As the online reviews for Holy Ghost disappear from their original sites I will add them to this page.

(From The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) - 26th September, 2004) - US

A New Light

CD set awakens spirit of intrepid jazzman

by John Soeder

Who was Albert Ayler?

Good question, even decades after the death of the avant- garde jazz saxophonist from Cleveland.

Ayler (pronounced "EYE-ler") remains "a mysterious figure," says Dean Blackwood, head of Revenant Records.

"It's mysterious how he got from point A to point Z in his musical life," Blackwood says. "He died mysteriously, too. People still don't know exactly what happened there."

Ayler's body was found floating in New York City's East River on the morning of Nov. 25, 1970. He was 34.

To fill in some blanks about Ayler, Blackwood's record company has put together "Holy Ghost," a 10-CD Ayler retrospective. Set for release Tuesday, Oct. 5, it's the most extensive overview of the '60s free-jazz champion's career to date. The lavish boxed set takes its title from a pronouncement by Ayler, a deeply spiritual artist who saw himself as part of a sax-playing trinity with jazz immortals John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.

"Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost," Ayler said.

Two of the box's discs capture the Albert Ayler Quintet (including Ayler's younger brother Don on trumpet) in concert April 16-17, 1966, at the old LaCave club on Euclid Avenue. Ayler is in typically freewheeling form, juxtaposing soul- searching reveries and honking and wailing outbursts on his sax with more melodic passages.

He was based in New York City for much of his career, although he often returned to Cleveland.

Nonetheless, Ayler was never as popular in his hometown or even in his homeland as he was in Europe.

"His music was too far out for people here," says his father, Edward Ayler. "They had to catch up to him."

Saxman Ernie Krivda, a fixture on the local jazz scene, got to jam with Ayler in the early '60s at the Esquire, a Cleveland hot spot.

"It was known for grooving jazz good-time stuff," Krivda says. "When Albert came in and laid out his very uncompromising musical viewpoint, it was not well-taken by much of the clientele or by the owner, who banned Albert.

"They thought he was nuts."

Critic Max Harrison called Ayler "possibly the last major figure" in jazz whose music conveyed "a real sense of danger, a seemingly authentic whiff of hemlock."

"It's not about notes anymore," Ayler said by way of describing his aesthetic in a 1967 interview with The Plain Dealer.

"It's a sound a feeling," he said.

"His music has a way of smacking people in the face with a powerful expression," says Ben Young, who produced the "Holy Ghost" set.

"It demands some sort of reaction," Young says. "You can't ignore it. It can't be thought of as background music.

"We know Elvis Costello and Brahms both can become elevator music. It can't be done with Albert Ayler.

"He seems to communicate, in a very blunt fashion, something very important to him. You have to come to grips with it and you have to sort it out."

Another highlight of the new box is a recording of the Albert Ayler Quartet's performance of a medley including "Truth Is Marching In" and "Our Prayer" (the latter was written by Don) at Coltrane's funeral in New York City in 1967.

"Al told me how sad it was," says Edward Ayler, 90.

"Coltrane tried to pick up the avant-garde from Al," Edward says. "Coltrane told his wife to let Al's group play at the funeral."

The elder Ayler's home in Warrensville Heights is filled with mementos of his son, including trophies Albert won as a standout on the golf team at John Adams High School.

"He played golf as well as he played his horn," Edward Ayler says. "At 18, he shot a 77. But music was his first love."

As a teenager, Albert spent two summers on tour with bluesman Little Walter.

After high school, Albert joined the Army for three years. He was stationed in France and played in an Army band. "Holy Ghost" includes a CD of the military ensemble's recordings of "Tenderly" and "Leap Frog," both featuring Ayler on tenor sax.

The boxed set itself is a work of art, a replica of a hand-carved spirit box. Common to Asian, African and American Indian cultures, a spirit box typically houses sacred items, Blackwood says.

For "Holy Ghost," the goal was to create "a little event in a box, more like an art object than something ephemeral," he says. "I'm hoping people treat it as a treasured item."

His Austin, Texas-based boutique record label's last big project, a 2001 box devoted to blues pioneer Charley Patton, won three Grammy Awards.

"Holy Ghost" aims to retrace how Ayler went from "a fairly conventional background" to the cutting edge of jazz, Blackwood says.

"His music genuinely shocked people," he says. "He was rejected not only by listeners, but by other musicians.

"He was a big fan of Ornette Coleman and Coltrane. But Ayler never considered copying them. It was more like he drew inspiration from their trailblazing.

"Despite the fact people walked off the bandstand when he would get up to play, he persisted. . . . He had an unshakable faith in the value of his own work."

Rejection "didn't dampen his spirit at all," Edward Ayler says. "He went on with his music. He was self-determined, an exceptional boy."

"Ayler was Great Black Music personified," jazz historian and photographer Val Wilmer declares in the boxed set's 208-page hardcover book, complete with rare photographs and essays examining various facets of Ayler's life.

His music "encompassed every thread woven into the fabric of so-called jazz," Wilmer writes. "He took as his source material the spirituals, funeral dirges, bugle calls and marches of the past, and, though he seldom did so, he could really play the blues."

Even at his most abstract, Ayler "is accessible for people who give [him] a chance," Blackwood says.

"It's not completely unbridled playing," he says. "Ayler really did want to give people something to grab onto, as far as a hook. It was one of his stated aims, to have something almost hummable.

"He used chunks of what we talk about as collective musical memory folky melodies with an almost singsongy, nursery- rhyme quality to them."

At times, it seems as if Ayler is playing "the national anthem of some country you've never heard of, yet it's naggingly familiar," Blackwood says.

For a prime example, listen to one of Ayler's best-known tunes, "Truth Is Marching In." "Holy Ghost" contains no fewer than five versions of the majestically anthemlike composition, which Taylor singles out as "an absolute high point for Ayler's creative expression."

Among the other odds and ends enclosed in the box are a dogwood bloom (an "organic" symbol of the spiritual nature of Ayler's music, Blackwood says) and a reproduction of a 1969 issue of the Cricket music journal. It includes an essay by Ayler in which he describes a series of apocalyptic visions, including a close encounter with a flying saucer.

"He would see visions," Edward Ayler says. "When he was in New York City, he told me about the angels he saw, how tall they were."

Playing the blues all over again

As a child, Albert would peek behind a radio, trying to figure out where the music came from, Edward says.

He took young Albert to the Palace Theatre to catch performances by Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Lester Young.

During those concerts, Albert "would stand up with intense interest," Edward says.

Albert was 7 when he started playing sax. He and his father, also a sax player, took music lessons together and performed duets in church.

"At first, the alto was almost as big as he was," Edward says. "But he took to it like a fish to water. . . . He had it all in him."

Edward doesn't like to discuss Albert's death. He believes his son may have been murdered over unpaid debts.

There was no sign of foul play, however, according to the biography in the "Holy Ghost" box. A medical examiner listed the cause of death as "asphyxia by submersion" in other words, drowning.

Since then, rampant speculation has blamed Ayler's demise on everything from a run-in with drug dealers to a government plot to wipe out influential blacks.

Others believe Ayler committed suicide. Shortly before his death, he reportedly told a friend his blood needed to be shed to save his mother and his brother Don, who had suffered a nervous breakdown.

Ayler is buried in Beachwood's Highland Park Cemetery. His mother, Myrtle Ayler, died in 1985.

Don, who made music only sporadically after Albert's death, is in a psychiatric hospital, Edward says.

"Holy Ghost" is coming out against the wishes of Ayler's widow, Arlene Ayler of Euclid, and their daughter, Desiree Ayler of Garfield Heights.

"We gave [Revenant] no authorization," Desiree says. "They don't want to pay us. . . . My father would be very upset if he knew these people were doing this to us."

Ayler also is survived by a son, Curtis Roundtree, from a different relationship.

"Revenant always endeavors to work as closely as possible with the family members, friends and colleagues who were close to the artist, and did so in this case as well," says Blackwood, who is an attorney.

"As a legal matter, the Ayler estate is far from settled," Blackwood says. "All legitimate claimants to the estate have been or will be compensated as provided for by law."

Rounding out "Holy Ghost" are two CDs of illuminating interviews with the soft-spoken Ayler.

"I'm hoping . . . all the people [who] like jazz will like what I'm playing on my instrument," he said during a Danish radio program in 1964. "The music we're playing now is just the blues of all of America, all over again. But it's just a different kind of blues.

"It's the new blues. People must listen to this music because they'll be hearing it all the time, because if it's not me, it'll be someone else . . . playing it.

"This is the only way that's left for the musicians to play. All the other ways have been explored."

Still avant-garde after all these years

Today, you can hear echoes of Ayler in maverick saxophonists such as Sweden's Mats Gustafsson or Brazil's Ivo Perelman, producer Young says.

Ayler's influence extends beyond jazz, too.

"To a certain extent, the jaggedness of hip-hop has caught people up to some flavors regarded as avant-garde in the '60s," Young says.

The forward-thinking spirit embodied by Ayler also has been embraced by Sonic Youth and other bands "on the extreme edges of alternative rock 'n' roll," Young says.

Edward Ayler says he initially shrugged off Albert's music as "anti-swing," although he eventually arrived at a deeper appreciation for it.

"I learned to grasp the feeling in his music," Edward says. "It's out of this world."

He keeps a journal of excerpts from newspaper and magazine articles about Albert ("His life was sustained by deep mysticism . . ."), copied by hand between notebook pages filled with prayers and spiritual reflections. He still regularly plays Albert's records, too.

"I enjoy it," Edward says. "My son!"

He laughs softly.

Who was Albert Ayler? Maybe his father knows best.

"He was a loving child," Edward says. "He was my pal. . . . Yes he was something."

Copyright © 2004 - The Plain Dealer/John Soeder

Holy Ghost review list

***

(From Clevescene.com (Cleveland) - 29th September, 2004) - US

Ghost Story  

A Cleveland avant-jazz great raises hackles again. This time, from the grave.

By Carlo Wolff

Albert Ayler, a controversial saxophonist known for his startling, otherworldly music, is fanning the flames all over again.

Some say the Cleveland native couldn't negotiate the changes and chords that any respectable jazz saxophonist ought to know. Others call him a pillar of avant-garde jazz tenor, along with the similarly divisive Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, the most legitimized and commercial of this titanic trio.

On October 5, Revenant Records will release Holy Ghost, a nine-CD box of Ayler material spanning from 1960, when he played in an Army band, to 1970, when he died at age 34; his body turned up that November, drowned, in Brooklyn's East River. Some say he was murdered, alluding to a drug habit that led to mounting debt. Others assert that he touched nothing harder than marijuana. While Ayler's death remains unexplained, his music is beginning to make sense, thanks largely to this remarkable set.

Clearing Holy Ghost for release, however, hasn't been easy. "There are several contestants to the estate, and ultimately, all of them will get something out of this," says Ben Young, the set's primary researcher. For some of them, satisfaction might be a long time coming.

Carrie Roundtree Lucas, who dated Albert in 1957 and had a son by him in 1958, says Revenant contacted her about the box, and "everything's OK." Their son, Curtis D. Roundtree, has ultimate authority over Holy Ghost, she says.

