Ware / Cooper-Moore / Parker/ Ali

Planetary Unknown

Label: Aum Fidelity Country: USA

"Planetary Unknown documents an epic occurrence and its commercial release is itself the same. Major circles arc together and synchronize anew here. Mighty majestic, mackadocious! David S. Ware and company raise the bar on artistic heights, in all disciplines, world-wide, once again. In late November 2010, four men arrived at Brooklyn's Systems Two Studio to record an album. The web of musical, personal and spiritual connections that brought them together at that particular time and place is a modern jazz parable. Ware and Cooper-Moore shared formative years in Boston, where they talked and played music all day, until in 1973 the pull of New York's jazz scene called them home. Cooper-Moore, Ware and William Parker were heavyweights of the Downtown loft scene, playing spaces like Ali's Alley and Studio Rivbea, experiences that equipped Ware and Parker for the extended periods each would spend within the Cecil Taylor Unit, and for their eighteen years of artistic refinement and growth inside the David S. Ware Quartet. Muhammad Ali, an early loft regular and drummer on Albert Ayler's Music Is The Healing Force of the Universe and Alan Shorter's Orgasm, had already relocated to Paris with Frank Wright, when, in 1976, Cecil Taylor's Unit came to town. Ware met Ali on that visit, and both men made a mental note that one day they must play together. Ali's presence here is a direct blood-link back to the birth of free music in America ? it was his brother, the late and much-missed Rashied Ali, who replaced Elvin Jones in the John Coltrane Quartet and with whom Coltrane recorded Interstellar Space, his catalytic 1967 album of saxophone/percussion duos, a fraternal inheritance respectfully acknowledged here in Ware and Ali's duo 'Duality Is One'. Imagine the scene as all those shared histories came together inside that Brooklyn studio space. 'Muhammad was already playing when I walked into the studio,' Ware recalls. 'I heard him live for the first time at that moment and thought, man, he is carrying the whole history of jazz drums in his playing.' 'The last 100 years of jazz, there was our rehearsal [for this record]' Ware explains. Let's get it on record now that this music is created as a way of learning about the future."