John Kruth by Marilyn Cvitanic
(39 Years Hence)
by John Kruth
Discharged from the Army in 1961, Albert headed for Los Angeles but like Ornette Coleman before him, he soon found himself an outsider in the local music scene. At the time the West Coast scene was epitomized by the lords of the funky lounge keyboard, Richard “Groove” Holmes and Les McCann, as well as Shelly Manne and Stan Kenton, whose orchestrated arrangements were the antithesis of Albert’s torrid free-form improvisations. Once again Ayler’s outrageous music was deemed too “country” and unsophisticated by the few critics who bothered to listen.
Oddly enough, Redd Foxx, a struggling stand-up comedian at the time, offered Albert some much-needed words of encouragement, reminding him to keep true to his vision. “Play what you believe in,” the future TV junkman Fred Sanford advised Ayler.
Throughout his life, Albert was financially supported by his parents, who always welcomed him home whenever the struggle to survive as an artist became too much for him to bear. Once again Ayler found himself cloistered in Cleveland, bored and alienated. Most folks would just grumble at the sight of old “Bicycle Horn” whenever he’d appear at jam sessions with his horn in tow.
Whenever the argument over Ayler’s “ability to play” arose, the issue usually became moot once the naysayer got an earful of his extraordinary tone. Judging Albert Ayler as a fraud brings to mind the buffoon who stands before a Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art, blabbing on about how he could do that if he only had a bucket of paint and some canvas. What most people fail to understand is that the sheer stamina necessary to create a work of such Herculean vibrancy often decimates its creator.
At this time Albert began to distance himself from the Baptist church that he grew up in and to develop his own personal belief system. He no longer viewed himself as simply a musician but as a shaman with a saxophone on a mission to heal the world with music.
Albert Ayler in park in Harlem, NY,1966 (photo by Val Wilmer)
Shamanism is tricky stuff. It’s an act best caught live and doesn’t always make for great records. “The main thing I got from listening to Albert Ayler’s records is that his records, and I suspect his concerts, since I never heard him live, are not primarily aesthetic commodities,” guitarist Marc Ribot told me. “What you get from an Albert Ayler record isn’t a polished aesthetic gem where everything is perfect. It’s more like an artifact of a ritual experience, as if you were standing in the back of a room while a ritual ceremony or sacrifice was being performed and you can’t quite see what’s going on but you knowsomething is going on,” Ribot said.
By the winter of 1962, Albert would flee Cleveland once more, flying to Stockholm, where he hoped to find an audience for his music. Ayler mostly wound up playing for children and supported himself by playing a few commercial music gigs. After an irate promoter pulled him from the stage one night, Albert befriended the avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor and drummer Sunny Murray who later described the saxophonist as “depressed” by his circumstance. After hearing Taylor’s unit of free-form improvisers Ayler begged to join the group and traveled with them to Denmark.
A year later Albert would return to Sweden once more to record his first album, My Name Is Albert Ayler (dated 1/14/63, it featured Albert playing standards like “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Green Dolphin Street”). But Ayler could hardly sustain himself in Scandinavia and soon found himself back in Cleveland, with fifty copies of his first record that he tried, with little success, to sell on neighborhood street corners. He soon headed for New York where an attorney who didn’t even own a stereo would become his champion.
“It was December 1963, a terrible time for everybody,” Bernard Stollman, the president of ESP Records said, recalling the days that followed the Kennedy assassination. “I was living on 90th Street and Riverside Drive in a tiny room at the top of the stairs, just down the block from a joint called the Cellar Door Café.” It was there Bernard crossed paths with Granville Lee, a friend of Albert Ayler’s from Cleveland. Lee told Stollman that he must absolutely hear Ayler’s music. “Basically he told me I had no choice,” Bernard exclaimed.
A few days later Stollman found himself trudging through the snow to witness Ayler in the flesh. The Baby Grand, located on 125th Street, was a small, charming candle bar that featured jazz. When he arrived, Bernard found a handful of people sitting at little tables with their coats on. There was no heat in the place and Stollman wasn’t at all that certain that Albert was going to appear that night.
“An older man who I gathered was Elmo Hope played in a trio setting. Within minutes of sitting down, a young man came in behind me, with his horn in his hand and leapt up on the stage without any fanfare or introduction began to play. The band turned and looked at him for a minute and then Elmo thoughtfully closed the lid on his piano and sat back and listened. The bassist parked his bass and the drummer stopped playing as well and they listened to this small, slightly built man with a black and white beard, whose horn was almost as large as he was. He proceeded to blow his head off, a sustained solo that lasted 20 – 30 minutes, which seemed to last no more than a couple seconds. When he was done he was covered in sweat, mopping his brow. I introduced myself and he gave me his name – Albert Ayler. I suddenly heard myself saying, ‘I’m starting a record label and I would like you to be my first artist.’ Some small voice in my head said, ‘Oh is that so?’” Bernard confessed with a laugh.