But Arlene Ayler, who was married to Albert from 1964 until his death, hasn't even heard of the Revenant box. Though she says she's not party to Albert's estate, she claims that their daughter, Desiree, is.

"I don't want a story put out on this," says Desiree, who receives royalties for her father's work on another label. "I'm going to call my lawyer. There's no story going to come out on this, when I didn't even give the permission for [Holy Ghost] to come out."

Also likely to benefit from the boxed set's release are Ayler's father, Edward, who still lives in Warrensville Heights, and his brother, Don. Albert's trumpet foil in their groundbreaking groups of the mid-'60s, Don Ayler is a resident at Cleveland's Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare Center, pending a hearing on charges of gross sexual imposition and sexual battery stemming from an incident last November.

Besides his surviving family, many musicians who played with Albert still live in greater Cleveland, among them Lloyd Pearson, a tenor man who led the R&B group the Counts of Rhythm with Albert in the '50s, when Albert was a golf star at John Adams High School and Lloyd was at East Tech.

"Albert was a nice cat, a gentle person," says Pearson. "Everybody liked him. He went in the Army and came back with this new type of music. He came back playing a new horn, but he wasn't playing the regular, standard blues changes. He was playing him."

Among the Holy Ghost recordings never before available commercially are two full discs of April 1966 concerts at the legendary Cleveland venue La Cave, featuring the Ayler brothers, Dutch violinist Michel Samson, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, and bassist Clyde Shy (aka Mutawef Shaheed), a high school classmate of Don Ayler's.

Besides the music, each Revenant box contains a dogwood blossom (intended to enhance the set's "organic" feel), reproductions of posters of Ayler shows, tributes to Ayler from those turbulent times, and a hardbound book of more than 200 pages reflecting on the arc of Ayler's tempestuous career and mysterious life. The book is crammed with information about all of Ayler's known performances and recordings, considerations of his art by Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones; the black militant philosopher was among Ayler's earliest champions) and British journalist Val Wilmer, and reminiscences by a wide range of friends and acquaintances.

Ernie Krivda, a Lakewood-based tenor saxophonist, jammed with Ayler in the early '60s at "105," a legendary strip on Euclid Avenue around East 105th Street.

"At this particular time, guys are starting to do different stuff, and the 'new thing' is kind of at hand, so cats are experimenting," Krivda remembers. "Albert Ayler would come in and play, and it would be kind of upsetting to a lot of people. There's a sense of irony to this, because he wasn't the only one doing this, but something about his demeanor got him banned. The funny thing is, [early Ayler disciple] Frank Wright was also sitting in, and he was as 'out' as you could be, but they liked him.

"The thing with these particular guys was, they fundamentally weren't real solid. Everybody tries to draw comparisons to the music of [Arnold] Schoenberg, [Anton] Webern, that kind of thing, but those people were fundamentally very sound. But it was an interesting time, and it did challenge the music, and there are things that were part of it and we could use."

Accessible Ayler tunes, such as "Spirits Rejoice," "Our Prayer," and "Bells," seem to spring from a timeless well of marches, spirituals, gospel, even folk. Ayler was a marvelous, accessible melodist, as well as a challenging, exhausting improviser. That juxtaposition makes his music striking -- and much more aggressive than he was in person.

"He and his brother were really, really friendly guys," says Jon Goldman, an aficionado of imaginative jazz. "In the '70s and '80s and '90s, you would read interviews with rock musicians who listed him among their influences, whereas he encountered a lot of hostility from mainstream jazz musicians." Wynton Marsalis, Goldman recalls, "admitted to me that despite the fact he'd never really even heard an Albert Ayler record, he still disparaged his approach to music."

That approach and Ayler's complexity appeal to Dean Blackwood, who co-founded Revenant Records in 1996. His mission: to present "raw musics" in upscale, meticulously recorded and researched packages. The seven-CD, $150 Revenant box Screamin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton won three Grammy awards in 2003. The Ayler box, retailing for $100, is likely to win a Grammy or three of its own next year.

"You've got this guy from a fairly conventional background -- he grew up in fairly comfortable circumstances, he was captain of the golf team in high school, and he played as a teenager in Little Walter's blues band -- and suddenly he decides to make a complete break with not only jazz convention, but really, musical conventions of pitch and form, to really break out on his own," Blackwood says. "While he had certain models in Coltrane and Ornette, they weren't necessarily musical blueprints; they were more like spiritual and moral models. His music sounds nothing like any of these guys. The kicker is, despite repeated and violent rejections at every turn, not only from audiences but from fellow musicians . . . this guy soldiered through."

"At first, I couldn't understand it," Edward Ayler says of his son's music. "But later on, I really took to it, saw where he was coming from and that he was really exceptional, that the music was out of this world. I understood it then. I have never heard any music like that."

Copyright © 2004 - Clevescene.com/Carlo Wolff

Holy Ghost review list

***

(From The Denver Post - 10th October, 2004.) - US

New light on mystery man

“Holy Ghost” casts scholarly eye on saxman Albert Ayler

By Bret Saunders

Remove the cover of the "spirit box" that holds the contents of the just-released "Holy Ghost," an affectionate unearthing of recordings made by the visionary saxophonist Albert Ayler, and you get more than the standard-issue stack of CDs with accompanying booklet.

The enclosed hardcover book is a dedicated work of scholarship, supplying details of Ayler's troubled life and a chronicle of every known occasion he took to the stage. Also included are facsimiles of a concert poster, a poetry booklet, an underground arts magazine circa 1969, a photo of a childhood Ayler brandishing his horn and, mysteriously, a pressed flower, encased in plastic.

Without hearing a note of the music, you know that this project was created with a deeply felt respect for the artist.

Revenant, the independent record label behind "Holy Ghost," has assembled this sort of presentation before, with recordings of the bluesman Charlie Patton. It seems the idea is for the listener to become immersed in the world of the performer to sense the importance of what he created. In the case of Ayler, whose music and life is shrouded in mystery, the release of mere scraps of additional material would be heralded as important news by his followers.

With "Holy Ghost," Revenant has produced seven discs of rare music. Just as enticing are a pair of CDs with 1964-70 Ayler interviews conducted in Europe, where he was more readily accepted than in his native U.S. This is a trove of outside-oriented improvisation, and it demands to be heard by followers of post-John Coltrane avant-garde jazz.

Ayler played the tenor saxophone as his primary instrument, and his brawny, wailing sound was a departure from his Cleveland childhood roots of straight-ahead jazz and rhythm and blues.

Drawing from the cacophony of New Orleans brass bands of the 1920s while playing as free as anyone committed to vinyl in the '60s, Ayler was often a source of controversy within the jazz community. His music didn't swing in the traditional sense, and he sought to communicate a sense of spirituality, as indicated in compositions with titles like "Spirits Rejoice" and "Truth Is Marching In." His simple melodies became overwhelming torrents of sound, resulting in his personalized version of ecstasy.

As anyone familiar with the free music of the '60s knows, it wasn't always recorded with the greatest of care. Portions of "Holy Ghost" sound distant, but for the most part, the music cuts through these sonic handicaps and communicates Ayler's sense of passion. The set also connects with other leaders of this creative music, featuring collaborations with pianist Cecil Taylor, trumpeter Don Cherry and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders.

As for Ayler himself, questions remain surrounding his shocking November 1970 death (his body was discovered in New York's East River) at the age of 34. It's useless to speculate on what he might have created had he survived his demons.

But for those of us moved by the search for enlightenment he undertook during his short life, "Holy Ghost" adds several mesmerizing hours to his small discography. In addition to being a carefully assembled trip back to a turbulent era for music and, for that matter, all of American culture, it's a remarkable presentation of one artist within the realm of the still undervalued world of jazz.

Copyright © 2004 - The Denver Post/Bret Saunders

Holy Ghost review list

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(From Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service - 17th October, 2004.) - US

The Legend: Albert Ayler

By Joe Gross

On the morning of Nov. 25, 1970, the body of Albert Ayler was found in the East River near Brooklyn's Congress Street Pier. The controversial jazz saxophonist was all of 34 years old.

The medical examiner's report suggested drowning — a likely suicide — and no autopsy was performed. But within weeks, rumors began to spread around New York's tightly knit free-jazz community. Some said that, before his death, Ayler had been missing for nearly three weeks and had been exhibiting signs of mental instability. A few contended that this leading light of the African-American "new thing" was shot by the police. Another black revolutionary silenced?

Here's the only thing we know about Nov. 25, 1970: It didn't happen overnight, and it didn't happen all at once, but on that day, Albert Ayler turned into an old-fashioned American legend.

A line in the sand of his own time, Ayler's music has become a jazz touchstone. Sounding like folk songs, marching bands and the freely blasted energy of life all at once, his music is now regarded as a root integer of the '60s avant-garde.

Ben Young, Dean Blackwood and Noel Waggener are three guys for whom the legend resonated. Infants or not yet alive when Ayler died, the three put together a small team of researchers, writers and designers and took the past 2 1/2 years to produce Holy Ghost, the first CD boxed set devoted to Ayler.

Financed by and released on Blackwood's Revenant Records label — an eclectic, boutique label specializing in carefully designed and packaged archival recordings of self-described "raw musics," ranging from the Stanley Brothers to Captain Beefheart — the long-rumored Holy Ghost eschews available recordings for 10 CDs of previously unavailable live sets, demos and interviews, shading in Ayler's previously underdocumented career.

The set includes a 200-page hard-cover book featuring tributes and essays by fellow musicians, biographical sketches and never-before-published photos. There are reproductions of a handwritten note, a photo, a small magazine and a dried dogwood flower, a symbol of the crucifixion, all of which are housed in a sturdy box, molded from a hand-carved original designed for this set.

Although Ayler doesn't have the name recognition of Charlie Parker or Miles Davis, this set is a big deal. His influence was broad, and none of these recordings has been previously available.

Legendary saxophonist John Coltrane said he listened to Ayler's music closely and formed an intense friendship with the younger man, enabling Ayler to obtain a contract with Coltrane's label. After 'Trane recorded the dense group improvisation Ascension, he said to Ayler, "I was playing just like you." (In turn, Ayler played at Coltrane's funeral, an electrifying performance included in somewhat muffled form on Holy Ghost.)

Anticipation is running high for this boxed set. Revenant is pressing up 15,000 copies of Holy Ghost.

Andee Connors owns and operates Aquarius Records, a San Francisco store known for its esoteric clientele and strong mail-order business. "There have been hints for a long time that it might be coming out some day," Connors says. "That will certainly help sales."

"Team Ghost," as the researchers are referred to in the liner notes, sifted through hours of tape, chased down recordings they weren't sure existed, conducted interviews, navigated a messy estate and designed dozens of graphics, all in the name of a guy whose musical extremity prompted fellow musicians to stop playing (often in disgust) when he took the bandstand.

How did these three do it? What is it about Albert Ayler that inspires such devotion?

In 2002, Blackwood, head of Revenant Records, was looking for a new project. Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues, his label's elaborate, seven-CD boxed set of the complete recording of bluesman Charlie Patton, was released the previous fall. (The set would win three Grammys in 2003.) It was time to start thinking about a follow-up. The Ornette Coleman box he'd always wanted to do wasn't quite ready for prime time, so he turned to Albert Ayler.

