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.