Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity

 

      This is one of those albums that is required listening for free-jazz. This album features Albert Ayler on saxophone, Gary Peacock on bass, and Sunny Murray on percussion. Ayler himself said of the record, "We weren't playing, we were listening to each other". It was recorded for the ESP-Disk label and was a key free jazz recording which brought Ayler to international attention as it was so "shockingly different". It features two versions of Ayler's most famous composition, "Ghosts". (Wikipedia) I listened to this album on YouTube so I listened to it for free. I know free-jazz for free isn't really cool and that the musicians must get paid but at the same time I'm just a poor employee and I can't pay for every great jazz album that I listen to. I would end up in the poor house. Anyways, because its on YouTube, I read the comments and there were a few of them I really liked. The most brutal music in the world is Blackened Death Metal and Albert Ayler. (SuperMaligan). The other one I really liked was this music can change your life. (once you are open to it). (suricatafari) And lastly; The last major fundamental shift in the history of jazz.. everything after has been consolidation and assimilation of this detonation. (joe albanese)
     Here's some info on the recording itself; The single recording session that resulted in Spiritual Unity was ESP's first. It was on July 10, 1964, in the Variety Arts Recording Studio, off Times Square in New York. The session began some time after one in the afternoon. "At one point," according to the record label, "the engineer fled the control room for a few minutes, but returned in time to change the tape for the next selection". Although label owner Bernard Stollman remembered asking for a stereo recording, the session, well mixed and miked, was in mono. The musicians were paid and signed recording agreements after the session, in a nearby cafe. (Wikipedia) The album is very short and only runs about 29 minutes.
     The first tune is a tune featured twice on the album called 'Ghosts'. It has some resemblance of a melody and kind of a head that plays in the beginning and end of the tune, but the rest of it is pretty much free form. I would say its a kind of beautiful free form playing but its really not. Nor is it the aggressive free-jazz kind of sounds associated with Peter Brotzmann, who would record a great album called Machine Gun in 1975.. The music from the first track kind of just reminds me of what free-jazz sounds like today for the most part. Everyone plays their part and the musicality involved is top notch. The bass gets a solo, the sax plays a lot of stuff, and the tune ends.
     The next tune is 'The Wizard', a song with a another interesting title. Black Sabbath had a great tune called the Wizard as well but that wasn't until 1969. I doubt Sabbath heard of Albert Ayler, but apparently John Lennon was a big fan. Anyways, this tune is like continuation of where they were with the last piece. Ayler's saxophone is squealing and moaning, and the bass is really playing the melodic material. It's hard to really talk about the piece, as its so free form. But this is what I can say about it for sure. Although its busy and you're listening to saxophone, drums, and bass playing all together and its very muddy and sounds out of tune, its like within the choas of the music and the form, there is an inward beauty and melody inside of it. I'm not sure if others would be able to find it by listening to it, but I can. 
     The next tune is 'Spirits', a more mellow number, a kind of like free-jazz ballad if you could say that. The saxophone sounds very sad and emotive, by playing trills and short melodic lines over impassioned bass and drum groove. After a kind of head and opening, they begin to go into a haunting saxophone solo. This is where I can see the comment talking about how brutal Albert Ayler's music can be. Because it does sound like some powerful stuff. Then the bass comes into play more kind of walking melodic bass lines. The drumming is very minimum I would say. Sunny Murray stays to just adding rhythmic poetry to the piece by just sticking to cymbals for the most part. This song just hits you hard, especially at 1: 46 in the morning.
     The last tune is just another version of 'Ghosts'. This version is 10 minutes long, instead of the 5 minute version we heard earlier. It features the same opening motif, a great kind of free-jazz head before the saxophone goes on extended solo time. While the sax is going off to solo land, the bass is playing melodic lines in the higher register, and the drums are holding it down with cymbals and some very quiet snare hits. But I can't say that there's really a rhythmic pulse or anything. It's hard to say there's no rhythm but that's how I feel about it. Its more like textures and less like harmony, rhythm, and counterpoint, none of that really. And that's what makes it great! This is probably the best track on the album because the saxophone isn't holding back at all. Plus you can hear the virtuosity in the saxophone playing in this track more so than in the others. He's playing a lot of arpeggios and scales but using them in less common ways, instead of just running them up and down like blues or bop guys from that time. The tune ends with the same motif from earlier and that's the end of the album. Very short listening experience for a jazz album.
     Lastly, this album is what free-jazz is really all about; listening, rather than playing. One thing I noticed the musicians on this album did was that they never overplayed, at all ever. Musicians could really learn a lot from that today, especially the Berklee Graduate type jazz musicians these days, the young cats. This is the second Ayler album I've listened to, the first being Ghosts, an even more out there and wacked out album with haunting saxophone textures. That one, even my step mother had to yell and tell me to 'TURN IT OFF!", haha. Anyways, this isn't your mother and father's jazz, this is the jazz that was really pushing the envelop in 1964. Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were doing similar things to this except a few years earlier, making them great game changers in jazz. However, John Coltrane loved Albert Ayler so much that he called him the Holy Ghost. I heard something like that in the old jazz stories. Also this is what Ayler said of John Coltrane: "John [Coltrane] was like a visitor to this planet. He came in peace and he left in peace; but during his time here, he kept trying to reach new levels of awareness, of peace, of spirituality. That's why I regard the music he played as spiritual music -- John's way of getting closer and closer to the Creator." Also Archie Shepp spoke highly of how Albert Ayler influenced him in this video here. Something must be said of the mental psyche of Ayler, who died of a presumed suicide. Ayler disappeared on November 5, 1970, and he was found dead in New York City's East River on November 25, a presumed suicide. (Wikipedia) His music has that sort of tortured sound that can be horrific, but there is also a part of it that is beautiful. His saxophone playing isn't like anyone elses' because of this. This is the type of jazz that I feel like will be played in the future when we've gone to the other planets in our solar system. They won't be playing bebop or swing, or dixieland, it will be something more like this, textures of sound, of listening to the other musicians in the group instead of overplaying. This is the last great evolution of jazz and it has stayed at this point since this time. Astounding that we haven't moved beyond it, but realistically can we go beyond something so raw and primitive than this? I'm very optimistic about the jazz music of the future and I think it can go beyond this, but at what cost? Will it be at the cost of disregarding traditional jazz instruments? Maybe? Maybe we'll just start improvising with laptops, making sounds with electronics. We don't know what the future holds, but I know that this is great and so is other stuff like it. Required listening for a free-jazz 101 course.