"I remember hearing Albert's stuff on a mix tape that someone gave me, and it really was of a different ilk," says Blackwood, who moonlights running the label during breaks from his day job as a lawyer at Dell Corp.

"You'd hear these songs, and you were sure that you'd heard them before," Blackwood says.

Just listen to any one of the versions of Ghost available on Holy Ghost. The song's head, perhaps based on a European folk melody, is astonishingly simple, a song you might whistle while raking leaves. The cymbals splash in, a bass string thrums, and then Ayler takes off into space honking, squealing, overblowing, totally free of time, rhythm and tempo. The band follows in Ayler's giant steps. By the end of the piece, the theme returns, bringing the listener back to a melody anyone can learn.

"It's as if he were tapping into some sort of collective musical memory," Blackwood says.

One of the reasons Ayler is so obscure is that, for years, his albums have wandered in and out of print. But Team Ghost wasn't interested in stuff that was already out there. They wanted the unreleased music.

Researcher Young — as a disc jockey for the Columbia University radio station WKCR, then as a reissue producer for Verve and RCA Records, and now as WKCR's director of broadcasting and operations — has spent much of his adult life chasing the memory of various jazz musicians. He was a high-school hipster in Nashville when he first heard of Ayler and was instantly drawn to his music.

By 1995, Young was convinced enough previously unheard Ayler material had been unearthed that more records could be made. After all, Ayler only produced a small pool of music in his lifetime. But record labels weren't interested until Young and Blackwood started planning the set in 2002.

"Initially, someone at WKCR put me in touch with Ben in connection with the Ornette project in 2001," Blackwood says. They soon realized that an Ayler project could be completed within a more finite time frame.

"Dean and I shared the feeling that you can't know enough about Ayler," Young says.

Blackwood readily acknowledges that Holy Ghost would have been impossible without Young. "He did all of the work," he says. "Ben was the driving force. He has this huge stockpile of radio interviews and research to draw from."

By early 2002, Blackwood and Young had drawn up a prospectus of Ayler recordings they knew existed or were rumored to exist, who possessed them and how likely the parties would be to let Team Ghost use them.

Young and his own gang — Carlos Case and Tom Greenwood, both of whom Young had worked with when he was in charge of Verve Records' research department — would usually make the initial contacts with the parties who had the recordings and do field interviews with book contributors. The whole thing was a bit like a worldwide scavenger hunt with dozens of clues and conflicting parties.

"Once Ben tracked someone down, I cinched the deals," Blackwood says. He made sure the rights were in order and the musicians who participated in the recording were paid.

It doesn't help that Ayler's estate is a legal miasma. Upon his death, Ayler left a father (Edward Ayler), a wife from whom he was separated (Arlene Ayler), two children (Desiree, a daughter with Arlene, and Curtis Roundtree, a son from a different relationship) and a girlfriend with whom he was artistically collaborating at the time of his death (Mary Maria).

He also left no will. "There are a lot of contestants to the Ayler estate," Young says.

Rights had to be negotiated, tapes cleaned up. Finnish radio provided 1962 recordings with the Herbert Katz Quintet, a solid if uninteresting Finnish group. The extraordinary-but-rough-sounding recordings of Ayler playing at Coltrane's funeral and Ayler playing with Cecil Taylor in 1962 were polished. At the last minute, Revenant found out that for 44 years someone had kept a tape of Ayler playing with the 76th Army Band and rushed to get it in the box.

Of course, there were tapes that Team Ghost couldn't get, avenues still closed to the public, pieces of Ayler's past still unearthed.

"They're kind of sore points," Young says. "As much work, if not more, was pumped into ones that didn't pay off." For example, Team Ghost wasn't able to shake loose the 1966 "Titans of the Tenor" concert with Coltrane.

Blackwood wanted Holy Ghost to be as definitive as possible: "We wanted to be exhaustive to the point that if we didn't have it, it was very unlikely it would ever come out," he says.

Young isn't as convinced. "There will be tapes flushed out of the underbrush once attention comes to this set," he says. "That's always the way it works. You do your best to be complete and then somebody pipes up at the end and says, 'I hear you're doing this complete thing. Guess what I have?'

"But I welcome that," he adds. "It's always nice to find something you didn't know about."

Copyright © 2004 Cox Enterprises, Inc./Joe Gross

Holy Ghost review list

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(From The New York Times - 24th October, 2004.) - US

Made Him Wanna Holler

By Ben Ratliff

JAZZ musicians are often mythologized, but in the case of the tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler, the effect is so extreme that he has become an abstraction, swathed in Baptist-church language, the revolutionary rhetoric of the mid-60's Black Arts movement, and hot-palmed record-collector desire. "Holy Ghost," a new boxed set of his work put out by the Revenant label, is his worshipful monument.

It is a black plastic box containing nine discs, a partial facsimile edition of an issue of "The Cricket," the magazine of which Amiri Baraka was one of the editors, and an oblong, hardcover, 208-page book of essays and data, tracking Ayler's life up, down and sideways. There are copies of a snapshot depicting the prepubescent Albert with saxophone and of a flyer from the nightclub Slug's along with a real pressed flower in a plastic sleeve. It feels funereal, like something that should be buried with the body. Or mutely symbolic, like some totem in a dream.

Ayler himself seems like dream material. In 1970, at 34, he was found drowned in New York's East River - it's still unknown whether it was suicide - after practicing eight years of a kind of jazz stripped of all its niceties, its complex rules of harmony and rhythm. As much as he loved Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker, he apparently had no desire to learn how to improvise through chord changes, the most basic obligation of a jazz saxophonist.

So his songs, and his improvisations, finally tended to use basic, major-triad harmony. Anthems, hymns and marches often use major triads, too, and thereby he cracked a secret: he figured out a way to make music that sounded ancient and somehow inevitable.

The box set's accompanying book repeats one story, over and over again, with different names and places. It is about Ayler, in his early performing years, eagerly sitting in on a bandstand, following along for a few bars of the standard material the band is playing. (It's "Moanin'" in one anecdote, "How High the Moon," in another, "Billie's Bounce" in a third - but it doesn't matter.) And then Ayler explodes, in some mixture of rapture, one-upmanship and free-tonality improvisational zeal. He shrieks and cries through his instrument, and uses his one professional refinement - a big tone and vibrato learned from playing in R&B bands. The other musicians, or the promoter, or the fans drop their drinks, or stalk off stage, or drag Ayler away.

It sounds like an exaggeration, an idealization, some kind of special pleading. Or, again, like a dream: stepping up to a practiced bandstand and offering primitivism instead of professionalism is a little like the one about showing up to school with no clothes on. But Ayler probably knew why he was there; both his ruckus and his melodies make historical sense. He was under the trance of Ornette Coleman's first records, sensing the possibilities in jazz of looser tonal relationships, stronger folk elements, and wilder playing. He had been playing marches for three years, with the 76th United States Army band in Orléans, France. And he was - perhaps - starting to come undone with religious visions.

Ayler's acquaintances report that he talked a great deal about "the truth" and "holiness." He insisted that the music is out there, and musicians are just vessels. "You think it's about you?" he once asked Amiri Baraka, after reading his appraisal of someone-or-other's jazz. He spoke about visions, and once wrote them down in a letter to Mr. Baraka: "The Devil angel thrives off of uncleanliness, curse words, blasphemy and discord."

Ayler wasn't naïve. He was creating some crossing-point of gospel and shock, art-brut flung up to God; his technical ability may have been rudimentary, but he had a killer sense of how to spook jazz bohemians of the early 1960's down to the core. Even in jazz, there can be something beyond technique - some intuitive form of style - and Ayler had it.

The producers of "Holy Ghost" have prowled the margins of Ayleriana to put out material that isn't well-known and protected by license. The best of Albert Ayler? To me it is "Spiritual Unity" (1964, ESP); "The Hilversum Session" (1964, Coppens); "Albert Ayler Live in Greenwich Village" (1965-67, Impulse). What they've found isn't all good; with such slender technique, there are no guarantees. Let's say you are a Type-B Ayler appreciator, someone who doesn't actually feel that he was the Holy Ghost. How do you work through it?

There's some instructive juvenilia here: on a bonus disc, rehearsals of his Army band in 1960, with Ayler soloing ineptly during the big band standard "Leap Frog." There's a chilling recording of the concentrated little set Ayler played at Coltrane's memorial. And there are two entire discs of Ayler being interviewed. He's all sweetly credulous enthusiasm: his speaking voice exposes him. The conversations provide more details - his parents' illnesses, his pay scale ($10,000 for his final Impulse contract), endless homilies about the challenge to the avant-garde artist in society. But if you can get through them, someone should devote a nine-disk box set to you.

This Type-B Ayler appreciator really only wants to hear the best of the 1965-1967 period, when Ayler moved from a free, liquid concept of group improvisation toward the sound of a band repeating his national-anthem-like melodies, over and over and over, in a kind of fractured unison. There's a surfeit of it here, much of it with muffled sound.

And please, save me from the original demos behind the album "New Grass," his 1968 album of spiritual R&B cut with reputable session players - a record ultimately compromised by Impulse Records, which hired singers and musicians against Ayler's plan. But the demos here show that the album didn't start promisingly, either.

Here's the good news. At the end of disc one, and for nearly all of disc two, we get a sense of how Albert Ayler spent 1964. This is the music that approaches a state of grace. It is his trio with the bassist Gary Peacock and the drummer Sunny Murray, and they play the most extraordinary music: it begins with and returns to little motifs, but is essentially free jazz, a very early example of the real thing - long, exploratory solos of shapes and texture with no determined key, players moving in and out of a running stream.

And here's where I will join the mythmakers: these three musicians are in a trance. They make light, dancing music - Sunny Murray, in particular, made his cymbals sound like running water. (Around this time, he was seen onstage using knitting needles for sticks.) Mr. Peacock played all over his instrument in almost random patterns, coming down on a fat, resonant low E once in a while. But there is space in the music: if free jazz often suffers from an oppressive density, don't blame these father-figures.

Here, there's nothing gratuitous about Ayler's saxophone language. As he demonstrates in "Saints," he believed that there could be such a thing as a free-improvisation ballad. He doesn't clonk you over the head with what would become his sure tactics: volume, repetition, or the hint of old-time religion. That he played music on such a high level, then hardened it into a routine and finally lost his way, seems the saddest and most real story; much of the rest of the book of Ayler feels like apocrypha.

Copyright © 2004, The New York Times/Ben Ratliff

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(From The Chicago Tribune - 24th October, 2004) - US

Spirit of Ayler's music lives on in `Holy Ghost'

By Bill Meyer

Albert Ayler's death in 1970 at age 34 ended one of the most mercurial careers in jazz on a sour note. During the previous decade the saxophonist had exerted a profound impact on jazz, through his own recordings for the ESP and Impulse labels and through his close association with John Coltrane. But when his lifeless body was pulled from New York's East River on Nov. 25, 1970, Ayler had no record label and was estranged from his family and musical peers.