“Albert was very serious, grave and deliberate. Not particularly ruffled or excited. He said, ‘Well I have a commitment to do a recording next spring (which would result in Spirits) and I will get back to you.’ I was extremely dubious that I would ever hear from him again but in June I got a call saying he was ready to record.”
“Insanity and obsessions take many forms,” Stollman said with a chuckle. “My particular obsession, which some might deem insanity, was to ally myself with the most desperate, unrecognized and creative musicians of the New Wave which emerged in the early sixties in America. I think it was very similar to what happened in Paris when the Impressionists came along and the Academy shunned them and no gallery would show their art and they fled to the South of France where they languished and starved for many years. When any new movement occurs the established artists fight it and so do the institutions that support them, art galleries and publishers. In this case it was the record companies. When I started ESP there was entrenched resistance to the newcomers by existing artists who made comments dismissing these newer artists.”
ESP’s roster would include “jazz” artists like Ayler, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders, Ornette Coleman as well the outer fringe of folk artists like the Holy Modal Rounders and Pearls Before Swine.
Not knowing exactly what to do, on June 14th 1964 Stollman lined up a session at a small studio called Variety Arts in mid-town Manhattan that primarily recorded Latin music. Bernard recalls: “Gary Peacock arrived with his wife (composer Annette) followed by the large, amiable, quick-footed Sunny Murray who was soon followed by Albert, who was quiet and laid back.”
The session began without a word while Annette and Bernard sat outside the studio, listening with the door open. “I never even went inside to check out the layout of the studio,” Bernard said. As they listened to the session, Annette and Stollman exchanged glances. “This is marvelous,” he told her. “What an auspicious beginning to a record company!” When it was all over, Joe, the engineer handed Bernard the tape. Thinking it was just a demo tape the engineer had recorded the session in mono.
“Oh my God! I couldn’t believe it! This gorgeous music was recorded in mono! But no one has said a thing about it in over forty years,” Bernard said. “No one could care less! It was a superb recording. Today I’m still delighted with it.”
“What I did with ESP was not so unique,” Bernard explained. “You or anyone else could’ve done it. I had a naive, un-formed sensibility that listened to music without prejudice and responded viscerally to what I heard. I innately knew I was making a big commitment and not very happily, as the gestation period has taken at least a quarter of a century. So I have motivation to stick around this planet for a while,” the seventy-something Stollman said with a grin.
Spiritual Unity was released nearly a year later in December of 1965. Ayler would record another two albums, Bells and Spirits Rejoice, in the following two years for ESP and Bernard would release two more live albums – Live at Slugs and Prophesy, ironically recorded where it all began, at the Cellar Café. There was also The New York Eye and Ear Control, a soundtrack for an independent film that featured a stunning group of high-energy, high-spirited, telepathic improvisers headed by Ayler and featuring Roswell Rudd, Don Cherry, Peacock, Murray and John Tchicai on alto sax. The album still sounds as fresh today as it did when it was cut in July, 1964.
Albert Ayler's Ear And Eye Control cover
“Collective improvisation is probably the most traditional music in the world – wherever you go and as far back as you go. It’s the lifeblood of the music,” Roswell Rudd said. “We were walking down Madison Avenue in the sunshine when Albert told me he got a call to tour in Europe (with Cherry, Peacock and Murray). He shook his head and told me ‘I know exactly what is going to happen. We’ll go over and Sunny will have some awful problem and we’ll have to bail him out. And in order to return to America we’ll have to record for some company to get the funds together. And of course he was right. Albert was very melancholy because he couldn’t get arrested in America and this depressed him beyond measure. He needed engagements, concerts, promotion and he wasn’t getting any help from anyone, not George Wein – nobody.”
It was John Coltrane who would step up to the plate and whole-heartedly embrace Ayler’s artistry, claiming that Albert had moved “the music into even higher frequencies.” ’Trane became Albert’s champion, helping him financially and using his enormous influence to squeeze him onto concert bills and ultimately land a record deal with Impulse Records for him by putting the bug in producer’s Bob Thiele’s ear, although it wasn’t until after Coltrane’s death that Ayler would sign the deal.
“He said, ‘Bernard, I’ve had an offer to record for Impulse. They’re offering me an advance. I don’t know what to do,” Stollman recalled. “By 1967, ’68 my company was on the way down. Between the industry with all the bootlegging and the government and our anti-war policy, we were done in. I said, ‘Albert they can give you the money and the distribution that I can’t give you. It might make very good sense. They’ll move your career along.’ Essentially we were a farm team that launched artists that other labels then would pick up on. Impulse nearly picked up everyone on our label (including Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra and Marion Brown in addition to Ayler).”
This piece first appeared in Signal to Noise in Winter, 2005.
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