Albert Ayler, part III.

I originally wanted to finish my opening volley on Ayler with a 1966 performance of "Truth Is Marching In" from Berlin. Actually, I wanted to do write on Live In Greenwich Village from the same year, but I couldn't find a handy youtube clip to link to. Turns out that's fine, though, because I found yet another 1966 performance of the same tune that makes a pretty darn interesting comparison to me.

Here's the Berlin performance - to my ears, this recording is a little harsh with high-end, and the violin is a bit too hot in the mix, so be ready for that:



Looking back over the last two posts, I think I've been so eager to talk about my argument that Ayler is less far out than he sounds that I haven't really talked much about how he sounds. This performance has a lot of what I think of as typical Ayler - the simple melodies and repeated riffs, the cluttered, in-your-face textures, the kind of smeary yowl that he plays when other folks with his technical facility might go for Coltrane-like showers of arpeggios and scales. The opening and closing sections are really lovely - very reminiscent of a New Orleans funeral - but importantly, Ayler likes to include all the  cracks in the surface that appear in a good field recording. There are deliberately sour and out of tune notes all over the place, and the musicians are free to leave the choir playing the main melody and chatter along in parallel, like folks talking during a performance, or maybe weeping and wailing during a funeral. After a couple centuries of listening to big and loud groups work their hardest to sound like one voice, the seeming lack of cohesion that Ayler goes for can be pretty disconcerting. Fifty years ago, you either got this sound or you didn't. And while free jazz is certainly a sound that many people are used to now, it's still far from the kind of cliche that you can safely play in Starbucks without people noticing. Of course, that's the point of playing like that. Pretty in a vacuum becomes boring. If you want to get from pretty to beautiful, you have to include contrast, and you have to include enough ugly to make things more like your life. That last chord is the simplest and most common major triad that you can hear in last chords dating back at least to the 15th Century. It's no big deal. But the ugly moments in this performance (most free jazz fans won't call the music ugly, but we're being a little disingenuous, I think. We just like ugly and try to rationalize it later) make it sound transcendent. We all just went through all that together - it was loud, and chaotic, and we couldn't get a grasp on what was going on, but now we're through it, and back on solid ground, but transformed. Shoot, Greek tragedy works on that premise.

Ayler's music on the surface level contains a lot to think about and discuss, and it's pretty understandable that there hasn't been a lot of discussion of what's going on beyond that surface. Just about everything I've read about Ayler's music can fit into two categories. There's the introductory spiel: Ayler has a huge sound with a wide vibrato, he likes folk melodies and really simple tunes, and when he's not playing the tune, it's loud and chaotic and can be really hard to take. Or there's the blind fandom approach: Ayler is deeply spiritual, truly free, uplifting and if you don't get it, you just don't get it. I certainly have no argument with either of those angles on Ayler's music, and there is nothing exclusive about either of them. But there is a middle ground that doesn't get a lot of discussion. For all the attention to the "free" part of free jazz, if it weren't still jazz it wouldn't sound the way it does. We hear total chaos every day when we walk out into the street, but it takes some tradition and coordination to turn that into a recognizable performance. In this performance, Ayler sticks to a very clearly delineated form, and for as much freedom as everyone in the group is allowed, they move in lock step from section to section. It opens with that lovely, New Orleans inspired chorale, of course, and stays there for over half of the performance. At 4:12 in the above clip, Ayler introduces new material - that almost Irish sounding shuffle riff, and the rest of the band is right there with him before he even finishes the first phrase. That B section doesn't last long - at 4:40, Ayler shoots up into the altissimo register of the sax, and that's the signal for the group to join him in fast, loud, chaotic blowing. It's the only properly free section of the performance, and again it starts on Ayler's signal and everyone knows to go right into it (it's also the first time the group leaves the firmly entrenched tonal center of the tune. I would not call it atonal, though, which implies using the western pitch system in a way that avoids the implication of a tonic. This is non-tonal playing - pitch is not really the point here at all.). The free blowing goes on for almost exactly one minute, at which point Ayler re-introduces the jig theme and again, no one in the band misses the cue. And at 5:57, it's a return to the opening chorale, shortened to one minute this time, and it winds up on that gloriously quiet last chord. So the form here is ABCBA - that's the more-or-less classic arch form that Duke Ellington famously used a lot, and I think that indicates that Ayler was playing jazz with a depth greater than the often acknowledged nods in his music to Sidney Bechet's sound on the sax and the improvised counterpoint of New Orleans second line bands.

In fact, I think Ayler's attention to form in his performances is something that he has in common with Ellington, George Russell, Stan Kenton, and a few other composers and arrangers of big bands, but it hadn't cropped up in a lot of smaller groups before, who most often are content to stick to the head-solos-head form that makes up probably 90% of bebop and post-bebop jazz.

Funnily enough, on some level, it's the formal aspects of Ayler's compositions that identify tunes for people, even if they don't notice it. I came across this clip from Slug's Saloon in New York from the same year, also titled "Truth Is Marching In."



I don't know who applied the titles to these two performances, but it's not the same tune at all, and not even the same form. I can only assume that it's the opening chorale followed by triple-meter riff followed by basically free playing that gives the impression that they're the same performance. That's funny to me, because this performance is also just as tightly played in just as clear a form, but it's not an Ellingtonian arch. I hear it as a Rondo, which is a form that dates way, way back, and Mozart used it all the time. After the intro, that riff is used as a refrain that pops up between sections of contrasting material. So the whole performance goes Intro-ABACADA(etc.). I'd like to know who identified these two performances and gave them the same title. If it was a listener, well, it was just a careless listener. But if it was Ayler announcing the tunes as such, there's a whole discussion to had some other time about what Ayler considered a composition, or whether he attached much significance to his titles at all.