(39 Years Hence)

by John Kruth

Although ultimately damaging to his career, Coltrane devoted    himself to Free Jazz and abandoned the soulful ballads and modal  stylings that brought him a hit in the spring of 1961 with My Favorite Things. Blowing chorus after chorus with unbounded ferocity Coltrane would unwittingly chase his fans from the clubs while inciting critics to claim that he was out to “destroy jazz.”

If Coltrane had indeed destroyed Jazz then Albert Ayler sent the music hurtling beyond the outskirts of Pluto. It was Ayler who melted the music down and left its corpse an unrecognizable smoldering lump. The saxophone in Albert’s hands had become another instrument altogether, a far cry from the horn that its Belgian designer Adolphe Sax had in mind. Albert’s exaggerated tone and oscillating pitch produced notes far beyond the normal range of the tenor sax. “It’s not about notes anymore!” Ayler would declare.

Tonally, Albert’s horn was the closest a saxophone ever came to resembling the soaring feedback of psychedelic guitarists Jimi Hendrix or John Cippolina of Quicksilver Messenger Service and brings to mind pure electronic sound waves as produced by Leon Theremin. Whether Albert was inspired by electronics or psychedelia one can only guess. One look at the trippy lettering on the Impulse album covers to Love Cry and Live in Greenwich Village and it seems obvious that Impulse was blatantly trying to market Albert to the hippies.

Scorned by the Jazz community Ayler hoped his forward-looking music might connect with the “New Generation” who were in the throes of abandoning traditional religious practices and embarking on their own personal spiritual journey of self-discovery, embracing everything from Buddhist meditation to experimenting with LSD.

In the years since his death, Ayler’s music seems to have influenced more guitarists than saxophonists. “It is possible that he may have been looking to imitate those sounds,” Marc Ribot said (referring to Hendrix’s guitar and the theremin). “Guitar players can only at best envy sax players. We’re always trying to make up for our breath not being in it,” he added with a chuckle. Over the years Marc has recorded Ayler’s Ghosts, Bells, and Saints. “It’s deep stuff,” Ribot said. “But the time is now and he’s getting the critical evaluation he deserves.”

“There was a very good FM station in my hometown of Syracuse that used to play a lot of Free Music and Psychedelic Rock and that’s where I first heard Albert Ayler and the Holy Modal Rounders,” (Captain Beefheart guitarist) Gary Lucas recalled fondly. “Albert’s music was soulful, playful and very American-sounding music. It was the stuff! Ayler was a fantastic composer who utilized folk melodies within the framework of his compositions. I responded instantly to Ghosts because of the folk element. It was very beautiful and a natural for me to cover, which I did on my very first recording that I did in 1988. (From a compilation called Live at the Knitting Factory.) It became a staple in my show,” Lucas explained.

In 2000 the punky Wisconsin trio Violent Femmes released a cover of Albert’s New Generation on their album Freak Magnet. Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie had been playing Ayler’s Universal Indian for years with his own band and recently recorded Albert’s Change Has Come on a new album which features his shakuhachi flute playing.

Just 15 years old when he first discovered Albert Ayler, Ritchie recalled: “It was the farthest out music around, along with John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ayler’s music was incredibly rootsy in an abstract way that appealed to me. He took it to the point of hysteria, which was an interesting approach but sometimes it was too much.”

While Ayler’s music has the ability to mystify some listeners, its force frequently repelled others. While in the army, multi-instrumentalist/composer Anthony Braxton experienced a sudden loss of popularity when he tried to hip his friends to Free Jazz. “I started having problems in the army,” Braxton confessed. “I would play the music they wanted me to play: we’d play classical music, and marches. It was clear that I was a proficient technician. What wasn’t clear to them, however, was the music I really wanted to play. For instance my parents sent me Albert Ayler’s record Bells and Coltrane’s Ascension. I played the records and after five minutes everybody in the barracks came and was ready to kill me. Because I was attracted to this kind of music people thought they couldn’t like me. Fortunately, I was able to have some friends who could relate to some of the activity I was into.”

The sheer apocalyptic intensity and outrageousness of Ayler’s sound blew the door of Modern Jazz off its hinges, leaving the gate wide open for a new crew of reed-bending revolutionaries to come trouncing through in his wake. With Albert’s call for “spiritual unity,” Coltrane (who called excitedly to tell Ayler he was playing like him during the sessions for his groundbreaking album Ascension), Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp all followed suit, with Braxton, Peter Brotzmann and John Zorn to soon follow.

Albert Ayler wailing prayers to the infinite in a hand-tailored green leather suit was clearly another glittering link in the 14-carat-gold chain of audacious black performers that stretches back to Josephine Baker, Little Richard and James Brown and continued with Jimi Hendrix and Prince.

Joined by Henry Vestine on electric guitar and Bernard Purdie laying down a rock-solid 4/4 beat, Ayler would suddenly abandon the avant garde to cut an album of populist R&B style “message” songs (with the help of Mary Maria Parks’ cosmic lyrics) in an attempt to reach a larger audience.