While the New York medical examiner's office simply stated that Ayler had drowned, associates such as saxophonist Charles Tyler and French concert promoter Daniel Caux deemed his death a suicide.

But today Ayler's music is very much alive. Not only do musicians such as Mars Williams, Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson -- who are too young to have seen Ayler play -- perform his compositions; they've incorporated his huge tone and high energy level into their own music. Last week Revenant Records released "Holy Ghost," a nine-CD boxed set of Ayler's music.

Revenant's last release, a collection of bluesman Charley Patton's complete recordings called "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues," won three Grammy awards in 2002, but "Holy Ghost" is even more impressive. Aside from one 1964 concert, none of "Holy Ghost" has been legally released, though some parts, such as Ayler's performance at Coltrane's funeral, have circulated among underground tape traders.

But Revenant President Dean Blackwood says not even bootleggers have had access to the recordings that bookend the set: Ayler's 1960 recording debut with a U.S. Army band, which appears on a brief 10th bonus CD, and his final recorded concert, which took place on July 28, 1970, in La Colle Sur Loup, France.

Impressive packaging

"Holy Ghost's" packaging is as impressive as its content. It comes enclosed in a faux-onyx replica of a hand-carved spirit box which, according to the project's art director Noel Waggener, is patterned on containers used by Pacific Northwestern Indian tribes to hold sacred possessions. In addition to the CDs, it includes a hardbound 208-page book, reproductions of contemporary fliers and pamphlets, and a dried flower.

A flower?

"The dried flower is a dogwood bloom," Waggener explained in an e-mail. "It is said that the cross Jesus was crucified on was made of a dogwood tree. The legend goes that after the crucifixion, dogwood trees would no longer grow strong enough to crucify a person on. Dogwood blooms thereafter grew stained with blood in the center and with holes punched into the ends of their petals to symbolize the nail holes in the cross."

The flower, like the box's title, underscores the deeply spiritual nature of Ayler's music. The saxophonist grew up in a devoutly Christian household in Cleveland, and that experience pervaded his music. Ayler's ululating solos crossed the utterances of worshipers speaking in tongues with the more profane, but equally ecstatic rhythm and blues honking he learned as a teen touring with harmonica player Little Walter.

Saxophonist Williams leads the group Liquid Soul, which combines jazz solos with contemporary urban rhythms. Since the mid-'90s he has also led Witches And Devils, which plays Ayler's compositions.

Speaking by telephone from his North Side home, Williams praised Ayler's "soulful, gospel-y melodies."

"They reach out in this prayerlike, folk song way that any person could sing," Williams says. "They were like prayers that reach deep into you soul and just grab you. He'd take these themes and use them as springboards into the free."

"Free," in Williams' parlance, refers to Ayler's improvisational methods. His music represented the next step in free jazz, which grew from Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Coltrane's rejection of bebop's structural restrictions.

Vandermark, a celebrated local saxophone and clarinet player who won a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1999, calls Ayler's music "a key breakaway from the harmonic basis of improvised music towards pure sound as a communicating force."

"The distance between his ideas and the expression of their content has been almost completely eliminated," Vandermark says. "His music couldn't exist in a conventional jazz framework, so he came up with a new set of expressionistic systems. To my mind, the fact that Ayler is not as well respected and known as Jackson Pollack points to a major discrepancy in the appreciation of improvised music as an art form."

Artist Pollack's drip-strewn canvasses were dubbed action paintings; Ayler played energy music. Mats Gustafsson, a Swedish reed player who helped secure some of "Holy Ghost's" music, says that energy was indivisible from Ayler's spiritually motivated urgency.

Emotional content

"That's the whole thing with Ayler, the emotional and the spiritual content that he's bringing in the music," Gustafsson said after a recent concert at the Empty Bottle. "It's so strong that you can't escape it."

The notions of freedom and spirituality that Ayler articulated with pieces titled "Universal Message" and "Universal Indians" transcended genre and sect. Alan Silva, who played bass with Ayler, says, "Albert was a messenger of the civil rights movement, the rights of religious people, the rights of Indians." Speaking from his home in Paris, Silva added, "He was exercising his First Amendment rights in the pursuit of art."

The boxed set illuminates every phase of Ayler's brief career. After leaving the Army, he moved to Scandinavia in 1962 to find compatible musicians and receptive audiences. He sounds cramped playing standards such as "Summertime" with the overly polite Finnish Herbert Katz Quintet. Sitting in with the Cecil Taylor trio in Denmark later that year, he sounds at home for the first time.

In 1964, Ayler moved to New York City and formed his first stable group with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray; these recordings represent his purest expression of passion and energy. Beginning in 1965, Ayler's trumpet-playing brother Donald became his principal collaborator. The brothers' music, which emphasized collective improvisations based on hymnlike melodies and manic marches, sounded like a space-age update of early New Orleans jazz.

Then Ayler signed with Coltrane's label, Impulse records, shortly after Coltrane's death in 1967, and his music changed dramatically. On New Grass, his third album for the label, the churning rhythms and Donald's buglelike calls were replaced by rock beats and bouncy songs with lyrics sung by Ayler and his new partner, Mary Maria. Holy Ghost's text documents the opprobrium that Ayler's peers heaped upon the record, but the set also includes raw demos for the sessions that suggest the record company toned down Ayler and Maria's millennial sentiments.

Silva, who played on the first two Impulse recordings, credits Ayler's creative restlessness with keeping him relevant.

"Albert said it in all of his works," he recalls. "The idea of transformation is inevitable in American art. It's what makes art American."

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune/Bill Meyer

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(From 24 Heures - 31st October, 2004) - France

Prophète du jazz, Albert Ayler ressuscite enfin

Un luxueux coffret rend hommage au saxophoniste mort en 1970, à 34 ans.

par Luca Sabbatini

«Mort par noyade», concluait à l’époque le rapport du médecin légiste. C’était le 25 novembre 1970. Albert Ayler, saxophoniste iconoclaste et défenseur de la cause des Noirs américains, venait d’être repêché dans les eaux glacées de l’East River new-yorkaise, après trois semaines de dérive. Le corps méconnaissable, boursouflé, avait la teinte délavée des cadavres en décomposition aquatique.

Suicide? Assassinat? Accident? Nul ne le saura jamais. Ce qui est sûr, c’est qu’il y a trois décennies, s’achevait à 34 ans, de manière sordide, brutale et mystérieuse une vie tout entière placée sous le signe de l’amour. Amour de la musique, mais aussi adoration quasi mystique pour le Créateur et ses créatures.

Sainte trinité

Véritable acte de foi, un luxueux coffret ressuscite aujourd’hui le Saint-Esprit d’une trinité du jazz moderne dont le Père s’appelait John Coltrane et le Fils Pharoah Sanders. La métaphore biblique peut paraître excessive, mais elle était revendiquée par le saxophoniste lui-même. Il y avait du saint François chez cet homme doux, au regard lointain. L’éloquence de ses prêches, la jubilation de ses improvisations auraient converti le plus sourd des oiseaux. Albert Ayler ne jouait pas du saxophone; il l’incarnait, lui, son souffle et son instrument.

Tout au long des neuf CD d’enregistrements live captés entre 1962 et 1970 dans un son presque toujours étonnant de clarté, il faut écouter avec attention la plainte extatique d’Albert Ayler. Sorte de hululement continu, son jeu à la prodigieuse intensité évoque tour à tour le chant des baleines, une version sonore du Cri de Munch, un rituel de peuplade primitive ou un appel de l’au-delà.

C’est parfois éprouvant, souvent envoûtant, toujours incroyablement engagé. Rarement la musique improvisée aura atteint pareille incandescence. Le ténor d’Albert Ayler semble cracher des flammes à chaque phrase. Des flammes purificatrices, qui balaient toute la vulgarité et la laideur du monde.

Autour de lui, on retrouve quelques grands libérateurs du jazz, du pianiste Cecil Taylor au trompettiste Don Ayler, le propre frère du saxophoniste.

Incantations et prières

Hymnes jubilatoires, fanfares tarabiscotées ou marches enthousiastes, les compositions d’Albert Ayler forment une ronde de la vie et de la mort, où prennent place mères et enfants (Mothers, Children), esprits et fantômes (Spirits, Ghosts), prophètes et sorciers (Prophet, The Wizard), incantations et prières (Bells, Truth is Marching In, Music is the Healing Force of the Universe, Oh! Love of Life).

Le mysticisme du Coltrane de A Love Supreme n’est bien sûr jamais loin. Mais alors que celui-ci s’oublie dans des abîmes de contemplation et de méditation, Albert Ayler reste en permanence guidé par une joie panique et torturée, un appétit vital insatiable qui libère d’immenses flots d’énergie.

Inlassablement remis sur le métier, ses thèmes fétiches se prêtent aux plus étourdissantes métamorphoses, ouvrent des espaces sonores alors à peu près inexplorés.

Il faut du courage (et beaucoup de technique instrumentale) pour maintenir une constante qualité musicale avec des improvisations coulées dans la chaux vive, éruptions volcaniques où les notes perdent leur identité propre pour se fondre dans une masse torride et furieuse. Avec d’autres improvisateurs, l’auditeur crierait vite au «n’importe quoi»! Chez Albert Ayler, la conviction, l’urgence deviennent palpables, se transmettent infailliblement à l’auditeur.

Outre sept heures d’enregistrements rares ou inédits, le label texan Revenant offre deux disques d’interviews d’Ayler ou de ses proches. Plusieurs documents — un livre richement illustré de 208 pages, une photo du musicien jeune, la copie d’une note manuscrite, des fac-similés de publications d’époque — complètent le programme strictement musical. Bref, cette somme rend enfin justice à l’un des grands visionnaires de la musique. Albert Ayler. Que son nom soit sanctifié. Que son règne vienne.

Copyright © 2004, 24 Heures/Luca Sabbatini

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(From Le Nouvel Observateur - 4th November, 2004) - France

Albert Ayler, le revenant

By Bernard Loupias

Le label Revenant, qui avait déjà consacré un coffret pharaonique au bluesman Charley Patton, érige cette fois un monument à la gloire du plus étrange des musiciens du free jazz des années 1960.

Dans les années 1960, sur son campus californien, John Fahey passait pour un sacré excentrique. Quand tout le monde se laissait pousser les cheveux, gobait du LSD en écoutant du rock psychédélique, ce type vêtu comme un clergyman se trimballait tout le temps avec des 78-tours de bluesmen oubliés ou des disques de Varèse ou de Boulez. Ce guitariste génial, mort en 2001, auteur d’une flopée d’albums éblouissants, n’aimait que ce qu’il appelait les «musiques crues» (raw music), où il devinait une honnêteté fondamentale. Avec son héritage, plutôt que de se payer une maison, ce fauché proverbial préféra fonder le label Revenant pour éditer du gospel antédiluvien, de la bluegrass obscure ou du Cecil Taylor. Mais son coup de maître restera l’invraisemblable coffret que, juste avant sa mort, il élabora à la gloire de son idole, Charley Patton, un des pères du Delta Blues. Une splendeur: trois bons kilos sur la balance, boîte toilée de vert, lettrage doré, deux livres (dont la thèse de musicologie de Fahey), les pochettes de tous les 78-tours de Patton en fac-similé, etc.

