Albert Ayler
Live In Greenwich Village: The Complete Impulse Recordings [2CD]

For this review, pages upon pages would be necessary - unthinkable, I told myself - then I thought that this incredible and essential record cannot be missing in the DeBaser world, so we’ll make do, Ladies and Gentlemen, and cut to the chase. In fact, we'll keep it very short and mainly try to pique the curiosity of those who have not yet stumbled upon these crazy recordings. (Speaking of Ladies and Gentlemen, where are the Ladies in the DeBaserWorld?).

Let's start by saying that I can't play this record at home. It's not even a matter of jazz or non-jazz; it's that Albert Ayler was not a normal guy, and his music is not normal. It is generally a 'raw assault on jazz' (in the words of music critics of the time), absolutely iconoclastic, with few introspective flashes immediately contradicted and countered by a fury of instruments, mixed with divine intuition to Ayler's personal interpretation of New Orleans/dixieland music of the '20s (the brass bands) and the most joyful military marches in major key, religious tunes, klezmer music, basic traditional, popular and circus themes: the whole with an absolutely disconcerting and sinister effect, deafening and incontrovertibly free, yet angry beyond belief.

Confederate with that other madman, Cecil Taylor, saxophonist Albert Ayler began to make the most uncompromising free jazz with no initial trace of the political-cultural background that would increasingly characterize the movement (Art Ensemble Of Chicago above all), mainly because most of the time he seemed a lunatic and certainly not a leader of the black resurgence in America. Only the appreciation and association with John Coltrane provided him with elements of generic spirituality and universal brotherhood to partially cover and justify his musical incursions, but I was never convinced by it: 'Trane's musical research is evident and is clearly generated by an intimate personal path, while Ayler seems to me 'simply', brilliantly, unhappily, and irredeemably mocking and furious. With life in general, with his own in particular: I don't know for sure, even though Albert was involved in frequent episodes of hallucinations, and it is nonetheless evident his violent rebellion against the extreme religious atmosphere in which his family had raised him.

His phrasing is fast (the man can really play) but irritating, characterized by the choice of raspberries and very shrill, annoying sound timbres, as well as the absolute disregard for rhythm (it is often out of time): it is irksome, blasphemous, wobbling, and out of tune; it is mariachi, his music sounds like a drunk and out-of-tune Mexican band, amplified with Marshalls and passed through distorters, playing the mass. Albert Ayler is wild and uncontrollable, and when he is not deafening, he is crooked and unbalanced, and more than anything else, he is absolutely iconoclastic, without concessions, without compromises, forget Ornette Coleman. When he titles tracks of rare violence with the most religious and spiritual references, I am sure I am witnessing mockery, hatred, despair, and revenge, forget ‘Spiritual Unity’, ‘Infinite Spirit’ or ‘Our Prayer’.

The fact remains that - who knows how - he is an exquisite musician, although I could not say how consistent or conscious he is. Albert indeed begins to play sax and oboe very seriously, performing regular music studies and playing (more or less from 1949 to 1959) traditional jazz and band music, exactly the kind that he would deconstruct violently a few years later. It is probably the encounter with Cecil Taylor that changed his life, pushing him to express (though not resolve) those series of internal knots that would lead him to suicide at only 36 years old, in circumstances never clarified and after having thrown everything into the fury of his records, from funky to bagpipes.

Let's get to the record, a testimony of a series of concerts at Greenwich Village (1965) that represent the unreachable culmination of Albert Ayler's art, his 'Made In Japan'. This double CD edition is the second expansion of the work and definitively encloses all the traced recordings, enough for educated ears, but never enough for mine. There are two double basses here, a drum set largely absent, but when it’s there, it wrecks everything, two madmen with the violin and cello that evidently have the task of sanding down the eardrums and all the raspberries in the world, and above all the supreme mocking of all the religious and military - institutional - tunes that came to the mind of the leader of this genius and erratic formation, that plays fourteen atrociously evil, mocking pieces, whose message we should not fully absorb otherwise we might go put bombs in Parliament like Guy Fawkes. Listen, for example, to ‘Light In The Darkness’, eleven indefinable minutes, and tell me what should be done with this music which is now 50 years old and still delightfully and tragically unlistenable, just a tad more comprehensible (we have had other angry avant-gardes in the meantime). Ah, we’re at the seventh minute and they’ve really gotten mad, the trumpet is a rampaging elephant, and there are screams below (I don’t think it’s the audience), then Albert re-enters in sync with his demented marches (occasionally he gets it right) and madness is complete, like listening to two bands simultaneously playing different genres. The strings begin to scrape again and who knows what faces the onlookers had, a few minutes later they’ll be hit by a circus music compilation that sounds like played by the poor and tragic Joy Divisions of the Nazi concentration camps. Few tracks later or earlier, indistinctly, it seems like being in the middle of an endless 'Sister Ray' and suddenly the music opens to the most evident contrast, a religious hymn in which everyone joins as one only to thoroughly smash it, without continuity solution and without any musical complacency. The audience is stunned: I believe it. Christ, to have been there.

I also address those younger than me who listen to the growls of extreme metal bands, often without art and part in a genre too easy to whip up at the drawing board (without wanting to generalize). You who know that music is not necessarily a Rondo, that it can and must express also the anger, the fear, the dark and the death, come lend an ear also to these wretches, who fifty years ago lived the marginalization on their own skin, and discomfort and diversity, and put everything in a bold, utterly breaking music, which spoke of their black souls, scream and blasphemy together, but also rebirth in a new aesthetic. (Meanwhile, the Albert Ayler Band, down here, sounds like three televisions turned on together).