By
Colin Green
1964 has been described as Albert Ayler's
annus mirabilis, the
year in which his music reached maturity and he found his true voice.
Arguably, he never attained the same heights or levels of cohesion so
consistently thereafter. The album under review, part of the Revisited
series on Hat Hut's ezz-thetics imprint, allows us to sample his music
towards the beginning and end of that year comprising remastered versions
of two releases:
Spirits recorded in New York in February and
Ghosts in Copenhagen from September (not New York as stated on the
back cover). Both albums were rereleased on the Arista/Freedom label in the
early 1970s under the titles
Witches & Devils and
Vibrations respectively. The track order differs from all previous
versions and although no explanation is provided, presumably this is in
line with the order of recording at each session and the documentary nature
of the project. Art Lange supplies excellent notes.
"I like to play something - like the beginning of 'Ghosts' - that people
can hum," said Ayler in a revealing interview with Nat Hentoff in 1966,
"and I want to play songs like I used to sing when I was real small. Folk
melodies that all the people would understand. I'd use these melodies as a
start and have different simple melodies going in and out of a piece. From
simple melody to complicated textures to simplicity again and then back to
the more dense, the more complex sounds."
In part, this echoes a worldview that can be traced back to Rousseau and
the Romantics and which has remained prevalent to this day across a range
of cultures - that a more authentic and less corrupted image of ourselves
is to be found in native traditions and folk-history, a place that also
exists in the innocence of childhood, states in which a purer, more
spontaneous version of the self is unrestrained by limiting conventions and
where intuition confers greater understanding than the powers of the
intellect. Also significant is a mythologising tendency reflected in the
brief titles Ayler gave his pieces which evoke a shadowy, numinous realm
and a desire for things that cannot be explained. Ghosts are emanations
from the past appearing in the present; spirits, witches and devils occupy
a spectral region that intersects mysteriously with our own. Likewise, for
Ayler music was a medium in both senses: a means of communing with others
and a form for articulating areas to which the rational mind provides
limited access, the paradigm of creativity that marries archetypal with
individual sensibilities. It is in the latter that we find the complexity
he mentions. Improvisation provides a dramaturgy for personal voices
allowing them to move from generic to unique expression. At the same time
the music of our age is essentially fragmentary in which no single voice
prevails, yet we yearn for a past now lost, grounded in some
half-remembered union. During 1964 Ayler's achievement was to find a way of
combining all these elements into music that holds an enduring fascination
- immediate, melancholic, profound - and which remains a touchstone for
free jazz.
Looking back, there's a tension in his work between impulses which it took
him some time, if not to resolve then to use in a genuinely creative
friction. Ayler wanted to connect with the foundations of jazz in hymns and
song, felt to be imbued with transcendent values, and to explore the
instrumental innovations of bebop and beyond, to be rooted in the
vernacular but also to have a distinctive, contemporary vision. He'd
developed an idiosyncratic way with the tenor saxophone, having power and
personality, yet found no satisfactory format in which his warped pitches,
off-key shrieks and R&B squawks could be properly integrated so they
would sound like more than mere eccentric bursts and indulgent meanderings.
He apparently introduced wayward deviations even when practicing as a child
and was told by his father to get back to the melody: "I'd be standing in a
corner playing and trying to communicate with a spirit that I knew nothing
about at that particular age." As heard on
My Name is Albert Ayler
, originally recorded for Danish radio in January 1963, with most standards
it was as if he was speaking a hybrid language, unsure of quite what he
wanted to say and at odds with the repertoire and his fellow musicians.
Two tracks from that session suggested ways forward however, though this
may seem clearer to us now than it did to him. On 'Summertime', a ballad of
noble simplicity, Ayler slithers around the melody, chopping phrases into
irregular sections, reducing his line to soft textural trails, giving the
performance a heightened expressive weight threaded to the underlying
melody which always remains a point of reference. On the day after that
recording, when first hearing Ayler play, Don Cherry felt the same
spiritual presence and spontaneous outpouring as in the congregation of a
Baptist church as a child. The final track, 'C.T.', a reference to Cecil
Taylor, is a freely improvised piece. Some months before in October 1962
while working in Sweden, Ayler had seen the Taylor quartet at the Golden
Circle in Stockholm. He was familiar with the melodic and other innovations
of Coltrane, Ornette and Sonny Rollins, but Taylor's music was probably the
most advanced formal development of jazz at that point and he wanted to be
part of it - "I finally found someone I could play with" Sunny Murray
reports him as saying. Ayler sat in for one night and played with the trio
of Taylor, Jimmy Lyons and Murray during the latter part of their residency
at the Cafe Montmartre in Copenhagen the following month, though not on the
night the legendary
Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come was
taped. There is however, a recording taken from a Danish TV broadcast of
the trio with Ayler in an extended improvisation of over 20 minutes from a
week earlier, considered by Mats Gustafsson to be "the missing link", that
first appeared on the
Holy Ghost box set under the title 'Four'.