Producer Michael Cuscuna pointed out that although Bob Thiele produced New Grass he was “long gone from Impulse when the Mary Parks/Henry Vestine sessions took place. Ed Michel did these and I am sure they were Ayler’s doing.”

“It was an obvious attempt by Impulse to make Albert Ayler’s music a commodity,” Marc Ribot said referring to 1968’s New Grass. “The music clearly wasn’t Jazz and as far as Rock and Roll records go they are some of the oddest to be found. It may not be any accident that they [New Grass and Music is the Healing Force of the Universe] were Ayler’s last two records.”

Listening to the interviews with Albert on disc nine of the exquisite Revenant box set Holy Ghost, Ayler sounds bewildered and deeply frustrated over the failure of these two projects. The guilt over his brother Donald’s nervous breakdown along with overwhelming disappointment at not being able to break through to a larger audience seems to have delivered the one-two punch that led to the discovery of Ayler’s body on the bottom of New York’s East River on November 25th 1970.

To this day, mystery and hyperbole still shrouds Albert’s death. Everybody from vengeful drug dealers, to the Mafia, to “the man” and God (as in Amiri Baraka’s poem “The Dark Is Full of Tears”) murdered Albert Ayler. Poet/paramour Mary Maria Parks had little to say on the daunting subject. “Albert chose to take his own life,” she told me in a late-night telephone interview. “I called his parents in Cleveland.”

“Albert met everyone with a smile,” Mary said in reverie. “He was cool and very educated. I thought he worked at the post office!” Parks said with a laugh. At the time Mary Maria had an office job and sang gospel. “My girlfriend was a wild flower. She was hitting on him. But he was looking at me from the corner of his eye. I sat down and he kissed me on the cheek. ‘Nice meeting you,’ I told him, but I had to get home to Brooklyn. ‘I’m going there too,’ he told me. Soon after, I received a note from him saying he had to see me again.”

Since his high school days, hanging around the Cleveland barbershop, Ayler was known as a lady’s man and a clotheshorse who sported leather suits, pointed boots and fur hats. At the time he met Mary Maria he was still married to Arlene Benton. The couple had a daughter named Desiree but would separate two years later in February, 1966.

Much to his brother Donald’s disappointment, Albert would find his muse and new collaborator in Mary Maria. Inspired by poems Albert found in her notebooks while “rambling through” her stuff, Ayler began setting Mary’s lyrics to music. “I wrote ‘Message from Albert,’” Mary explained to me. But producer Bob Thiele resented her influence on Albert and denied her credit on the album. “I thought he would die if he didn’t record ‘Music is the Healing Force of the Universe!’” she said with a laugh. “I did the original vocals on the record but they were replaced by Vivian [Bostic].” Parks also claims to have produced Albert’s stunning Love Cry sessions but when the record was released the credit read Bob Thiele. Mary Maria Parks had found herself persona non grata in an exclusive boy’s club – the Jazz world.

“Total nonsense!” Michael Cuscuna refuted. “Girlfriends hanging out in the studio are not automatic producers!”

Perhaps Parks’ fondest memory of Albert that she was willing to share was of them making music together. Mary Maria (whose musical background included playing piano and harp) picked up the soprano saxophone with Ayler’s coaxing and coaching. One time they were run out of Prospect Park in Brooklyn for their incoherent cosmic caterwauling. “Oh he was somethin’!” Parks recalled. “He’d play tenor while I was whistlin’ on my soprano! I played that soprano until my knees shook!”

Bernard Stollman recalls going down to the Village in 1968 and witnessing the changes in Ayler and his music: “One night I went to see him at the Café Au Go Go. It was dark and he was totally absorbed and he was singing! I never heard him sing before. He complained that his contract (with Impulse) required that he sing! He was singing in tones or in tongues. I was amazed. But for whatever reasons I fled,” Stollman confessed.

Like a crazy saint or a wandering prophet whose fierce beliefs carried him through an endless series of trials and tribulations, Albert’s short visit on earth was fraught with plenty of scorn and degradation. Years after his death, a plethora of malicious metaphors still continued whenever his name appeard in print. In 1992 one cranky critic in the pages of Stereo Review derided the re-release of Ayler’s Love Cry as an “audio nightmare” and likened it to the musical equivalent of “New Year’s Eve in Times Square.” Author Eric Nisenson also slammed Ayler – calling his music an “intense cacophony the likes of which the human ear has not heard outside of medieval insane asylums.”

When seeking hard answers to the great mysteries of the universe it seems that Ayler wound up sadly bewitched by his own vision. Like Ray Milland in The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, perhaps Albert simply “saw too much.”

With his sax lifted skyward and his eyes fixed somewhere on the great beyond, Albert didn’t merely play to the faithful few who attended his sporadic club and concert dates, he was playing to the hosts of the Heavenly Mansion! He wailed like a madman possessed, trying to cleanse his tormented soul.