Aujourd’hui Dean Blackwood, son ami et avocat, poursuit l’aventure de Revenant avec un nouveau monument consacré à Albert Ayler, le plus irrécupérable des musiciens du free jazz. Dans un boîtier de plastique noir, des affichettes de concerts, des photos de famille, des magazines en fac-similé, une fleur porte-bonheur, neuf CD (deux d’entretiens et sept de musique inédite, dont la rencontre Ayler-Cecil Taylor en 1962 à Copenhague et ce que le saxophoniste joua lors des obsèques de Coltrane!), un extraordinaire livre de 208 pages avec notamment des textes d’Amiri Baraka (ex-LeRoi Jones) et de deux journalistes français: Marc Chaloin, qui consacre un texte définitif aux années européennes d’Ayler, et Daniel Caux, l’homme qui avait invité le saxophoniste à se produire aux Nuits de la Fondation Maeght à Saint-Paul-de-Vence en juillet 1970 et en profita pour l’interviewer pour France-Culture - interview que l’on retrouve ici. Bref, une folie exemplaire à une époque où les comptables dirigent les maisons de disques...

Tout le monde se souvient, dit-on, de ce qu’il faisait quand il a appris la nouvelle de l’assassinat de John F. Kennedy. Je ne connais pas un amateur de jazz qui ne se souvienne tout aussi précisément du choc qu’il a ressenti en entendant pour la première fois la musique d’Albert Ayler, ce Lautréamont de la note bleue, retrouvé mort à 34 ans, le 25 novembre 1970, dans les eaux glacées de l’East River, quelques mois à peine après son ultime triomphe à la Fondation Maeght. D’ailleurs, comment oublier ce son énorme doté d’un vibrato tout aussi impressionnant, ces réminiscences de ritournelles enfantines, de musiques de parades néo-orléanaises, de marches militaires, voire de sonneries de chasse à courre, qui soudain basculaient dans l’inconnu, dans un orage de clameurs célestes, un maelström d’anches sifflantes chevauchant une houle de cymbales et de peaux... Devant cette musique inouïe, on oscille toujours entre jubilation et terreur sacrée, colère ou extase, en tout cas malheur aux tièdes!

Ayler et son quintet se sont produits pour la première fois à Paris, Salle Pleyel, le 13 novembre 1966. Ce fut un scandale terrible. Si le concert avait lieu demain, ce serait pareil. Trente-huit ans après, la musique d’Ayler ne passe toujours pas. Sans doute parce qu’elle plonge ses racines les plus secrètes dans les transes de ces églises noires où des preachers enflammés appellent l’Esprit sur leurs fidèles. D’où croyez-vous que viennent les titres des thèmes d’Ayler - «Spirits», «Holy Spirits» ou «Prophecy»? La puissance de conversion de cette musique spirituelle, Daniel Caux l’a expérimentée. Elle a changé sa vie: «Fin 1965, j’ai acheté l’album "Bells", que j’ai écouté en boucle un mois durant. C’était si puissant que je n’ai pas vu - j’étais alors peintre - de possibilité pour moi de produire quelque chose d’aussi intense. Et j’ai arrêté la peinture.»

Copyright © 2004, Le Nouvel Observateur/Bernard Loupias

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(From Neue Zürcher Zeitung - 11th November, 2004) - Germany

Zwischen Vision und Wirrnis

Die CD-Box «Holy Ghost» zeigt diverse Facetten des Jazzsaxophonisten Albert Ayler  

By Christian Broecking

Albert Ayler träumte von Engeln, so gross wie das Empire State Building. Über Musik redete er in der Sprache der schwarzen Kirche. Sein Ton war laut und grell, manchmal machte er den Leuten Angst. Einen dreiteiligen grünen Lederanzug hatte er aus Europa mitgebracht, wo er Anfang der sechziger Jahre als amerikanischer Soldat stationiert war. Passend dazu trug er jeweils eine Ray-Charles-Brille. Und einen schwarzweissen Bart. Eine schillernde Persönlichkeit, wahrlich, und ein umstrittener Musiker. 34 Jahre nach seinem Tod ist nun eine opulente Box mit 10 CD, einem 210 Seiten starken Leinen-Hardcover-Buch (mit Essays von Amiri Baraka, Val Wilmer und Ben Young) und Reprints von Konzertankündigungen bzw. handschriftlichen Notizen erschienen. Die Aufnahmen waren grösstenteils unveröffentlicht, einzelne zirkulierten allenfalls auf obskuren Bootlegs.

«Wunderbare 22 Minuten»

«Wo waren diese wunderbaren 22 Minuten, während unser Leben verging», fragte Gary Giddins, der Star der amerikanischen Jazzkritik, nachdem er dank der neuen Box nun zum ersten Mal einen Mitschnitt eines Konzerts gehört hatte, das Albert Ayler 1963 in Kopenhagen zusammen mit Cecil Taylor gab. Auf einer anderen CD finden sich zwei Titel, die die U.S. Army 76th A.G. Band drei Jahre zuvor im französischen Orléans eingespielt hatte. Aus den biederen Bigband- Arrangements hört man hier nur vage jenen Solisten heraus, der in der folgenden Dekade für einige der unversöhnlichsten Platten sorgte, die der amerikanische Jazz bisher hervorgebracht hat.

Auch im legendären New Yorker Cellar Cafe, wo der Trompeter Bill Dixon vor vierzig Jahren mit Cecil Taylor die sogenannte «Oktoberrevolution» des Jazz anzettelte, trat Ayler auf. Das war die Zeit, als die «free spiritual music» - so nannte Ayler seine Musik - nur in den Coffee-Shops aufgeführt werden konnte, während die Clubs die Jazzstars buchten und den experimentierfreudigen Musikern à la Ayler bestenfalls sonntagnachmittags oder montags einen Gig bescherten, wenn die Traditionalisten pausierten. Ein Zeitzeuge wie der Jazzbassist Barre Phillips sagt heute noch, Aylers «Ghosts»-Trio, das erstmals im Juni 1964 im Cellar Cafe auftrat, sei eine der schockierendsten Formationen der Szene gewesen. - In «Holy Ghost» lässt sich das nachprüfen, es liegen unveröffentlichte Live-Aufnahmen des Trios vor.

1965 improvisierten Ayler und Co. zu Texten von Amiri Baraka: «We want poems that kill, setting fire and death to whitie's ass», hiess es hier. Kein Wunder, meint Sunny Murray - Albert Aylers Schlagzeuger - rückblickend, die Mitmusiker des kompromisslosen Saxophonisten hätten bisweilen befürchtet, ihre Karriere zu ruinieren, so radikal sei die Musik und die Aufführungspraxis damals gewesen. Der aufgeschlossene Sopransaxophonist Steve Lacy gab zu, in seiner eigenen Musik sei etwas kaputt gegangen, als er Ayler gehört habe - immer und immer wieder. Andere Zeitzeugen berichten von ähnlich skandalisierenden Auftritten Aylers, die er Mitte der Sechziger zusammen mit John Coltrane und Pharoah Sanders bestritt. - Im Sommer 1967 starb Coltrane. Er hatte sich zuvor gewünscht, dass Ornette Coleman und Albert Ayler an seiner Beerdigung spielten. In der exzellent recherchierten und liebevoll präsentierten «Holy Ghost»-Box finden sich auch Mitschnitte dieser Trauerfeier. Albert Ayler sagte dazu: «Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost.»

Ratlosigkeit

Als Ayler aber 1968 die Platte «New Grass» herausbrachte, stellte sich Ratlosigkeit ein unter Musikern und Fans; die neue Mischung aus Modern Gospel und Rock hatte etwas Verwirrendes, ja Verstörtes. - Bis vor kurzem noch war man sich nicht klar darüber, ob sich hier die kommerziellen musikalischen Absichten des Produzenten Bob Thiele abzeichneten oder ob Ayler auf diese Weise selber ein grösseres Publikum zu erreichen suchte. Die Produzenten der Box jedenfalls geben Thiele die Schuld.

Am 25. November 1970 wurde Ayler tot aus dem East River geborgen; er war nur 34 Jahre alt geworden. Am 4. Dezember 1970 wurde er in Cleveland beigesetzt, die Grabsteinplatte auf dem Veteranenfriedhof weist ihn irrtümlich als gefallenen Vietnam-Soldaten aus. Hatte er seinem Leben selbst ein Ende gemacht? War er Opfer eines Verbrechens geworden? Die näheren Umstände seines Todes konnten nie geklärt werden. Ayler aber lebte weiter als mythische Figur, als Jazzlegende. Sein musikalisches Erbe war dabei umstritten. Am 20. Dezember 1970 schrieb Archie Shepp in der «New York Times», Aylers Musik sei Wahrheit gewesen, «die seelenvolle Verkörperung eines kühnen, futuristischen Traums, der in einem leidenschaftlichen, unbeugsamen Sinn für Moral und Gerechtigkeit wurzelte». Der schwarze Kulturkritiker Stanley Crouch hingegen, der 1977 als Schlagzeuger auf dem Ayler-Tributalbum «Flowers for Albert» mitgewirkt hatte, betrachtet Aylers Musik heute als Sackgasse. Aus seiner Sicht haben Aylers Experimente dem Jazz geschadet. Musiker wie Ayler seien einfach nicht versiert genug gewesen, das Erbe des Jazz weiterzuführen.

Permanente Irritation

Tatsächlich hat der seltsame Ayler-Mix aus explosiven Free-Jazz-Soli und Kinderlieder-Melodien, ergänzt durch Anklänge an Spirituals, schottische Volkslieder und rudimentäre Marschmusik, heute noch etwas ebenso Faszinierendes wie Unnahbares. Auf den zwei letzten CD von «Holy Ghost» sind ausführliche Interviews mit Albert Ayler sowie mit dem Trompeter Don Cherry enthalten, die Auskunft geben über ein kurzes kreatives Leben zwischen Vision und Wirrnis. Dass Albert Ayler in einem seiner letzten, abstrusen Interviews zu Protokoll gibt, Frank Sinatra und Tom Jones hätten seine Ideen geklaut, stimmt eher traurig. Die Ayler-Box dokumentiert aber auch so, wie Albert Ayler permanent irritierte.

Copyright © 2004, Neue Zürcher Zeitung/Christian Broecking

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(From Billboard.com - 24th November, 2004.) - US

Albert Ayler: Holy Ghost

By Ron Hart

There is no greater jazz musician to have been fished out of New York's East River than Albert Ayler. But while the story behind his murky demise remains a great mystery of modern music, the legacy he left behind grows with every young saxophonist who discovers his short yet dynamic body of work, one that changed the course of freeform bop structure as we know it.

Although many of his albums remain available thanks to the efforts of such labels as Impulse!, Black Lion and ESP, never before has his career been celebrated to the degree of this nine-disc boxed set.

Titled "Holy Ghost" after Ayler's famous quote where he declared himself as one-third of jazz's holy trinity behind John Coltrane (the father) and Pharoah Sanders (the son), this gorgeous collection anthologizes the controversial tenor's professional years between 1962 to 1970 through rare and previously unreleased material.

