Die Like A Dog - fragments of music, life and death of Albert Ayler (Cien Fuegos, 2024)

By Eyal Hareuveni

Thirty years after its release, the debut album of the free jazz supergroup Die Like A Dog - German reeds titan Peter Brötzmann (on alto and tenor saxes and the tarogato), Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo (on electric trumpet) and the American rhythm section of double bass player William Parker and drummer-percussionist Hamid Drake - is rereleased as a double vinyl, and remastered for vinyl (by Martin Siewert, the guitarist of Radian). This quartet was inspired by the music of free jazz pioneer Albert Ayler (1936-1970), whose lifeless body was found in New York City's East River.

The original album was released by the legendary German label FMP in 1994 and was recorded live at Townhall Charlottenburg in Berlin in August 1993. Brötzmann’s liner notes expressed his great love for the music of Ayler and for Ayler as a role model but also expressed a deep personal reflection about Ayler as a kindred spirit who experienced a common struggle to communicate their revolutionary artistic vision and shared a similar longing for a better world. “Many people didn’t listen to him, he was disputed until the end of his short life. Most of all the critics and organizers mostly didn’t know what to do with him. The audience, especially in Europe, loved him”, Brötzmann notes. "The idea of expressing my love of and admiration for Albert Ayler - both man and music - in a musical statement is not new. We both tried to do similar or almost identical things at the same point in time, each independently and without knowing anything about each other - each of us within his own culture”.

Brötzmann wanted to enlist drummer Milford Graves (“who stood by Ayler during the last months of his life”) for this project but Graves did not like traveling. Kondo and Parker worked before with Brötzmann (most recently in The März Combo Live In Wuppertal, FMP, 1993) and Drake also recorded with Brötzmann shortly before the formation of Die Like A Dog (Hyperion, with pianist Marilyn Crispell, Music & Arts, 1995), and all continued to work Brötzmann. They were considered as the natural choices for such a demanding project. Die Like A Dog reconstructs cleverly the legacy of Ayler with very short quotations of his music - “Prophet” (from Spirits Rejoice, ESP-Disk, 1965), “Ghosts” (from the album by the same name, Fontana, 1965), “Spirits” (from the album by the same name, Debut, 1964) and “Bells” (from the album by the same name, ESP-Disk, 1965), and covered the gospel-blues standard “Saint James Infirmary”.

If you have not experienced the phenomena of this great quartet do yourself a great favor and rush to check it out. The music is still as powerful and invigorating, inspiring and uplifting as it was the first time I listened to it. The turbulent and passionate energy of Die Like A Dog can energize- or better, enlighten - a small town on any given day. The synergy of Brötzmann and Kondo is simply magical, feeding each other in a profound poetic and lyrical manner and with uncompromising, manic yet deeply emotional intensity. The rhythm section of Parker and Drake lifts the quartet even higher, with a spiritual-hypnotic force, just like Alan Silva and Graves did in the iconic Ayler’s album Love Cry (Impulse!, 1968). Together, this supergroup offers a stimulating, cathartic antidote to our stressful, troubled era, then, now and forever. Die Like A Dog was a collective that sounded greater than its parts and reflected faithfully Ayler’s most beautiful belief that music is the healing force of the universe.

Order on Bandcamp