David S. Ware’s Final Interview, and the Catalog AUM Fidelity Kept in Print

David S. Ware gave one of his last interviews in early 2012. Arranging it took patience: word came back through his press agent that he needed rest, and the conversation waited until he felt better. At the time the delay looked routine. Ware had dealt with health problems for most of his life, and a kidney transplant in 2009, after a decade on dialysis, suggested the worst was behind him. He died that October, and the exchange has only now been published in English.

Ware was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in November 1949, the year that gave him his middle name, Spencer, after his grandfather. Drums were his first attraction. “Rhythm is part of life,” he said, describing the pull toward expressing it, while noting the same rhythms could be carried by other instruments. He ended up carrying them on tenor saxophone. He grew up in Scotch Plains, spent three semesters at Berklee, and found the school poorly suited to the musicians who interested him. By seventeen, he said, he already knew the kind of player he wanted to be; Berklee mostly clarified what he did not want to do. Trips into New York taught him more, helped along by a teenage friendship with Sonny Rollins, struck up through a mutual acquaintance.

By the mid-1980s Ware belonged to the core of New York’s free jazz resurgence, a group that included Charles Gayle, William Parker and William Hooker. AUM Fidelity, his longtime label, has kept the catalog alive since, through live recordings and reissues.