The Boy Who Cried Freebird (23 page)

“Albert was one of the free medicine men that we had bestowed on us by the creator; John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Ornette,” explained Sunny Murray. “Albert and I were part of the 1936 baby boom—and we're all medicine men.”

Before leaving Europe, Ayler made two recordings as a bandleader. His first album,
Something Different!!!!!!
, was cut at the Stockholm Academy of Arts with an unremarkable Swedish rhythm section and an audience of twenty-five people.

Three months later, just days before returning to America, Albert taped a radio program in Copenhagen with Danish pianist Niels Brønsted, a (phenomenal) sixteen-year-old bassist named Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and a fellow American expatriate on drums, Ronnie Gardiner. The radio session was subsequently released as
My Name Is Albert Ayler
.

On this recording, after a shy, spoken-word introduction, Albert Ayler abandoned his mild manners and embraced a decidedly ardent sound. He performed four standards and one original tune. You can hear the struggle between the group's bop-conservatism and Albert's new, visceral expressiveness.

He mostly used the tenor on
My Name Is Albert Ayler
, but Albert did play soprano sax on “Bye Bye Blackbird” and another old chestnut, “Summertime.” On Ayler's “Summertime,” George Gershwin's plaintive tune becomes a bent, musical psychodrama as Albert's
vibrato-laden tones sweep and search, wringing every bit of mawkish emotion from the tune's familiar melody.

So began Ayler's ascension in the new-jazz ranks. But things moved slowly upon his second return to Cleveland and in spite of an opportune jam with Coltrane's quartet, Albert was still treated with confusion and rebuffs. He was spotted hawking
Something Different!!!!!!
on the streets of his hometown, to no great success.

Thanks to the availability of an apartment in a house his aunt Beatrice owned on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, Albert moved to New York and began his revolution in earnest.

Word spread about the forceful young saxophonist and when Albert joined Cecil Taylor's group onstage at Philharmonic Hall on New Year's Eve 1963, the anticipation was high.

“We were all waiting for Albert to come onstage, and all of a sudden we hear this towering tenor sound from the dressing room,” remembered pianist Burton Greene. “He just came straight out of the dressing room with this towering sound and walked onstage. The only way I can describe it is ‘towering'—and it's kind of an earth-shattering experience to hear that. The power coming out of this little guy, it was just a constant stream of energy.”

Albert was gaining a reputation, but he was still hard up for paying work. He frequented clubs like the Half Note and the Cellar Café, where he sat in with Coltrane and other jazz musicians including Canadian pianist Paul Bley and bassist Gary Peacock.

“I met Albert in 1963,” recalled Peacock. “Paul Bley and I were working the Take 3 coffeehouse down in the Village. I asked if there were any horn players who might be able to join us. (Sun Ra's) John Gilmore wasn't available for this one gig, but he said, ‘Do you know who Albert Ayler is? You might want to check him out.' Albert came
down, and that was the first time I heard him play. As far as shocking me, I had never heard anybody play like that before. One time he stopped by my place in Chelsea and said, ‘I have a surprise for you. Around three o'clock this afternoon listen for me.' He had gotten on a ferry to go to Staten Island and from where I lived in Chelsea you could hear the ferry when they blew their horn. I'll be damned if at three o'clock in the afternoon I couldn't hear him on the ferry. He was exceptional that way.”

Albert was no longer working as a sideman with Cecil Taylor, but he received new opportunities as a bandleader. And just before a lengthy tour of Scandinavia with Gary Peacock, Sonny Murray, and Don Cherry, he made two cutting-edge recordings,
Witches and Devils
and
Spiritual Unity
.

Spiritual Unity
, a trio date with Peacock and Murray, is considered to be Albert's landmark session. It was released on ESP, a record label founded by Bernard Stollman, an entertainment lawyer who'd worked on the estates of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. Stollman was enamored with the cultural avant-garde and his label reflected the outer limits of underground taste: no producers, one-shot recording sessions, and psychedelic packaging. “Only the artists decide what you will hear on their ESP-Disc,” was their credo. Later on, the label exclaimed, “You never heard such sounds in your life.”

