Albert Ayler quintet - Stockholm/Berlin 1966 re-issue...

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

AYLER'S 1966 European concerts re-issued on Hat Hut...

Review from the Guardian 21/10/2011 (John Fordham)

"The writer Amiri Baraka described the scorching sax sound of Albert Ayler – the free-jazz saxophonist who died in 1970, aged 34, in New York's East River – as "like the singing from a black hole". But for all its stark expressionism, Ayler was blasting this spine-chilling noise across a familiar landscape of early-jazz street marches, spirituals and gospel. This album features remastered versions of tapes made in Berlin on this once-controversial artist's European tour of 1966, plus the first release of music recorded in Stockholm on the same trip. Ayler's blazing shows were following sets by Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz and other more orthodox jazz artists, but his finales roused the European crowds to ecstatic acclaim just the same. Sometimes the music sounds like the work of a dishevelled Salvation Army band, sometimes like a series of strange, hooting operatic arias, in which jaunty themes Sonny Rollins might edge their way into the midst of big, rapturously lamenting harmonies. The repertoire is much the same from both gigs (including a shimmering Truth Is Marching In and the see-sawing, lamenting Bells), and has an even more emotional quiver for the addition of fine Dutch violinist Michel Samson, meshing evocatively with the vibrato and clarion lead-lines of Ayler's trumpeter brother Donald."


I really like Ayler from this period. Not sure I could listen him every day/all day but he's a wonderfully cleansing force to cut thro much of the limp dross that passes for "jazz" today.

BN.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

yep bluesie he cuts through ...

... but being a mindless hedonist i just love the New grass album as well ...

[Ian Thumwood]

Interesting to read the comments here as I would have to pick up on the comparison between Ayler's music and the "limp dross" of much of today's jazz. I think there is plenty of jazz being payed in 2011 which is equally as strident and scorching as this - the recent gig I went to over the summer with Bunky Green and Rudresh Mahanthrappa was no less acidic. In some respects, it was very much like industrial strength Jackie McLean although perhaps more complex and less immediately attention grabbing.

To some extent, there is the "naughty schoolboy" element about Ayler's music. The "New grass" album is a very good example of this and I would have to say that this is one of my mst frequently played CD's, even if it is a bit corny in places. I very much like certain aspects of the music and the better elements are appealing not so much because they are "Avant Garde", but because the music sounds so traditional. I mean this in the jazz context as you could almost imagine this ,music being cranked out in New Orleans sixty-odd years earlier. It is wierd to me how Bluesnik and Jazzrook in other posts have commented favourably on the progressive nature of Ayler's work however I feel that you can almost consider him on the same context as someone like Lester Bowie who was an alleged "Avant gardest" despite having an ear definately tuned towards popular music and an understanding of the kind of jazz played in the 20's and 30's.

Forty years on, the only thing that is "modern" about Ayler's tenor playing which is like a "shock and awe" version of Sonny Rollins (but nowhere near as creative or capable of stringing out a cohesive improvised line over a fraction of the distance) is the abrasive quality of some of his work. From a harmonic point of view, I don't feel that Ayler (as much as I like some of his music) was at all "Modern" and definately pitched somewhere between more Traditional elements and perhaps Horace Silver at the most adventurous. i.e. Ayler was no genius when it came to understnading harmony and elements of his technique seem to me to be a device to by-pass this problem.

What is fascinating is how this music seems to have been absorbed by the mainstream. Loose Tubes were parodying this kind of thing back in the mid-80's. I don't buy the idea that so much of today's jazz is limp dross but it is fascinating to see how contemporary players have picked up the baton when it comes to playing "outside." Check out Joe Lovano's recent "Us Five"project and I feel that here is a player with greater technique who can employ "Ayler-isms" in a context that is thrilling both from a rhthmic point of view and within a challenging harmonic and formic content as well.