Amongst the treasures found here include a fiery medley of "Love Cry/Truth Is Marching On/Our Prayer" from John Coltrane's funeral on July 21, 1967, a phenomenal reading of Gershwin's "Summertime" with the Herbert Katz Quintet from a 1962 Helsinki concert, a serious jam of "Venus/Upper and Lower Egypt" with the Pharoah Sanders Ensemble from January 1968 in New York and several kinetic performances of various Ayler-led quartets and quintets spanning his career.

"Holy Ghost" is encased inside a gorgeous black onyx Spirit Box replica of a hand-carved wooden original, with a 208-page hardbound book loaded with essays, photos and facsimiles of sacred possessions Ayler so dearly held to his heart.

Revenant continues to prove itself the finest reissue label in the country with this incredible piece. But most of all, "Holy Ghost" is a definitive look at one of the finest God-fearing men to ever step on the stage of the Village Vanguard, one whose legacy has finally been given the treatment it so lovingly deserves.

Copyright © 2004, Billboard.com/Ron Hart

Holy Ghost review list

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(From Newsday.com - 28th November, 2004.) - US

Blowing sax - and minds

By Gene Seymour

With a retail price of more than $100, 10 compact discs, 210 pages of hardbound accompanying text, a pressed flower and random replicas of 1960s memorabilia, "Holy Ghost" (Revenant) isn't the kind of box set you merely "buy." You marry it - sacred vows, rings and all. Or maybe you just move yourself and your things into it, committing yourself to a long-term lease absorbed in its glories, its mysteries, its melancholy.

Perhaps what it's really like is diving into an absorbing, demanding, picaresque novel chronicling the adventures of a romantic, martyred hero-saint - a story that becomes even more compelling when you know, in advance, how it turns out.

The protagonist of this epic is Albert Ayler, a name that still polarizes jazz fans of several generations 34 years after his body was dragged from the East River, where he'd apparently drowned himself.

For devotees, Ayler was the most impassioned, transcendent and (some maintain) lucid of tenor saxophonists associated with the 1960s "avant-garde" or "new thing" jazz music. For others, he was a wild, raw and (some maintain) undisciplined purveyor of the kind of keening, screeching, incoherent music that strained the tolerance of listeners whose threshold for cutting-edge jazz crested at John Coltrane's early 1960s albums.

Coltrane, for the record, asked Ayler to play at his funeral. And such is the reach and heft of this lovingly assembled box set that Ayler's very performance at the July 21, 1967, memorial service for Trane is included in "Holy Ghost," as are dozens of live tracks stretching back to 1962 in Helsinki, Finland, where Ayler began tentatively blowing people's minds with an otherwise conventional rhythm section. (There's also an eight-minute bonus disc of Ayler the serviceman in 1960 blowing the blues away with a U.S. Army dance band while stationed in France.)

One doesn't go far into the text of this epic before encountering the first revelation: a November 1962 gig in Copenhagen where Ayler sat in with none other than pianist and fellow insurgent Cecil Taylor. Their encounter was so lacking in documentation before now that some considered it mere legend, even a chimera. But there's nothing imaginary about the exuberant sense of boundary-busting possibility Ayler and Taylor aroused in each other.

From that point, "Holy Ghost's" narrative literally takes off for the sonic stratosphere as Ayler leads a series of bands into uncharted musical territory. It was a journey that both reflected and fed the social, cultural and political insurgency of a tumultuous decade. Ayler had become an icon of musical upheaval for such critics as Amiri Baraka, who contributes a wry, poignant reminiscence in the aforementioned accompanying text and whose underground black-arts magazine, Cricket, is replicated in this set as part of its evocative extras.

Four decades removed from the 1960s, Ayler's music can be absorbed and appreciated beyond the context of African-American resurgence and militancy. There are many listeners who will insist on hearing little more than screeching and yowling. What they're hearing, in part, is the vibrato-heavy tone of the classic rhythm-and-blues honkers with the range of expression broadened and deepened. One listener's cacophony is another's ecstasy. And ecstasy, spiritual and artistic, is the essence of Ayler's playing at its most vertically energetic.

When listening to performances of such Ayler compositions as "Truth Is Marching In," "Ghosts," "Holy Spirit," "Bells," "Mothers" and "Love Cry," one finds powerful melodic strains in Ayler's music that are harder than ever to find these days even among so-called "traditional" players. Where Coltrane was engaged in deconstructing harmonic progressions to within an inch of their lives, Ayler's improvisations, even at their wildest and densest, were totally driven by the melodies.

The overall effect, whether the group included Michel Samson's violin or Ronald Shannon Jackson's drums, resembled an all-night blues jam at a Mississippi roadhouse or a Pentecostal revival meeting with everyone shouting and singing in tongues.

Discs 8 and 9 are composed entirely of interviews with Ayler. The first of these, in 1964 and 1966, show Ayler as forthright, optimistic and gentler in manner than his playing would have implied. Over time, one hears the misunderstanding and relative neglect of his art getting to him more and more, though in a July 1970 tirade, he insists that Frank Sinatra, Tom Jones and the Beatles are beholden to his influence. Less than five months later, Ayler was dead. He was 34 years old.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday.com/Gene Seymour

Holy Ghost review list

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(From Creem Magazine - November, 2004)

Albert Ayler: Holy Ghost

By Brian J. Bowe

When saxophonist Albert Ayler died in 1970, his obituary in Down Beat said his playing "bore little resemblance to any other jazz, past or present." And 34 years later, his playing is still unlike anyone else's. A new box set, Holy Ghost, provides more evidence of that than anyone should need.

The folks at Revenant are known for their lush packaging, and Holy Ghost is no exception. The box (which is a gorgeous spirit box cast from handcarved original) contains 10 CDs of rare and previously unreleased recordings. Along with the discs comes a 208-page full-color hardbound book featuring new essays by Amiri Baraka, Val Wilmer, other Ayler scholars. It also comes with sacred Ayler relics (a small flower in an envelope, reproductions of photos and letters, and some reprints of the great literary chapbooks published during the his time and featuring some of his contemporaries).

The recordings are drawn from radio and TV sessions, studio demos, private recordings, and live concert footage, all of which give testament to the breathtaking breadth of Ayler's talent. His saxophone playing featured extreme vibrato, powerful playing around the melody (although sometimes returning to the melody). It's like a high-energy New Orleans funeral march or klezmer music from Space-Africa.

In many ways, his playing comes off as the logical extension, the next step after John Coltrane (although the influence went both ways between those two giants). With titles like "Spirits Rejoice," "Free Spiritual Music" and "Judge Ye Not," the music has an overtly holy bent, drawing from spirituals but taking them to new levels of Pentecostal outness (as though Ayler was playing his saxophone in tongues). It reeks of spiritual and physical liberation, and it helps cause feelings of both.

Not only was Ayler a jazz innovator, though. He was also one of the prime influences on the MC5 - an influence that can be easily heard when Ayler's work is compared to MC5 improv freakouts like "Black To Comm" or "Starship."

In the accompanying book, there's an account of a conversation between poet Ted Joans and clarinetist Albert Nicholas that shows why the Five found Ayler's approach so appealing.

"I turned to say something to Albert Nicholas," said Joans of an Ayler performance with Don Cherry, Gary Peacock and Sonny Murray. "And then like an unheard of explosion of sound, they started. Their sound was so different, so rare and raw, like screaming the word 'FUCK' in Saint Patrick's Cathedral on crowded Easter Sunday…The entire house was shook up. The loud sound didn't let up. It went on and on, growing more powerful as it built up. It was like a giant tidal wave of frightening music. It completely overwhelmed everybody."

Holy Ghost is overwhelming, too. It's overwhelming in its size, its breadth, its packaging, and its price. But really, it's a small price to pay for salvation.

Copyright © 2004, Creem Magazine/Brian J. Bowe

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(From The San Jose Mercury News - 5th December, 2004) - US

A startling rediscovery of a jazz original

ALBERT AYLER'S MUSIC DELIVERS JOLT ON 9-CD SET

By Richard Scheinin

One of the most exhaustively researched and lovingly produced jazz packages of recent years has just been issued by Revenant Records, a small independent label. The nine-disc set is called ``Albert Ayler: Holy Ghost.''

Coincidentally, ``Revenant'' means ``ghost'' or, according to Webster's, ``a person who returns, as after a long absence.'' The definition applies, eerily, to Ayler, a startling musician -- the Jimi Hendrix of jazz -- whose brief, mercurial career ended in 1970 when his body was fished out of New York's East River. ``Holy Ghost'' documents the musical evolution of the saxophonist and free-jazz icon, drawing on radio and television sessions, live concert and demo tapes and private recordings, most previously unissued or sporadically bootlegged.

Ayler (pronounced EYE-ler) was 34 when he died. No one knows what happened to him, whether his death was an accident, suicide or, as rumored, the result of foul play. His unresolved, mysterious death fit the arc of his life: Ayler played mysterious music.

Still, it carried his audiences into a world of delirious joy. For listeners hungry for something new, for music with a jolt, Ayler, 34 years dead, could be the medicine they need. I assure you, there is nothing like it. His music has as much impact as rap, punk or metal, and it is soulful, phenomenally so. It is a music of essences, rooted in the black church, blues and the broadly smeared expression of earlier jazz masters, including Sidney Bechet.

Influenced Coltrane

Largely forgotten, Ayler was profoundly influential during his short life: One of his greatest fans was the saxophonist John Coltrane, whose late-period explorations were influenced sharply by the younger player. Many of today's saxophonists, aping late Coltrane, don't even realize how closely they really are aping Ayler.

He wrote ringing, anthemic melodies with such titles as ``Truth Is Marching In,'' ``Spirits Rejoice'' and ``Ghost.'' These songs have an ancient, timeless feeling about them; on first hearing, there is a sense of already knowing the melodies, which draw on spirituals, parade marches and folk tunes.

Ayler would play these songs with a massive sound that often incorporated a swooning, almost drunken vibrato. Then his band would break into a collective roar -- a giant hosanna, waves breaking over waves, with Ayler blasting, moaning, glissing and gurgling on tenor, throwing out thick brush strokes of sound, coming at you on a bed of continuously spreading rhythms.

Like Coltrane, Ayler was a quester, a spiritual striver whose music can be heard as a march toward God, at a time when jazz was becoming a subversive, mystically inclined ``energy music.'' A religious man who grew up playing his horn in a Cleveland church with his musician father, Ayler spoke often about music as universal energy, an expression of the Holy Spirit.

Picking up on this theme, Revenant has housed the nine discs of ``Holy Ghost'' in a ``spirit box,'' molded from plastic to resemble a hand-carved funerary box of onyx. It holds a 208-page book with essays by Amiri Baraka, Val Wilmer, Ben Young and other free jazz chroniclers; career and recording chronologies; testimonials from artists who knew and played with Ayler; photos, memorabilia, even pressed forget-me-nots in a wax envelope.

The final two discs are of two hours of interviews with Ayler. In 1964, he is gentle and affable. In 1966, he is in a dark mood, consumed with the book of Revelation, warning, ``It's getting late now.'' In 1970, he defines improvisation as the ``expression of one's feeling through suffering pain.''

