David S. Ware had one of the biggest tenor sounds in jazz history, and I mean that literally — the man could fill a room without a microphone. He came up in Cecil Taylor's unit in the mid-70s, which tells you a lot about his tolerance for density and chaos, but Ware wasn't a chaos guy at heart. He wanted structure underneath the fire. So when he put together his own quartet in the late 1980s with Matthew Shipp on piano and William Parker on bass, you got something rare in free jazz: a band that actually sounded like a band, not four soloists sharing a stage.

The quartet is really the whole story with Ware. Albums like Flight of i (1992) and Third Ear Recitation (1993) show a group that could go from a whisper to a scream and back without losing the thread. Shipp's piano was percussive and angular, Parker's bass was a motor that never quit, and whoever was on drums — Marc Edwards early on, later Whit Dickey, then Guillermo E. Brown — had to be strong enough to hold down that much low end and that much saxophone at once. Ware's horn sat on top of all of it like a foghorn, and somehow it never got buried.

Columbia Records signed the quartet in the late 90s, which still seems like a strange decision looking back — a free jazz band on a major label distributing Mariah Carey. Go See the World (1998) came out of that deal, and it's a good entry point if you want to hear Ware's sound without diving straight into the deep end. A few years later they recorded Freedom Suite (2002), a tribute to Sonny Rollins, which makes sense once you know Ware idolized Rollins and Albert Ayler in roughly equal measure — the discipline of one, the raw spiritual howl of the other.

He wasn't a prolific interview subject or a self-mythologizer. He just played, got sick with kidney disease in the 2000s, got a transplant in 2009, and kept playing until he couldn't anymore. He died in 2012. If you want to understand why musicians who worked with him talk about him with real reverence, skip the biography and just put on one of the quartet records loud. The sound does the explaining.