by Richard Koloda (781.65 Ayler)
Albert Ayler was one of the most renowned saxophone players this side of John Coltrane. In fact, his and Ornette Coleman’s bands played at Coltrane’s funeral, an honor that Coltrane had requested before his death, and Trane told many folks that he saw Ayler as the next important up and coming horn player. Sadly, he only lived a few years beyond Coltrane, but he achieved stunning heights in his all-too-short career. Author Richard Koloda, a musicologist who was also a personal friend of Albert’s trumpet-playing brother Donald, has recently published Holy Ghost: The Life and Death of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler, and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.
As Koloda discusses in his preface, Ayler’s premature death and the discovery of his body in the East River became the stuff of legend in jazz, and unfortunately the legend has sometimes overshadowed the significant body of work he left behind. But in his short career, he did change the course of jazz music, bringing collective improvisation back to modern jazz, and exerting sizable influence on John Coltrane. And if you influenced Coltrane, you’ve de facto influenced the direction of jazz. Koloda asserts that this is the first in-depth biography of Ayler to be written in English, and his research gathered over 20 years corrects the historical record around Ayler’s work and life on a variety of fronts—even misstatements by Albert himself!
Proceeding through Ayler’s life chronologically, Koloda describes his childhood in Cleveland as a generally comfortable middle class upbringing in a musical family. Albert’s father Edward was an aspiring saxophonist, and his younger brother Donald proved to have musical proclivities at a young age, too. Albert’s father started him on alto saxophone by the age of 4, and he was performing in public by the age of 9, and even touring in Little Walter’s rhythm and blues band by the age of 17. In his early 20s, he joined the military (Koloda notes that the timing would suggest he did this to avoid paying child support), and while playing in the Army band, he switched from alto to tenor saxophone. Though his playing for the Army was conventional as one might expect, it appears that he began to find his own voice on the instrument around this time, which ultimately consisted of combining simple, gospel-inflected melodies with very free playing. Upon discharge, he looked for venues to continue developing this style, but early audiences in LA and his native Cleveland weren’t overly receptive. In 1962, he headed to Sweden, where he recalled his new approach being appreciated during his military stint.
His initial reception in Sweden was about the same as things were in the US—his intense, timbre-focused sound was still running a little ahead of the stylistic curve. But he did come across the first people to champion his work, such as Bengt “Frippe” Nordstrom, who released the first recordings of Ayler on his own Bird Notes record label. The first of these records, “Something Different,” was released in 1963, and became the new standard in free music, taking things further than Ornette Coleman’s late 1950s approach. These early recorded efforts continued to baffle most critics, too, who were largely thrown by Ayler’s propensity for playing standards on his records that would only briefly feature recognizable forms, and then everything would become disorienting. He began to meet like-minded musicians in this early period, though, such as bassist Henry Grimes and trumpet player Don Cherry, who was also a veteran of Ornette’s band.
Ayler was back in Cleveland later in 1963, and some local musicians were starting to pick up on his style. One detail I learned in this book was that tenor player Frank Wright was directly influenced by Ayler’s approach, and he went on to record similarly free jazz albums (his style was often referred to as “energy music”) from the mid-60s through the 70s. Later in the year, Ayler moved to New York, where another of the main champions of his work happened to see him play on Christmas day. That audience member was Bernard Stollman, who immediately decided to sign Ayler as the first artist on his new record label, ESP-Disk (we have a great book in Polley all about that label called “Always in Trouble, by the way). ESP Disk indeed released much of Ayler’s mid-60s work, starting with “Spiritual Unity” in 1964, and went on to become one of the most important record labels in documenting what was often called “The new thing.” Most of the essential Ayler records, including “Spirits Rejoice,” “Bells,” and “New York Eye and Ear Control” were all released on ESP Disk.
The middle sections of the book detail Ayler’s quick rise to jazz notoriety, where again his impact on the playing of John Coltrane feels like an essential way to describe the importance of his work. The influence couldn’t be more clear just looking at Coltrane’s discography: after his landmark album “A Love Supreme” in 1965, his next major album was the large-ensemble free jazz “Ascension,” released in two parts in 1966, and subsequent albums showed his improvisational style reaching further into the sound explorations pioneered by Ayler.
Success with peers and his critics didn’t always fill the seats at his performances, though. Koloda recounts the years of continued financial struggle and some audiences still just not warming up to free jazz in festival formats. Coltrane interceded to get Ayler signed to Impulse Records, and he gradually capitulated to pressures to make his music more commercial in a variety of ways: he included vocals, he made shorter pieces that could be used as singles, and he attempted to incorporate rock and R&B influences into his music. In retrospect, these decisions seem misguided, and there is also recorded evidence that Ayler continued to develop his own unique free sound regardless of the records, as evidenced by the recordings we have from his last performances in France July of 1970. And in his final months, we find evidence of Albert struggling with his mental health: his brother Donald, who had played trumpet in Albert’s bands over the years, also had issues with mental decline, which Albert blamed in part on himself. Donald ended up hospitalized around September. Without clear prospects for the future (Impulse Records dropped Albert in early 1970), he entered a period of depression. After the successful French shows in July mentioned earlier, he played very little, visited family, and ultimately disappeared on November 5. His body was found in the river on November 25. Despite some of the strange legends that have developed over the years, author Koloda’s research seems to conclude that his passing was most likely a suicide.
The postscript to the book follows up on the final years of Albert’s brother Donald: in and out of hospitals for the rest of his life, he continued to play music, but for the most part lived in a declined state until his passing in 2005. On the whole, “Holy Ghost” is a well-written book that’s a pleasure to read, but unfortunately there are no happy endings for either of the Ayler brothers. Though the influence of Albert’s music in particular lives on—Koloda notes that many modern art-rock bands explicitly pay homage to his work—he only experienced a small fraction of the love and admiration for his work that exists now.
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try This is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture by Iain Anderson or Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP Disk by Jason Weiss.)
( publisher’s official Holy Ghost web site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
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