Ayler's 'C.T.', from six weeks later, contains occasional passing
references to a dancing figure used in 'Four' but has none of the whirlwind
pace injected by Taylor. In the absence of a strong motivic flow and with
musicians unfamiliar with the idiom the improvisation tends to drift.
After the
My Name in Albert Ayler session, he went to New York for
further dates with Taylor, then to his hometown of Cleveland where he sat
in with the visiting quartets of Sonny Rollins/Don Cherry and Coltrane.
Returning to New York, he played in a private session with Ornette and
resumed working with Taylor; the last appearance with his quartet was at
the Five Spot in January 1964. In a number of respects Ayler's musical
temperament was very different - for him prominent melodic content mattered
far more than to Taylor - but in the pianist's ensemble he found something
equally important: a form of simultaneity where music can be many things at
the same time and ride different currents, superimposed and criss-crossed,
not moored in a common rhythm but wandering within and carried by its own
processes. It may be that when it came to his own music, in Ayler's mind
retaining traces of a blues structure and incorporating tunes redolent of
an earlier age with this kind of flexibility enabled him to sustain
correspondences between ancestral voices and the diction of the present in
a way faithful to both, seeing himself as both heir and transmitter. As he
put it at the end of 1964, "The music that we're playing now is just the
blues of all of America all over again, but it's a different kind of blues.
This is the real blues, the new blues."
For the
Spirits session in February (tracks 1 to 4 on this album)
Ayler used Henry Grimes on double bass and Sunny Murray, drums, from
Taylor's quartet. Joining them were two musicians from Cleveland, trumpeter
Norman Howard, with whom Ayler had played since his youth, and double
bassist Earle Henderson. The bass players appear on different tracks and
both play on 'Witches and Devils' (Unfortunately, their listings on the
back cover don't take account of the track reordering.) The piece
originally named "Saints" has been renamed "Prophecy" for this release, the
title given to the tune on later recordings, and more confusingly it's the
same tune as 'Spirits' on
Spiritual Unity, which is not the same
as the track of that title here. This suggests that Ayler viewed his themes
as sharing collective associations, and the melodies themselves are in
certain instances variants or bear close family resemblances. Some would be
repeated during sets and sessions in different manifestations and a few
years later in live performance he would link them together in contrasting
sequences.
Two tracks, 'Spirits' and 'Holy Holy', have Ayler and Howard focussing on
texture and delineation, part of Ayler's gestural arsenal, though in a more
rudimentary fashion than would be used later. In both pieces the head is
dispatched quickly followed by long solos, a short duet then a reprise. The
solos consist of lines that flow and swell with no real relationship to
thematic material, an uninterrupted flux of energy that is all trajectory
and contour. Pitches are secondary, arbitrary even. But for the agitating
presence of bass and drums the music would be curiously static, however -
it has potency but lacks dimension. This rendition of 'Spirits' doesn't
contain the bristling invention of performances of the piece later that
year, including a version at the Cellar Cafe in June that begins with
primordial streams of sound and where the theme is frequently alluded to
but only emerges fully at the very end, summoned out of the vortex. 'Holy
Holy' introduces a little more variety, particularly in Ayler's solo which
concludes with him playing part of 'Ghosts' in its first recorded
appearance.
The other two tracks from the session are of a different order. They
assimilate melody and improvisation, innovation and raw expression, in a
way that would typify Ayler's rubato ballads and form part of his legacy.
There's a truly tragic air about them heightened by an exaggerated vibrato
that resembles the trembling melisma of passionate song. During Ayler's
opening statement on 'Saints/Prophecy' the trumpet provides a parallel
commentary in brief stabs outlining the melody, a tune which lies behind
the music like a phantom presence through Ayler's twists into the upper
registers and Howard's constrictions, until the final, painful unison.
'Witches and Devils' is a funeral dirge with the two basses providing a
mumbling accompaniment to the ceremony, released into further laments
during their plucked and bowed solo. At times the nuanced, achingly cracked
trumpet almost breaks down. Beneath all this Murray's taps, rolls and
splashes intensify and subside in weather-like motion. It's a performance
of great emotional depth whose elegiac tone and sense of collective
mourning are made all the more poignant by mingling constant change and
seeming stillness.
Tracks 5 to 10 jump forward to a Copenhagen studio in September 1964 and
the quartet with Don Cherry (cornet), Gary Peacock (double bass) and
Murray, and it's a quite a leap. As heard on the albums
Prophecy
and
Spiritual Unity, which Hat Hut plan to release at some point
as a complete edition, in the intervening months the trio of Ayler, Peacock
and Murray had taken shape, forming what is still considered a model of
integrated improvisation and intuitive interplay. Peacock's deep-toned yet
agile bass was able to handle the metrical shifts and oblique angles of
pianist Paul Bley (see: the Bley quartet's
Turning Point mostly
recorded in March 1964) and his pliable, responsive manner fitted perfectly
into the spaces created by tenor and drums. "We weren't
playing,
we were listening to each other" said Ayler. He'd agreed to a residency for
the trio at the Montmartre club with the possibility of other dates and
prospects of recording and Cherry, who was already in Europe, joined them.