There was an interesting review of a Guiseppe Logan CD on "All about jazz" a few years back which essentially suggested that some of those who followed Ayler's lead were not technically up to the challenge in the way that jazz has now developed. It would be fascinating to hear Ayler had he lived and suggest that he may have ended up evolving into an American Gato Berbeiri. For me, Ayler always seems like a line in the sand with the development in jazz and along with the likes of Cecil Taylor, an example of a musician who was so shocking that jazz took 10-15 years to take stock. Listening in 2011, the music played around the same time as Ayler's best work by composer's such as Andrew Hill or even Herbie Hancock now sounds more challenging as , upon reflection, we can make a better connection between Ayler's approach and more archaic forms of jazz.

Wondered if Bluesnick will be checking out the clarinetist George Lewis next?

[burning dog]

Not surprising that people have absorbed Ayler. He died over forty years ago. Forty years before that Loius Armstrong was just out of short trousers to put things in perspective. The social economic background was different in 1968 from today and although by then jazz was no longer the main listening of Black America, the music filtered down/through to other black genres. There was a "connect". Now fire music's function is more to appeal to certain peoples character than responding to the outside world, and "Shocking" music is a part and parcel of the rock/pop entertainment business.


As CLR 'Harry' James famously asked in his 'When Swing was In', "What do they know of Jazz who only Jazz know?"

[Serial_Apologist]

If as Ian implies Ayler was as unprogressive as he claims, how come then that players Ian profeses admiration for have taken him on board? By all accounts Ayler had mastered more than "the rudiments" prior to being called up - how fascinating it wouild have been to hear him in the late 50s! - and it was in the wake of terrible army experiences that he changed approach. The actual playing has more to do with sound possibilities than the old logic, the possibilities for producing new sounds from a saxophone; regardless (dare one say) of motivations, political, racial, psychgological, for a moment, this was "in the air" at the time: think of Cage's call to listen to sounds, and live electronic transformation of instruments to "hear the otherwise inaudible" (Stockhausen Mikrophonie I) - so there is an ironic grain of truth in Ian's comment that he evolved this way of playing to circumvent improvising over changes.

[Ian Thumwood]

S-A

Don't agree!!

I was not trying to denigrate Ayler's music rather state that for as something with such an "extreme" reputation, the music he produced does have an archaic quality about it which I am sure was totally on purpose. Even more that with another "out" player, Ornette Coleman, there is a very strong connection with older forms of music in Ayler's approach. It think you make a good point about refering to Cage and Stockhausen (neither of whom I am that familiar with) but you can hear similarities with a player like George Lewis or, if you want to go more remote, Ayler to my estimation shares the same raw qualities with someone like Charley Patton or Blind Lemon Jefferson. Ayler's music has a visceral quality about it which eschews the more esoteric notions of 20th Century Composers like Stockhausen. Even Cage's music sounds more twee and charming than shocking these days - a bit like a maverick, 20th Century Michael Haydn?

As far as "sound possibilities", Ayler was harking back to an earlier school of tenor players that grew out of Coleman Hawkins albiet taken to a previously unheard of extreme that even Illinois Jacquet could not have predicted. Small wonder than contemporary players are able to make connections between the likes of Ayler and Ben Webster as there is a lot in common there. I'm not sure how conscious Ayler was with Cage's or Stockhausen's music and whilst I concede that there was a heady brew of experimental music in the 60's, I am sure that his inspiration would have been derived from other, Black sources.

I suppose that this all comes down to the notion of what is "Modern" in 2011 or indeed was has remained "Modern" since the late 60's. As I said earlier, Ayler's music is very much of it's time (just like Louis Jordan on the other thread) whereas players like Herbie Hancock or the late, Andrew Hill may have chosen a less radical approach at the time but ultimately managed to transcend the 1960's. Listen to someone like Eric Dolphy and the music he produced sounds far more adventurous even if it is more considered. I'm not convinced that Ayler would have continued in the same vein. In my opinion, understandling the nuts and bolts of the music in infinite detail (especially with an understanding of harmony that is probably second to none in jazz) has always served to ensure that Hancock always seems more radical even if the music may be easier in the ears.

In summary, Ayler fits squarely in the jazz tradition and his music wasn't quite the break with the jazz of the past in a way that someone such as Eric Dolphy was. The comparison with a more recent player like Lester Bowie shows how the music can sometimes embrace both ends of jazz tradition. Ayler was no different.

