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.