Listen to one of the great jazz quartets from the CD era.

The 1990s will never be known as a decade of great jazz. An era in which Wynton Marsalis dominated the conversation, in part by vocally dismissing free jazz and the avant garde as a destructive force, jazz in the ’90s was eclipsed by innovations in hip hop, electronic music, and experimental rock. The young crowd, which had been jazz’s fuel until the 1970s, was looking elsewhere for their shock-of-the-new sounds.

That said, nobody bothered to inform the crowds at the Knitting Factory and Tonic, two New York venues that render moot the notion that jazz was dead in the ’90s. John Zorn’s Tzadik label released so much great music through the decade that catching up with it all would take daily listening for a year. (It’s possible! Used Tzadik CDs — Tzadik didn’t do vinyl or cassette — are abundant and inexpensive on Discogs.)

This post is about the David S. Ware Quartet, one of the great foursomes of the decade: Saxophonist Ware, bassist William Parker, pianist Matthew Shipp and various drummers including Guillermo Brown, Whit Dickey, and Susie Ibarra.

Instead of pontificating, let’s move through the quartet one by one. Here’s a solo Matthew Shipp clip.

Here’s contra bass player William Parker alone onstage.

Drummer Susie Ibarra (yes, we’re playing favorites. When I saw the Quartet, she was on drums and floored me) has never played on a bad record:

That trio of backing players established, here’s Ware leading them. The caption to the video identifies this as being from 2009, but that’s wrong. Though we can’t lock in a date, it’s likely from the late 1990s or early ’00s. At an hour long, it’s a beast that sounds as vital and timeless now as it did when it was created.

Hot tip: Because this was the ’90s, most of the music released by members of this quartet was released on CD. It’s incredibly inexpensive to compile a remarkable collection right now; in five years this stuff will likely cost much more to obtain.