[burning dog]

Not much to diasgeree with in your latest post Ian.

I think Ayler was more concerned with being a radical iconaclast than modern (though much more just being "a musician" I guess, outside influence is crucial but not always at the front of a musicans mind), though a radicalism that paradoxically emphasised traditional black hymns, marching bands and collective playing.


Herbie Hancock was very "modern" in the late 60s early to mid 70s, in some ways more than the fire musicians, but I doubt he has much time for the concept of avant garde. He used electronica to make NEW sounds rather than imitate old ones and his black pop references were contemporary (there's nothing that reminds me of ELP in his 1969 -76 output!!) but he always wanted to reach a more general audience to a greater or lesser extent, and I don't think it was just for his own bank balance.

His fusion came from within more than anyone in this era by the sound of it (Someone used this phrase somewhere else on the board, maybe SA?)

On acoustic piano HH's harmonic sense and touch can make near dissonance sound seductive.

The problem I have is when young musicians are compared with 'the old lot' in the fire/free form genre it sounds a bit contrived to me

I agree about Ornette and his old fashoined bluesiness but always felt this aspect of his playing is pretty much unselfconscious. Aylers archaism must have been deliberate surely?

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

IAN # "Wondered if Bluesnick will be checking out the clarinetist George Lewis next?

HELL, Ian, I'm engrosed in a Johnny Dodds CD I picked up in a charity shop! "Blue clarinet stomp" etc. Could almost be Roland Kirk. Backwards, forwards, BUT Comrades, never sideways.


Trane (for example) obviously thought Ayler had real merit and I think a lot of the impact was indeed the (black american) mood/anger of the '60s. "Context, context context" as we say in New Jazz Labour. Although kind of weird that Gary Peacock went from THAT to Keff Jarrett, the most "Elton Johnesque" of lounge pianists.

I still find ALBERT greatly refreshing.

BN.

[burning dog]

Tough on neo-bop, tough on the causes of neo-bop.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i find that Ayler is heavily 'present' in his music in a way that few others manage .... the sound, the raucous, the traditionalism, the freedom and the intent matter .... i think he 'performed' rather than 'played' as Dolphy might ...or Rollins with the incomparable Mr Kirk somewhere nearer to Ayler [and where does that leave Mr Shepp ... you can well ask] the point for me of Ayler is that he conveys his spirituality magnificently, he is a preacher ... a bath of somewhat disconcerting refreshment with no prisoners taken, not in the least arid or intellectual but vital and slap in the here and now ...

[Jazzrook]

I still lament the fact that the BBC wiped the tapes for Albert Ayler @ London School of Economics which was recorded in 1966 for 'Jazz Goes to College' but never shown. Also incredible that no film footage of any Ayler performance seems to exist.

[Ian Thumwood]

BD

I agree about the contrived nature of more modern attempts at "fire music" but I think jazz left a lot of this kind of playingf behind in the early 70's. That said, I saw a French trio of tenor, bass and drums / small percussion ripping into a mixture of Ornette meets Albert ar Vienne about 10 years ago. Most of the audience quickly left and I was left with about 5 other people really digging what they were doing.

Here's some music that , to me, has taken it's cures from this era of jazz but made something different even if the record is now an amazing 39 years old. Definately not limp dross. Don't see many people championing this musician since the days of King kennytone.

[Ian Thumwood]

just found this on Youtube. Never heard it before but a record I have read masses of positive comments about - a truly iconic record. Hugely impressed by this group. The trumpets are brilliant. Not sure who is who but this music is very Ellingtonian. Absolutely brilliant.

[Ian Thumwood]

Press the replay button in the top LH corner

[Princess Hello]

I don't know if these are the Stockholm recordings in question but there are very early sessions with him playing with a pick-up rhythm section amid total mutual incomprehension, picking his way very gingerly and gently. It is the saddest music in the world.

Yes, 'New Grass' is corny but it always gets me in the throat. Maybe, like Dolphy it's because he died so young and so soon afterwards. 'Free at last'!

And yes there are strong links back to Johnny Dodds - an unsung all-time great, the only man you might fast forward over a Louis Armstriong solo for.