The package from Revenant -- a label founded by the late guitarist John Fahey, another iconoclast -- is over the top. But so was Ayler's music. He liked to say that his music wasn't about notes; it was about sounds and feelings -- and, oh man, did he have feelings. Certainly there were musicians and listeners, many of them, who cringed at Ayler's unhinged sounds, thought him unschooled, a primitive, a lunatic, a faker.

For some, Ayler's music still grates. I have always found it to be embracing and a challenge, matching melody with chaos, expressing a fierce beauty. Ayler's was a heart of peace inside a battle cry. Listening to him is like having your subconscious unpeeled, so that you enter a secret, roiling expanse of rage, desire, then intense calm. It's simultaneously soothing and unnerving to go there. His ``Sixties'' music continues to define our times.

In the beginning

The earliest recordings on ``Holy Ghost'' are 15 minutes of Ayler playing standards with a U.S. Army band in 1960 when he was stationed in France. But the set really starts with Ayler two years later, at 25, performing on a Helsinki radio show with a local, straight-ahead rhythm section. He plays ``Summertime'' and ``On Green Dolphin Street,'' bridging bebop and free jazz, sometimes sticking to the chord changes, sometimes riffing modally, sometimes veering toward the swoops and wide vibrato that would become his calling cards. Always, there is blues feeling; Ayler toured with Little Walter at 17 and referred to his music as ``the real blues . . . the new blues.''

Later that same year, in a Copenhagen television recording session by pianist Cecil Taylor's band, Ayler steps up to the microphone with braying low notes, squeals, flutterings -- the blues gone mad. This 23-minute segment already has been labeled the ``missing link'' in the documentation of long-form improvisation in free jazz. The music was no longer about chord changes, cyclic harmony and all that. It was about texture, vibration, new systems of organization and rarefied intuition.

But I prefer what unfolds beginning in 1964, in sessions by Ayler's own trio at a Manhattan club called the Cellar Cafe. Now we hear that sense of overwhelming spirituality, transmuted through Ayler's unforgettable melodies, the prickly, prodding bass of Gary Peacock (better known in recent years as Keith Jarrett's band mate) and the saturating drums of Sonny Murray.

When trumpeter Don Cherry joins the group in Copenhagen, there is absolute liftoff. Tangling with Cherry, Ayler's horn is yelping, bellowing, trilling across wide intervals: Coltrane sounds very much like this, three years later, on a famous live recording of a tune called ``Leo.''

If you can handle the varying sound fidelity on ``Holy Ghost,'' which ranges from poor to acceptable, there are all sorts of highlights as the music moves forward. Ayler plays with future Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali, who has a heavier attack than Murray. And in 1966, Ayler forms a quintet with his trumpet-playing brother Donald; their connection is symbiotic.

The first gig -- you get to hear it -- happens at La Cave, a club in Cleveland. Dutch concert violinist Michel Samson, a walk-on who became an Ayler regular for the next year or two, dives straight in, identifies tonal centers, double-stopping, sliding and underscoring the tunes, which now become bold declarations. Donald proclaims them, over and over, as Albert decorates his songs with Pentecostal filigree.

The music becomes tight, stripped down, as the brothers riff, and the rhythms grow more straightforward. Rhythm was important to Ayler: ``All music must have the roots, like of Louis Armstrong -- must have rhythmic truth,'' he once said. Here, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson pushes with rockish rhythms, or New Orleans-like rhythms, while the front-line instruments -- violin, trumpet and tenor -- fly up to commune at ever higher frequencies.

If you could get inside a swarm of butterflies and hear the massed sound of the thousands of beating wings, it might sound like this. Ayler might have likened the sound to the beatings of angel wings.

It's often said that the jazz avant-garde killed the jazz audience, because the music grew too intellectual. But this music is blood and guts. If jazz traditionally has been about tension and release, Ayler's music is largely about release. It's cathartic.

Jazz history

At the 1967 Newport Jazz Festival, the band came on after the Modern Jazz Quartet -- in the rain, like Hendrix at Woodstock. Ayler's best drummer, Milford Graves, was on hand and the music practically levitated; you hear it, feel it, on these recordings. You also get to hear Ayler, brother Donald, Graves and bassist Richard Davis performing at Coltrane's funeral in New York in 1967.

There are disappointments: a long, unfocused concert segment with Pharoah Sanders at Harlem's Renaissance Ballroom in 1968; embarrassing demos for Ayler's goofily misguided R&B album, ``New Grass,'' on the Impulse label, also in 1968; a Town Hall concert from 1969, with Donald Ayler as leader, that sounds like a distant field recording and is only of historical interest.

But ``Holy Ghost,'' overwhelmingly, pulls history back into focus. It sets Ayler back on his pedestal, alongside Coltrane, Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra and other revolutionary jazz figures. The music speaks eloquently, though Ayler, in the two discs of interviews, never quite articulates what his music was about. For long stretches, somewhat obsessively, without fielding a single question, he plows through the story of his life, sounding agitated, anxious to cram it all in.

He comes across as a good soul, but, toward the end of his life, something had tipped. He wants to be upbeat but can't help sounding rueful: ``I never go where I should be going,'' he says at one point. Life didn't work out for Ayler, but he left us his music, a holy gift.

`Albert Ayler: Holy Ghost'

Nine discs of rare and previously unissued recordings

Label: Revenant Records

Price: About $95 at most outlets

Copyright © 2004, The San Jose Mercury News/Richard Scheinin

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(Remco Takken is freelance muziekjournalist en radiomaker bij De ConcertZender - 2005) - Netherlands

Albert Ayler: Holy Ghost

By Remco Takken

Het zat heel eenvoudig inelkaar, in de saxofonistenwereld van de jaren zestig. John Coltrane was de Vader, Pharoah Sanders de Zoon, en Albert Ayler de Heilige Geest. Althans, zo zag Albert Ayler het zelf. Een nieuwe prestigieuze box met als titel ‘Holy Ghost’ laat horen hoe Ayler kwam tot deze gevleugelde woorden. Negen cd’s lang.

Het was 25 november 1970 toen Aylers dode lichaam werd gevonden in de New Yorkse East River. Hij werd slechts 34 jaar oud, zijn carrière als saxofonist besloeg slechts tien jaar. Tijdens dat korte leven had niet alleen de jazz een ander aangezicht gekregen, ook Ayler had inmiddels de nodige schepen achter zich verbrand. Van een hard studerende Sonny Rollins-epigoon werd hij free jazzblazer met een gospeltic. Van daaruit haalde hij de nietsvermoedende luisteraar iedere grond onder de voeten vandaan. Ritme, melodie en tijdsduur werden in het Albert Ayler Trio als een elastiekje aangespannen en weer losgelaten. Rond 1968 wilde Ayler de souljeugd naar zich toe trekken met een funky groep rond drummer Bernard Purdie en basgitarist Bill Folwell.

Verloren gewaande snippers
De onlangs uitgebrachte overzichtsdoos bevat vooral verloren gewaande snippers met historisch materiaal, veel (lange) interviews en meer. De stormachtige muziek tijdens de begrafenis van John Coltrane, een informeel en tot nu toe onuitgebracht concert in Frankrijk, een van de weinige opnames van Aylers geestelijk getroebleerde broer Donald, een concert in de Rotterdamse Doelen. Het is teveel om op te noemen.

Wat er niet op staat? In feite is volledig voorbijgegaan aan de reguliere platen, de albums die unaniem worden geroemd in alle jazz encyclopedieën. Naar ‘Spiritual Unity’, ‘Bells’, ‘Spirits Rejoice’, ‘Live In Greenwich Village’, of ‘Music Is The Healing force Of The Universe’ zal de geinteresseerde leek vergeefs zoeken. ‘Holy Ghost’ is de definitieve vervolmaking van Albert Aylers platenouevre. Alle composities die ook maar enigszins van belang zijn in Aylers relatief kleine oeuvre zijn aanwezig in onuitgebrachte live-versies.

Army Band
Ook de allereerste opnames die Ayler ooit maakte zijn te vinden in deze box. Deze nooitgehoorde eerste sessie uit het Amerikaanse leger dateert uit 1960, twee jaar eerder dan de opnames die al verschenen onder de titel ‘First Recordings’. Ayler was 24 jaar oud, hij stond op een kruispunt in zijn leven. De brave tenorsaxofonist van de 76th AG Army Band wilde uit het keurslijf stappen van Charlie Parkers akkoordendwang, maar vooralsnog speelt hij keurig mee op ‘Tenderly’ en ‘Leap Frog’. Hier kon toch niemand bezwaar tegen hebben, maar dat zou snel veranderen.

Saxofonist en jeugdvriend Lloyd Pearson herinnert zich Aylers terugkeer uit het leger, en bespeurde een enorme omslag in diens spel: “Ik zei: damn, the cat sure done got weird! Iedereen was bezig met akkoordenschema’s, en als je dat niet deed, dan vond men dat je niet kon spelen. Hij werd afgewezen door het publiek, door de muzikanten, door iedereen eigenlijk. Ze lachten om zijn stijl, omdat ze het nog nooit gehoord hadden.”

Domme mentaliteit
Om de in zijn ogen domme mentaliteit van de Amerikanen te ontlopen, vertrekt Ayler naar Scandinavië. Daar zou zijn vooruitstrevende muziek beter worden begrepen door het jazzminnende Europese publiek. Hij kan er goede opnames maken en verwante musici ontmoeten. De stormachtige groei die zijn spel in die tijd doormaakt is duidelijk te horen op de eerste cd in de ‘Holy Ghost’-box.

In het Finse Herbert Katz Quintet klinkt Ayler nog als een jonge hondenversie van Sonny Rollins: vrolijk, anarchistisch maar vooral swingend naast de vaardige gitarist-bandleider. De liedjes ‘Summertime’ en ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ zijn integer neergezet, duidelijk is dat de noord-europeanen zeer toegewijde bebop-adepten zijn.

Duikvlucht naar piepknor
Ayler maakt in de loop van 1962 een regelrechte duikvlucht van vrolijke clubjazz naar regelrechte ‘piepknor’, zoals vrije improvisatie destijds werd genoemd. Albert Ayler had de avontuurlijke trompettisten Bill Dixon en Don Ellis ontmoet, en is speciale gast bij het Cecil Taylor Quartet, een vrij improviserende avantgardegroep waarin Aylers latere drummer Sunny Murray meespeelt. Er is een goed klinkende opname van zo’n twintig minuten bewaard gebleven van een televisie-uitzending rond Cecil Taylors pianospel. Een mooie aanvulling op Aylers oeuvre als pionier van de free jazz.

Altsaxofonist Jimmy Lyons en drummer Sunny Murray vormen hier het hechte koppel waarvoor Cecil Taylor later een passend woord vond: ‘unit’.

Dronken rondzwalkende noten
De publieke doorbraak van Albert Ayler als bandleider, componist en saxofoonvernieuwer laat nog even op zich wachten. In juni 1964, een maand voor de historische monosessies van de elpee ‘Spiritual Unity’, maakt de Amerikaanse dichter Paul Haines een opname van een concert dat later ettelijke malen op plaat en cd zal verschijnen.