ESP—so named for Stollman's support of the contrived universal language Esperanto—released records by fringe jazzmen like Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. ESP was also the home of beat/rock/folk misfits like the Fugs and Pearls Before Swine. But the very first artist to have his own album released on ESP was Albert Ayler.

Recorded July 10, 1964,
Spiritual Unity
is arguably the first “free” jazz album. While Ornette, Cecil Taylor, and a few others had made
records pioneering the avant-garde,
Spiritual Unity
was the first album that
completely
eliminated the concept of time. That is, the new music wasn't at all dependent on rhythm.

Even the groups of Coltrane and Coleman had relied on conventional rhythm sections. But on
Spiritual Unity
, Peacock and Murray did not play in any sort of lockstep repartee. Instead, the bassist and drummer provided blatantly individualistic responses to Ayler's cathartic improvisations. Their performances did have a certain velocity—a sometimes-wavering momentum that was either fast or slow—but the dialogue between Ayler, Murray, and Peacock came from hard listening and active spontaneity.

Thanks to the dissolution of metric time, solos in the conventional sense were dispensed with and
Spiritual Unity
became a collective exhibition in creative freedom.

But that's not all. “He played beautiful melodies,” insisted Carla Bley. “It wasn't just that he could play free or that he invented playing free. He played beautiful melodies and that's just something that people respond to.”

Spiritual Unity
included two different versions of Albert's classic, “Ghosts,” and another tune entitled “Spirits.” Names of other Ayler compositions—“Witches and Devils,” “Saints,” “Prophecy” and “Spirits Rejoice”—give a further indication of his reverent perspective. The ethereal titles betrayed Albert's extreme religiosity and his messianic bent. For just as he experienced his music to an intense degree, so did Albert feel—and see—his religious convictions to an extreme.

Albert had visions; at least that's what he claimed in a 1969 essay penned for jazz journal
The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution
. He wrote, “It was at night when I had this vision. In this vision there was a large object flying around with bright colors in a disc form. Immediately I thought of the flying scorpion that I had read about in the
chapter of Revelation from the Holy Bible, but when the object started turning I saw that first it was flat then it turned sideways and started to shoot radiant colors at first then it would turn back to the same position. I was running with my brother when it aimed at us but it didn't touch us at all. I guess this is what they are calling the flying saucers. Anyway, it was revealed to me that we had the right seal of God almighty in our forehead.”

Albert's European tour in the fall of 1964 was successful, and not without positive controversy. But trumpeter Don Cherry, who'd worked as a foil for saxophone legends like Ornette, Trane, Rollins, and Archie Shepp, wasn't interested in staying with Ayler. And even before Cherry left that winter to pursue his wanderlust, Albert had already spoken to his own brother, Donald, in Cleveland, encouraging the younger Ayler to ready himself to join the band.

Donald Ayler had only recently switched from alto sax to trumpet when he got the call from Albert. Less mature than his older brother, Donald had made his own pilgrimage to Sweden and returned claiming to have hitchhiked thousands of miles to the North Pole. The prospect of working with Albert's group demanded rigorous preparation, so Albert enlisted a Cleveland altoist named Charles Tyler to help get Donald up to speed.

But no matter how much practicing Donald might do, he would never be a virtuoso like his brother. Albert's bandmates questioned the logic of bringing Donald into the group; his playing sounded infantile compared to the impassioned spitfire of Don Cherry. What could Donald really contribute? Many say not as much as Cherry. But the kinetic synergy, the harmonic kinship, and musical twinship between Albert and Donald would not be denied.

When the Aylers played together, something occurred that went beyond conventional wisdom. He wasn't technically gifted, but Donald's
energetic trumpet magically resonated with Albert's saxophone style.

So, besides showcasing his ecstatic squawks, guttural honks, rapid-fire delivery, dazzling multiphonics, and a wrenching vibrato, Albert was now playing his high evangelical sound alongside his brother, Donald, echoing the church duets of their youth and evoking the joyous spirits of ragtime.

