Ware, Shipp and others of their circle have moved to shorter albums in recent years. I'm not sure if this is conscious or unconscious, but this album clocks in at just less than 40 minutes. This is probably understandable, given the nature of the project, which is tightly focused around the Rollins composition, yet it is noticeably short and of course, the price is not reduced accordingly. This to me is a small quibble. The music on the disc more than makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity. But the trend should be noted and probably arrested if possible. Continued short album times will do very little to build the kind of audience that Ware and his group deserve.

I know nothing of the original, and bought this only because I read several good reviews and my local record store had it. The first few minutes I thought oh no, what have I bought, more screeching noise. But into part two it really came together; this is on the first listen. Now that I know the piece well, even the "screeching" in the first part are just fine; very powerful sounds indeed. And the piece as a whole is extremely satisfying. I'm probably not the only one who is compelled to compare this against A Love Supreme. I actually enjoy this every bit as much. Folks say there was no piano in the original, which is hard for me to imagine. The piano is fabulous and adds so much. This whole work from beginning to end remains a huge treat for me every time I hear it.

Covering standards is standard operating procedure in jazz circles. Covering entire albums, on the other hand, is a conceptual feat attempted by very few. Re-interpreting an entire suite though, doubling it in length and adding additional instrumentation to it, all the while holding true to the spirit of the original is yet rarer still. But this is exactly what saxophonist David S. Ware and his powerhouse quartet have pulled off with their re-imagining of Sonny Rollins' seminal Freedom Suite.

Rollins' 1958 suite was originally broken into four sections and played by a stripped down trio of sax, bass and drums. Ware has inserted free improvisational segues between these sections and augmented the classic trio lineup with pianist Matthew Shipp. It is a brave and interesting move. Anyone aware of Ware's background knows that Rollins took him under his wing when he was young and was one of his earliest and most influential teachers. This album can be interpreted as Ware's way of coming full circle with his influences.

The David S. Ware quartet has been regarded as one of the most fearsome and unbridled free-jazz working groups to come around in the past dozen years or so. But Ware has always had a place for the classic jazz tradition in his music. It's when he melds those traditions that his approach seems most radical, and so it is with this album. Here Rollins' structures are used merely as jumping off points for the quartet's more spirited and unfettered excursions. Working off Rollins' solid melodic structure gives Wares' recording a more accessible sound often unheard on his albums.

Where previous recordings of the David S. Ware Quartet have been more singularly focused on the tumultuous sounds of '60s free jazz best exemplified by the classic works of late-period Coltrane and Ayler, this album finds the quartet at cross roads. To say that Ware's interpretation of Rollins' masterwork is an improvement on the original would be outright jazz blasphemy. But to say that it is one of David S. Ware's best and most accessible albums is neither hype nor hyperbole.

Because it has been weighing so heavily on my mind (and is the reason I'm writing this review now), in the "comment" section below this review I am going to cut-and-paste the information regarding David's kidney situation and needs, in hope that maybe we his fans can do this for him.

I have a love/hate affair with Sonny Rollins. Sometimes I love him and sometimes he's too light and bright for me. Such has always been the case for me and The Freedom Suite. As longform jazz compositions go (even just ones from the "classic era" of jazz), it has never been my favorite. I like it but I don't think it's The Complete Machine Gun Sessions or Meditations. Still, I knew I'd have to hear the DSWQ's take on it.

The band does not disappoint. The band being the edition with Guillermo E. Brown on drums. They fully make it their own yet it always feels respectful of the original.

I had a few years about a decade+ ago where Matthew Shipp was my favorite pianist. Then things leveled out and I even stepped away from him for quite a while after being severely disappointed with a few releases under his own name. In some ways, he has never fully recovered from that, in my mind. With that, many of you probably have more (and more recent) of his own albums than do I, so this may mean less in the big picture than if I had more of them, but wow! Shipp's playing here is some of his best I've ever heard. In many ways, he makes this album. Shipp has a symphonic sweep and build to his playing. It feels grand. It feels large and rolling. Many pianists are mostly about single notes directly tied to the changes. When Shipp is at his best, there seems to be a grand architecture at work. He doesn't seem to be playing to the Now Moment so much as he's building and anticipating a sonic vision that arcs towards the next moment. He anticipates the future of the group mind.

If you have Live in the World then you have a live Freedom Suite. I can't rate this as highly as one of my all-time favorites, Corn Meal Dance, but for my ears and money, you still need this one. The Freedom Suite disc is the worst sounding (in terms of sonic/recording quality) disc of that set. This is much better and completely worth the time of any David S. Ware fan, as it is his vison that brought this to light.

David S. Ware's "Freedom Suite" magnificantly rehashes the Sonny Rollins song. Ware has Matthew Shipp on piano, William Parker on bass, and Guillermo E. Brown on drums. Since this was my first Ware CD, I wasn't sure what it would sound like. It's surprisingly catchy, and Shipp's off-center piano adds a dimension that didn't exist on Rollin's original trio recording. There's still a lot of saxophone (Parker and Brown are low in the mix, so Ware and Shipp dominate), and Ware is up to the challenge. I don't think this disc is much freer than the original, so it should appeal to most jazz fans. At a concise 39:25 length, Ware wisely chose to put out a very good shorter disc, rather than fill it up to 60-70 minutes with padding. I recommend it to modern jazz fans.