The other recordings of this quartet have appeared most recently on
HATology's
European Radio Studio Recordings 1964 and
Copenhagen Live 1964. Together with the current album they
document one the great free jazz ensembles.
As with the trio, in the quartet harmonic progression and melodic invention
play a part but are frequently given equal weight alongside other aspects
not usually so prominent or even featured at all. Changes in articulation,
velocity and register, sometimes abrupt, are combined with continuity and
contrast borne by the shape and density of phrases, layered tempos and pure
texture. The old hierarchies are not done away with so much as reconfigured
within a wider ambit so that imitation and resemblance, divergence and
variation - the essentials of instrumental discourse - can function on many
levels and in surprising ways, making the music concurrently familiar and
strange. Cherry adds extra colour and refinement, acting as an offset to
Ayler and Peacock plays arco extensively, a multi-hued sonority not heard
with the trio. Murray's kit is recorded with proper definition allowing a
genuine four-way perspective of the quartet, enhanced by the then common
practice of placing drums and bass at either side of the soundstage.
'Ghosts' is a tune Ayler based on the folk ditty '
Torparvisan'
(Little Farmer's Song) that had been part of his set while touring Sweden
with local musicians, though in his hands it couldn't be more different.
(Later, he was to incorporate 'La Marseillaise', originally a marching
song, into 'Spirits Rejoice' and other pieces.) There are two versions of
'Ghosts' here, opening with the longest. After cycling through the theme
all is rent asunder. Like starting from scratch, motivic segments are
caught in a swirl of conflicting tonal centres. Ayler's off-kilter tenor is
wide open then reduced to a surge of screams and honks, taken up by
Cherry's sinuous cornet that eventually reintroduces the theme in a
recognisable form for what sounds like a natural conclusion; save that the
bass continues oblivious, skittering over the melody before being joined by
the others for a rousing unison which this time brings the piece to an end.
The second version of 'Ghosts' has no solos and highlights the differing
character of the tune's constituent parts: haunting then ebullient then
back again.
Ayler's characteristic handling of intonation and timbre owes a debt to
vocal techniques, replicating those subtle tremors, inflections, and
occasional brittle edges employed by singers, even the open throated
exaltations of voices raised in supplication. On 'Mothers', he uses the
chord changes of the gospel song 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child'
for a melody delivered in a sobbing, coarse-grained tone. By way of
contrast the slightly detached cornet plays the tune shorn of adornment.
During the next iteration Ayler's weeping saxophone elicits sympathetic
wails from Cherry and in the concluding statement both ascend and merge
into their highest registers. Peacock's bass is scraped and bowed
throughout in a threnody of veiled counterpoint.
'Vibrations' is an Ornetteish theme that includes a sharply rising figure
transformed into an adrenaline rush of coruscating distortions and
refulgent fanfare blasts shadowed by heavily plucked, resonant bass and the
persistent chatter of Murray's snare drum, ending as a disintegration into
silence. In 'Holy Spirit' a repeated chant calls forth fierce
confabulations interrupted by an interlude for Peacock's chiselled thoughts
and waves of percussion. Like much of this music, what holds the
performance together is not a common metre but a shared respiratory rhythm,
what Ben Young has called an internal gyroscope, to which individual parts
seem related even in contradiction giving the improvisations their own
endogenous balance. It's a quality now taken for granted in free jazz.
Cherry said that Ayler was a pure folk musician, meaning instinctual and
without artifice. Some of those early critics were right; at times there's
an amateurish feel to execution and phrasing, but it's a deliberate absence
of cultivated sound that taps into what we think of as natural, uncontrived
sentiments, which permeate the music. 'Children' is begun by Ayler as a
sombre lullaby, rising and falling with swooning glissandi, then suddenly
changes direction and is played at breakneck speed. The remainder of the
piece alternates between tender ministrations and upbeat flurries, empathy
and exhilaration, topped off by the cornet's final peep.
After 1964 Cherry continued working in Europe and pursued the wider
implications of the folk and roots aesthetic, moving towards greater
collective improvisation and a synthesis with the music of other cultures.
His 'Suite for Albert Ayler' from Montmartre in 1966 is one of the first
musical recognitions of Ayler's importance, a melding of 'Ghosts' - a tune
he once suggested should be adopted as a new national anthem - and snatches
of his own 'Infant Happiness', the only non-Ayler composition played by the
Ayler/Cherry quartet and which Ayler had recorded again in 1965 under the
title 'D.C.'.
Sonically, the remastering from analogue tapes has resulted in greater
presence and richer textures. Previous releases are a little opaque and
monochrome in comparison.
Spirits has particularly benefitted:
there's a more pronounced identity to the two basses on 'Witches and
Devils' and Howard's trumpet positively sings out. For those with the
albums in their collection already
Spirits To Ghosts Revisited is
a definite upgrade, and if you don't have them it carries a mandatory
recommendation.
