Albert Ayler, part II.

Here is an earlier clip, from a 1963 recording:




This recording ought to be a classic. It's stark raving gorgeous, and just about everyone I've spoken to agrees with me. It's not even terribly rare or unappreciated, either - it gets blogged about all the time, it seems.

I've always been just a little bit confused by this track, and by that whole first album in general. I can't honestly say I've done the deep research on Ayler's career like I have with some other people (I think I'd rather be a fan and not make the transition to expert). But I haven't been aware of much early, transitional, pre-mature-voice recordings - really, I only know this album. It's not clear to me from what I've read whether this album is Ayler before he figured out his own sound, or if he's just keeping it toned down for the straights. Either way, it wasn't long before he was working with folks that were willing to abandon straight rhythm and Western pitch and harmony with him. Still, I'm not entirely convinced that he isn't reacting to the band and the tune the way any good musician does, and the breadth of style and approach in this tune alone (let alone in contrast to the rest of his recorded output) show Ayler to be not just good, but great.

One thing that crops up in a lot of assessments of this track is that the Swedish rhythm section "didn't understand Ayler's playing." I don't know who the first critic was that said that, but it's a cop-out - and, like the old story that Louis Armstrong started scat singing on "Heebie Jeebies" because he dropped his music during the take, it doesn't take long to disprove it just by listening to the recording carefully. For one thing, that's Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen on the bass. He's like the Swedish Henry Grimes. He can and does play anything and everything, and sounds great doing it every time. This is not someone who wouldn't understand Albert Ayler, especially when Ayler is playing old chestnuts like "Summertime" and "Bye Bye, Blackbird." I can concede that there are moments on the rest of the album where the dissonance between the mostly inside playing of the band and wild slurring of Ayler's solos come off like a plaid shirt with a striped tie, but not here, and check out that nice little chromatic crunch from the piano at 0:55. It's subtle, but it's there. This quartet knew what it was doing. If you want to hear failure in action like that, it's better to look at Cecil Taylor's album Stereo Drive, which is now better known as Coltrane Time and released under Coltrane's name. Kenny Dorham could not hang with Taylor's busy, dissonant comping, and he walked out of the session, which is why he isn't on the second side of the LP. That's what happens when it doesn't work out (and by the way, that was 1958. Surely, by 1963, word had made it to Sweden that American jazz musicians could get pretty weird).

So why cast aspersions against the rest of the band on this album? Well, for one thing, there's that dissonance between styles. Niels Bronsted really does keep his piano solo inside, and it's really nice, but it could have been played seven or eight years earlier and not raised eyebrows. To my ears, that's a welcome contrast, kind of like when John Coltrane played a million notes per second with the Miles Davis Quartet so that Miles could play three notes over the next two minutes during his solo. A bigger reason, though, is that what this recording says can make both musical conservatives and free jazz people a little uncomfortable: weird music may be weird, but it's still just music. The contrast between some of Ayler's wild sounds and Bronsted's inside playing isn't misunderstanding, it's just contrast. It's not like Ayler doesn't get the changes, and in fact he plays them beautifully, with occasional non-pitched commentary (and vice versa, really - he packs a lot of different things into the five minutes or so that he plays here). And similarly, Bronsted isn't ignorant to the fact that the saxophone player is doing some different sounding stuff, and he very tastefully stays out of the way and lets it happen.

Ayler's approach to music making here is to concentrate on his remarkable phrasing and some of the odder sounds he can get from his saxophone (many of which can be heard on rhythm and blues recordings from ten or fifteen years earlier, although not with Ayler's huge and inimitable core sound), while still openly and happily playing fairly traditional jazz. He's not that weird, he just sounds that weird. And as I mentioned, I'm not sure if this is a transitional thing for Ayler, or if it's just the way he works with this band for this recording. But I think it might be fair to say that, as far out and noisy and dissonant and "free" as Ayler sounds, there is still a strong core of the post-bop jazz tradition in his music, as I hope to show tomorrow when I look at a clip in which Ayler, blowing as freely and noisily has I've ever heard him, nails Ellington.

Albert Ayler, part I.

I've been listening to and thinking about Albert Ayler and his music a lot lately. He's one of those characters whose biography can outshine his music - partly because it's really strange (Did he really sound like Charlie Parker back in Cleveland, or did Cleveland just have that weird a music scene? He liked to stare into the sun? Really? How DID he die?), but I think it's also because his music can be pretty tough to talk about. His music, and the music of a lot of his successors, it awfully weird and intimidating on the surface. I find, though, that at it's core, this is still post-bop jazz, and the weird aggressive sounds are just weird aggressive sounds. Once you can hear what's NOT avant-garde about Ayler (and many others), you can come around to hearing what's beautiful about the strangeness. Here and in the next couple posts are three clips to show you what I mean, and my own attempt to actually discuss the music itself:



That's "Ghosts" from the album that kind of puts him on the map, Spiritual Unity. It's a frequent choice to introduce Albert Ayler to people, and it shows up in quite a few jazz history textbooks, including mine. There are lots of good reasons for that - with just a trio, you really get to hear what Ayler is doing - a lot of the time his recordings sound like massive, disorganized pile-ons at first, with six or seven people all sounding like they're trying to take the first solo at once. Here, you get Sunny Murray's usual tempoless chattering on the drums (and I mean that as a compliment - it's really hard to do what he does) and Gary Peacock playing pretty clearly supportive bass. So the focus is on one instrument, Ayler's tenor sax, and that can be plenty to absorb if you're not used to listening to stuff that fights tradition.

There are one or two things that come up in all the intro books with this recording - Ayler doesn't bother with traditional harmony, he makes some pretty strange noises, and he doesn't start with the head right away. And when that's all you read about his music, you can leave with the impression that there's not much more to it than that. That's not only unfair to his stuff, it's the reason it took me a good two years to actually like his music. Pay attention to that short, weird introduction, because it's a clue to his approach to free jazz in general. The notes don't make sense, the lines kind of meander around chromatically, and there's that ugly multiphonic bark in the second phrase. So the stage is set early - don't expect a pretty song, don't expect a lot of pretty in general, at least by the standards we've all been taught. But it's not nonsense, either - it's the same rhythm as the melody that he plays a couple seconds later, on which the whole performance is really based. And beyond that, the lines he plays have the same question/answer structure, and even the same pitch contour as the head (by which I mean, when the melody gets higher, so does the intro before it). Really, what he has done is to take away all the elements of music that we can discuss easily with the vocabulary of music theory - harmony, counterpoint, pitch, etc., and played a variation on all the other sonic aspects of the tune. He specializes in playing with contour, phrasing, tone color, dynamics, etc., and really, he doesn't get too far from the head in that respect. If you listen to the track four or five times in a row (it's not that long - you can take it!), you start to hear how he does this throughout the solo. The traditional way to discuss his soloing is to say that he dispenses with the head and plays what he feels, man! And sure, he does that. So does Louis Armstrong. So does Beethoven, for that matter. But it's not like he chose his compositions at random and then ignored them. As far as those not-so-easilly-discussed aspects of the tune itself, he starts out very close to the melody in his solo, and even in the long chromatic run that makes up most of what he plays, those shapes and phrases and general pitch directions come back again and again, even in the three minutes or so that he solos. Like a lot of people do when they develop non-traditional systems from scratch, Ayler comes up with a pretty simple and easily grasped solution - if Western Music took 1000 years to get to where it was in 1966, and Ayler only has about ten years to learn the saxophone and come up with a new kind of music, he isn't going to be able to come up with something as complicated as the tradition he's bucking.