“All I do is meditate,” he once said. “I practice and I meditate. You have to go all the way, because that’s what Coltrane did. The picture that he showed me when I looked into his eyes, was [of] the universal man.” Ayler undoubtedly believed the world was in “end times” as described by Saint John in his apocalyptic vision in the Bible’s final chapter, Revelations. “It’s late now for the world,” Albert exclaimed. “And if I can help raise people to new plateaus of peace and understanding, I’ll feel my life has been worth living as a spiritual artist.”

Whether howling with joyful abandon, or wailing an eerie cry of anguish and despair, Ayler’s scope of emotion was astounding. He envisioned himself “a true messenger,” not just of Jazz, but of the Holy Spirit. His melodies ebb and flow over majestic waves of rumbling drums and crashing cymbals. Ayler’s passionate saxophone cries with an overwhelming melancholy as if judgment day was near and his soul would be finally be reunited with God.

“Damn, the cat sure got weird!” Lloyd Pearson exclaimed after hearing Ayler upon his first return to Cleveland. Albert at the time played only soprano saxophone, claiming to be studying Arabic music. His horn sounded more like a Muslim imam calling the devoted to prayer than an instrument on which jazz is played. Ayler was seeking what he described as “the real music and the real religion.”

“It had a lot to do with God – which sounded strange to me at the time,” Lloyd later confessed. To Pearson’s ears Albert’s music resembled chaos more than any spiritual music he was familiar with.

Although based on old gospel songs and the tradition of New Orleans-style collective improvisation, Ayler’s music was oddly written off as self-indulgent by Miles Davis who complained that Free Jazz musicians had forgotten their “folk roots.” But Albert Ayler, if nothing else, was truly a folk musician. Ayler’s compositions were variations on folk themes much in the same way that Hungarian avant-garde composer Bela Bartok employed old peasant and gypsy melodies, as Ayler’s source of inspiration came directly from old Negro spirituals, Italian marches and New Orleans funeral dirges. Using traditional music as a blueprint for their compositions both men expanded on simple themes until the original songs were transformed into something new and unrecognizable.

“My drummer, Milford Graves, he plays folk from all over the world, like very, very old tunes, you know before I was even born,” Ayler told journalist Frank Kofsky. Indeed, the chore of timekeeping had been completely dispensed with by Albert’s innovative drummers Sunny Murray and Milford Graves.

“People often think of Free Jazz players or somebody doing something different as moving ahead but Albert Ayler was also moving backwards in his own history to some kind of church music and also towards a greater harmonic simplicity. In that way he was moving forward and backwards at the same time,” Ribot mused. “Part of Ayler’s history was that of a honking R&B player. At times his blowing was atonal and polytonal. He was looking to break with Bebop and R&B playing, and he reached back to the music he knew from his life – religious music, which comes from the experience of sitting with people and singing in church.”

Bassist Henry Grimes (who recorded with Ayler, as well as Don Cherry and Rahsaan Roland Kirk) concurred, describing Albert’s music as “strong and fantastic.” “You had to pay attention. It was very demanding,” he told me. Although Ayler’s music took on what Henry described as “abstract design” Grimes felt Albert’s unique take on gospel never lost its “roots in the church.”

“Two weeks before he died Albert came to see me on West 55th Street,” Bernard Stollman recalled. “By now his Impulse contract had expired and I think he was hoping I could give him some money but ESP was closing. We were dead in the water but I refused to acknowledge it for nearly six years! I sat across a table from Albert. He was his typical self, not at all ruffled. He played me a cassette of gospel songs that he had modified to the point that they were unrecognizable. He just took it way, way out. I never heard anything like before or again. It was gorgeous but I was flabbergasted. But it didn’t matter how I felt as I was in no position to help him. We would shut down soon after that. He told me that his brother Don was going to the hospital and he somehow had to help him. Who would have imagined that two weeks later he’d be dead!” Bernard said with a heavy sigh. “I have no clues about what happened. His private life was extremely shielded. He never discussed it with me.”

It’ll be thirty-nine years ago this November that the tormented saxophonist plunged into the cold gray abyss of East River (as did Hart Crane before him and Spalding Gray would in 2004) in hopes of finding the peace that eluded him on this earth.

Whether blowing with joyful abandon, or wailing an eerie disquieting howl full of anguish and despair, Ayler’s scope of emotion was truly astounding. Looking (and listening) back to Revenant’s box of rarities, it is now clear for anyone willing to suspend their belief system (a standard requirement when dealing with all matters spiritual) that Albert Ayler was indeed a true messenger, not just of Jazz, but of the Holy Spirit.

In 1998 poet Amiri Baraka, one of Ayler’s first true believers to sing the controversial saxophonist’s praises in print, had a bit part, playing the role of a crazy homeless sage in the brilliant political farce Bulworth. “You can’t be no ghost; you gotta be a spirit!” Baraka tells Warren Beatty who plays the hip-hop obsessed Senator Jay Billington Bulworth. Suddenly that phrase comes rushing back to me with new, profound meaning. Maybe finally the time has come for the world to no longer fear Albert Ayler (and his music) as a ghost that haunts but as a spirit that endures and inspires.

This piece first appeared in Signal to Noise in Winter, 2005.

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