Together, the brothers embraced the simple melodies of European folk songs and the vintage Americana of Stephen Foster. They played the marching music of military bands and old familiar bugle calls, and when they embraced the revolving themes and shimmering free-jazz anthems like Albert's “Truth Is Marching In,” it was a complete, consecrated communion.

“Albert and his brother sounded to me like they were from New Orleans or someplace down South,” said bassist Henry Grimes, who met Albert in the early '60s playing with Cecil Taylor. “That's where I thought they came from. Their music was so strong that it went back to roots that nobody ever pronounced.”

Although they were gigging in Manhattan and Europe, the brothers were perpetually broke and required frequent relief. And much like writer Jack Kerouac endlessly returning to his mother, Albert and Donald would often seek refuge with their parents in Cleveland.

Besides parents Edward and Myrtle, there was only one other person who acted as a benefactor to the Ayler brothers, and that was John Coltrane. For when it came to Albert, Coltrane was a true believer. The two men were close; they often spoke on the phone and even corresponded via telegrams.

Before succumbing to liver cancer at age forty, John Coltrane was inspired by Albert's intense spirituality and his towering saxophone sound. Late-era Coltrane recordings such as
Ascension
and
Meditations
reflect that direct influence.

Not only did Coltrane endorse Albert in interviews, but he also introduced the Ayler brothers during his portion of a 1966 concert at Lincoln Center called “Titans of the Tenor.” Albert again strode onstage blowing in cacophonous form, and while some spectators were enraptured by the screaming revelations of Coltrane and the Aylers, half the audience walked out.

“Sonny Rollins brought Yusef Lateef to the Titans of the Tenor, and Trane brought Albert because he thought Albert should be mentioned,” remembered Rashied Ali, who played drums with Coltrane at that time. “He didn't have to bring Albert to that thing, he could of brought Archie Shepp, he could have brought a lot of different people, but he brought Albert because he respected what he was doing.”

“Albert's music challenged all that had come before him,” said ESP's Bernard Stollman. “From the first moment Coltrane heard Albert play, he acknowledged that Albert was the new force, that Albert had succeeded him in terms of generations of music.”

At Coltrane's urging, his record label, Impulse!, signed Albert to a contract, resulting in 1966's
Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village
. The album cover resembles a psychedelic poster from the Fillmore, and Albert's group included violin and cello. On another Village recording, the string section was expanded to a foursome with two bassists. These larger groups created textured variations on Ayler's hovering, stream-of-consciousness meditations, and they amplified the recurring themes that flowed back and forth between Albert and Donald.

“All of Ayler's music is pretty traditional Americana in one sense,” said bassist Alan Silva, who played on some of the
Village
sessions. “It was coming out of a real spiritual development and that rooted the music in the '60s. You can listen to the titles and see where he was going. He had a personalized way of playing, and he set up a whole way of thinking about that particular music, especially on a spiritual plane.”

Veteran jazz scribe Nat Hentoff had another perspective on Ayler's sound. “The most significant thing I learned from talking to Donald and Albert,” said Hentoff, “is that the ideal listener is the one who doesn't listen clinically or critically, but one that opens himself up to the whole of the music, not just part. This helped me later in listening to John Coltrane.”

“Trane touched all of us musicians because he was the king of the avant-garde,” said Rashied Ali. “When he embraced the music it got a little more recognition than it would have gotten without him. It was like a godsend for him to embrace our side because Coltrane could have gone in any direction that he wanted to. He just moved in that direction and Albert and all of them, they just moved with him.”

When John Coltrane died, free jazz lost one of its guiding lights. Albert and Donald had played at Coltrane's funeral and were confronted with the void that the saxophonist had left. Impulse! was desperate to find its next saxophone star and was promoting three forceful tenor men: Ayler, Archie Shepp, and Pharoah Sanders. The New Thing had arrived, but Albert was drifting away from his brother, and the extraordinary music that they created together.

Toward the end of the '60s, Albert became involved with musician Mary Parks, who was also known as Mary Maria. As his lover, then manager and collaborator, Mary formed a bond with Albert that supplanted his relationship with Donald. Donald's heavy drinking exacerbated his own emotional problems, and the brothers ceased appearing together in interviews.