Dat een deel van dit materiaal nu opnieuw, en wederom in een iets andere configuratie in de ‘Holy Ghost’-box is uitgebracht, kan worden gezien als een zwaktebod. De rechten van de ‘Spiritual Unity’-sessie ligt bij het label ESP-Disk’, dat geen medewerking verleende aan de uitgave van de cd-doos. Samensteller Ben Young moet gedacht hebben dat het remasteren van een uitgemolken live-opname de meest galante manier was om tóch op een legale manier iets te kunnen uitbrengen van de belangrijkste periode uit Aylers leven.

Het ‘Cellar Café Concert’, ook bekend onder de titels ‘Prophecy’ en ‘Albert Smiles With Sunny’ is hoe dan ook mooi om naar te luisteren. Het zijn niet alleen de eerste opnames van een Albert Ayler die zichzelf eindelijk gevonden heeft. Het trio waarmee hij speelt is met een gerust hart ‘definitief’ te noemen: Gary Peacock is de bassist die zich op de gekste momenten losmaakt van thema, akkoorden en melodie, Sunny Murray is de vrije geest achter de drums.

In het bijgevoegde hardcover-boek ‘Holy Ghost’ is een interessante passage opgenomen over het vrijzwevende saxofoonspel van Ayler in 1964. Daarin wordt gesteld dat een klein aspect van Aylers muziek nog altijd open staat voor nader onderzoek. Bestaat de in het Cellar Caféconcert steeds terugkerende ‘dronken rondzwalkende noot’ niet eigenlijk uit een frase van verschillende tonen in één? Wat is het toch met dat gekmakend langzame vibrato? wordt het hier ingezet als een afgeraffelde triller? Alleen al als studiemateriaal van geflipt saxofoonspel, om te vergelijken met de emotionele uitbarstingen op het studio-album ‘Spiritual Unity’, bevat dit concert onschatbaar materiaal.

Financiële armslag
Na het plotselinge succes van deze muzikale wervelstorm is er in het najaar van 1964 genoeg financiële armslag om het trio uit te breiden met een in avantgardekringen vermaard trompettist. Don Cherry was bekend van zijn werk met Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane en Archie Shepp. In de jaren tachtig komt zijn naam op opvallende wijze terug in het nieuws: hij is de vader van zangeres Neneh Cherry.

Cherry doet mee tijdens een Europese tournee waarvan postuum het een en ander op plaat en cd verschijnt. De tweede cd uit de nieuwe Aylerbox bevat een Deens concert met Cherry dat eerder al verscheen onder de titel ‘The Copenhagen Tapes’. De opnames zijn zeer de moeite waard vanwege de korte, maar zeer intense momenten van gelijktijdig samenspel tussen Ayler en Cherry. De foto’s van dit duo in het bijgevoegde boek zijn afkomstig van Ton van Wageningen. Hij was aanwezig bij een vergelijkbare sessie in Nederland, waarvan opnames later uitkwamen onder de titel ‘The Hilversum Session’.

Zwart racisme
De vroegste vormen van ‘free jazz’, ‘free music’ of ‘the new thing’ hadden een duidelijke connectie met de zwarte burgerrechtenbeweging. Het was een uiting van de tijd, ook free jazz maakte deel uit van het vocabulair van de ‘protestgeneratie’ in de jaren zestig. Een bijverschijnsel van de ‘black power’-achtige denkbeelden van zwarte jazzmuzikanten was de weigering nog langer met blanken te spelen. In de Holy Ghost-box is een jam te horen met pianist Burton Greene, uit het midden van de jaren zestig. Niet veel later zou Greene, een blanke jood, het steeds verstikkender klimaat van de New Yorkse ‘vrije’ muziekscene ontvluchten. Tot op de dag van vandaag woont hij in Amsterdam.

Deze vorm van zwart racisme heeft een hoorbaar negatieve invloed op de muzikale kwaliteit van een van de sessies in de box. Op een nooit eerder verschenen plaatkant van het Pharoah Sanders Ensemble (met Ayler) speelt een nogal houterige drummer, Roger Blank. De originele slagwerker van deze groep, Bobby Kapp, was goed ingespeeld. Helaas had hij niet de gewenste donkere kleur om mee te mogen doen op een elpee voor het Jihad-label van de militante dichter Amiri Baraka.

In Cleveland, op 15 april 1966 om precies te zijn, mocht de Nederlandse violist Michel Samson meedoen in Aylers groep. Dat viel niet bij alle vaste bandleden in goede aarde. De zwarte altsaxofonist Charles Tyler weigerde in een ‘gemengde’ groep te spelen, en keerde direct huiswaarts.

Merkwaardige bezetting
Albert Aylers groep, met onder andere broer Donald Ayler op trompet en Ronald Shannon Jackson of Sunny Murray als drummer, was in 1965 uitgegroeid tot een kwintet, maar eindigde aldus met een klassieke violist in plaats van een tweede saxofonist.

De avontuurlijke muziek van deze merkwaardige bezetting vormde de kern van de klassieke Impulse-elpee Albert Ayler ‘In Greenwich Village’. Het is ook de belangrijkste reden om het ‘Holy Ghost’-retrospectief aan te schaffen: de schijfjes 3 tot en met 5 zijn helemaal gewijd aan de ‘violenbezetting’. De enkele songs die al eens eerder (op een bootleg) zijn uitgebracht, klonken nooit eerder zo goed. Een extra verrassing naast de bijdragen van violist Michel Samson is het gastoptreden van een Ayler-leerling: tenorsaxofonist Frank Wright, in Cleveland. In dit stadium van zijn carrière leek zijn geluid nog precies op dat van zijn meester. Het meegeleverde boekje geeft waterdicht uitsluitsel over het ‘Who’s Who’ tijdens de saxofoonduels.

Jazzrockprobeersels
Hoe je het ook bekijkt, de Impulse-elpee ‘New Grass’ uit 1968 blijft Aylers meest controversiële plaat. Critici boorden de poging om soul, rhythm and blues en jazz tot een spirituele eenheid te vormen volledig de grond in. Fans van het eerste uur keerden Ayler de rug toe, en veel nieuwe fans heeft het album niet opgeleverd: ‘New Grass’ verkocht voor geen meter.

Op de zesde schijf van de nieuwe cd-doos staan ruwe demoversies van een aantal stukken die bedoeld waren als een nieuw begin in Aylers carrière. Al snel wordt pijnlijk duidelijk dat er flink is gerotzooid met het uiteindelijke (gehate) eindproduct. Inderdaad, Mary Parks, alias Mary Maria, schreef de wat naïeve pseudo-religieuze teksten, en ja, voor het eerst sinds 1963 houden de muzikanten netjes de maat, spelen ze een bluesschema en is de muziek als geheel goed te volgen.

Echter, zo duf en onlogisch de plaat ‘New Grass’ klinkt, zo sympathiek zijn de originele demo-versies van augustus 1968. Het valt te hopen dat er in de archieven van GRP Impulse nog originele meersporenbanden te vinden zijn met alle oorspronkelijke muzikale bijdragen van zangeres Maria Mary, rocksichord-toetsenist Cal Cobbs en drummer Bernard Purdie. Het is hartstikke leuk materiaal, toegankelijk, dat wel, maar met een gekke twist. De veelbeschimpte, want bescheten klinkende sixtiesproductie die uiteindelijk werd uitgebracht kan dan eventueel als bonusvulling worden meegegeven op een apart cd’tje.

Vooruitziende blik
De fatale afloop van Aylers leven betreft niet alleen zijn mysterieuze dood. Tijdens zijn laatste grote concert in Frankrijk kwam hij bewust met oud repertoire, en veelgespeelde songs. Waarom deed hij dat? Eindelijk kon hij laten zien waar hij voor stond; er kwam een groot pubiek, er zouden tv- en geluidsopnames worden gemaakt. Ayler wilde zich niet geven. Niet omdat hij het einde voorvoelde, en slechts wilde terugblikken. De tenorsaxofonist was bang dat hij opgelicht zou worden met al die dure film- en opnameapparatuur om hem heen. Achteraf zou hij gelijk krijgen. De twee albums opgenomen bij Fondation Maeght zouden keer op keer worden heruitgebracht, zonder dat de muzikanten er een cent voor terugzagen.

Aylers vooruitziende blik maakt het ons helaas onmogelijk te bepalen waar hij met zijn muzikale carrière heen in wilde in de jaren zeventig. Hij zou 1971 niet halen, en nog steeds is de doodsoorzaak onduidelijk. Contrabassist Steven Tintweiss noemt in het Holy Ghost-boek de nieuwe composities waarmee de saxofonist bezig was, maar laat in het midden om wat voor muziek het gaat.

Brutale losheid
We zullen het moeten doen met deze laatste worp. De archiefvondsten van constant hoog kaliber maken veel duidelijk. Dat een jazzgigant als John Coltrane verbluft was, en zwaar onder de indruk van deze muziek, is goed voorstelbaar. De brutale losheid en de emotionele fijnstamperij van de vroege free jazz is helder en direct. De ontkenning van lichtvoetigheid en het uitblijven van gewiekste podiumtrucs maakt deze muziek ‘heavy’ en ‘deep’. ‘Dat ik hier zelf niet op ben gekomen’, moet Coltrane de Grote Goddelijke Zoeker hebben gedacht. De bewondering ging zó ver, dat de veelbesproken veteraan om raad vroeg bij de jonge beeldenstormer. Kort daarop speelde er een met Ayler vergelijkbare saxofonist in Coltrane’s groep: Pharoah Sanders. In dat opzicht leidde Ayler de weg, hoe vreemd dat ook mag lijken. Albert Ayler was de Heilige Geest, Pharoah Sanders de Zoon, Coltrane de Vader die leerde van zijn kinderen...

Copyright © 2005, Remco Takken

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(From Double Bassist - No. 33, Summer, 2005) - UK

Albert Ayler: Holy Ghost

By Matthew Simpkins

Albert Ayler (ten sax)
Heikki Annala, Gary Peacock, Steve Tintweiss, Mutawef Shaheed, Bill Folwell, Richard Davis, Sirone, Ibrahim Wahen (dbs)
Revenant 213 (9 CD box-set plus pp. 208 full colour hardback book)

     If Cecil Taylor blitzed jazz's rhythmic and harmonic palette, if Ornette Coleman liberated musicians from harmonic rigour, if John Coltrane endowed jazz with spiritual fire, then Albert Ayler arguably represents the first truly free jazz: freedom from music's nuts and bolts and total immersion in jazz as a raw emotional experience.
     Ayler's music was overwhelming, intense, exhausting - sometimes delirious, sometimes crushingly dark - a brutal music of ecstasy and torment. Revenant's astounding new set is effectively a religious artefact: a carved box, dried flowers, photographs, a hardback book, discs of Ayler's music and discs of his voice, exhaustively researched, essential and fascinating.
     The box begins in Helsinki in 1962 with a deliciously bizarre meeting of Ayler with a slick bop group. Sonnymoon for Two finds Ayler edgily buzzing above the band, his earthy intonation and tone, his wails and squawks sounding ridiculo