  |
|
|
 |
| The Impulse Story |
| Albert Ayler |
első megjelenés éve: 1969
64 perc |
|
| (2007)
|
|
CD |
| 3.726 Ft
|
|
| 1. | Holy Ghost
|
| 2. | Truth Is Marching In
|
| 3. | Angels
|
| 4. | Love Cry
|
| 5. | Bells
|
| 6. | New Grass / Message from Albert
|
| 7. | Free at Last!
|
| 8. | Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe
|
| 9. | Water Music
|
| 10. | Untitled Duet
|
Jazz / Free Jazz; Avant-Garde Jazz; Avant-Garde
Recorded: Mar 28, 1965-Aug 29, 1969
By 1968, it was abundantly clear - as the Beatles traveled to India, as "transcendental meditation" became a generally familiar term - that Impulse Records had tapped into a wellspring of spiritual adventurousness. Back in 1965, John Coltrane's best seller A Love Supreme had been a bellwether of sorts, espousing an Eastern-influenced, universalist message. Just over three years later, Pharoah Sanders's "The Creator Has a Master Plan" became a free-form radio hit that mirrored the spiritual direction of the age. "Before the Sixties, you didn't hear about Hare Krishna and some of these gurus that had come from India," Alice Coltrane recalls.
Yet, as alto saxophonist Marion Brown pointed out, some in the jazz circle did not look Eastward for uplift and inspiration: "I think you'll find that the spirituality of the music during the Sixties wasn't something exotic. It was coming directly out of the church, especially the Holiness Church. I know there was a whole tradition of saxophones in the church, and I don't know if Albert had been a part of that, but what he was doing was sure related to it."
"Albert" was, of course, Albert Ayler, a saxophonist who wore his spiritual roots on his sleeve, who stands as the man who managed to push the music one step beyond Coltrane, and who still begs comparison with Impulse's star.
Like Coltrane, the Cleveland-born Ayler had once donned a uniform and marched, and later developed an unfettered musical approach intertwined with a philosophy of understanding and supreme love; his song titles and gospel-intoned phrasing on alto and tenor saxophone testified as much. Like Coltrane, he had recorded for various small labels - in Ayler's case very small, like ESP-Disk, and often foreign - before coming to Impulse.
Yet Ayler's path differed from Coltrane's in a significant aspect: He had bypassed bebop and other modern jazz styles, skipping over foreign scales and Eastern sounds to create a wild, emotionally expressive style from more down-home sources: spirituals, blues, even military marches. Where Coltrane had been exceedingly academic in his musical search, Ayler seemed to have found a shortcut to a primordial creative source.
Coltrane was clearly a fan. He collected tapes of Ayler's concerts, and at his urging the veteran producer Bob Thiele, then heading Impulse, recorded Ayler live, issuing a performance of "Holy Ghost" on The New Wave in Jazz in 1965. That Thiele hoped to nominate Ayler as an heir apparent to Coltrane was obvious once Thiele signed him the label at the start of 1967. The music for his Impulse debut, Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village, was recorded at two venues closely associated with Coltrane, and featured tracks, like "Truth Is Marching In," that intone the same down-home, hymn-like solemnity as Coltrane's "Spiritual."
Impulse's intention with Ayler was more evident on Love Cry, released a few months after Coltrane's death. Frank Kofsky's liner notes opened on Ayler's performance at Coltrane's funeral on June 21, 1967; quoted Ayler describing Coltrane as the "father," Pharoah Sanders as the "son," and himself as the "holy ghost," and then positioned Love Cry as another A Love Supreme.
Musically, the album benefited from the fact that a more consistent band had settled in behind Ayler - including his brother Donald on trumpet and Call Cobbs on piano and harpsichord. The title track and "Bells" are typical of the tighter, more song-focused approach Ayler seemed to be developing at the time.
Ayler's path at Impulse took a significant turn with his next album, New Grass. Dismissing most of his quintet, he began to integrate rock and R&B forms into his music and plugged-in instruments into his band. He hung on to Cobbs and bassist Bill Folwell, and added R&B studio drummer Bernard Purdie. New Grass also featured a horn section and a rousing, soulful chorus, as on "Free at Last." It was a shift of major proportion, enough to warrant Ayler's spoken introduction to "Message From Albert": "The music I bring to you is in a different dimension of my life. I hope you will like this record. . . . The music I have played in the past I know I have played in another place at a different time."
Many have summarily dismissed New Grass and the Ayler recordings that followed as examples of a jazzman increasingly persuaded by Thiele's commercial guidance. But for a variety of reasons, that seems unlikely. Ayler had for years pursued his own headstrong path, never mind detractors or record men. No matter the musical context, Ayler's saxophone playing remained as emotionally unbound as ever, and he continued to fuse his own version of fusion after Thiele's departure from Impulse in 1969.
Furthermore, Ayler was not alone in choosing to absorb the soul, gospel, and rock resonances of the day and match them to his own wildly primitive vocabulary. At Impulse, Archie Shepp had already played free-jazz solos against soul backgrounds on his albums, while other recordings from the jazz and rock arenas - Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, both from 1969, come to mind - can be considered close parallels to Ayler's integrationist approach.
A series of sessions in the late summer of 1969, overseen by Impulse's new in-house producer Ed Michel, brought forth Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe and The Last Album - the latter released after Ayler's still unexplained death in 1970. Both blended the sounds of rock guitar, jazz freedom, and spiritually focused poetry, a mixture that worked on tunes like "Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe," "Water Music," and "Untitled Duet," but at other times sank with the experimental weight. A bagpipe solo tracked backwards on another song was emblematic of Impulse's freethinking approach at the time, according to Michel:
"The sessions were all typical that way. [The Impulse artists] were all finding different directions, many of which started with Coltrane, and which Coltrane made possible. Since Impulse was doing something that other people weren't particularly doing. . . . I mean, Sam Rivers was doing it at Blue Note, Eric Dolphy did it everyplace he went, but Impulse was a place where this was an acceptable procedure. This kind of stretching was something we looked for."
It's clear Ayler found the freedom and support he was looking for at Impulse. He had completed a five-year period of rapid growth by the time he joined the label in '67. His In Greenwich Village album serves as a farewell look back to his edgier, more avant-garde recordings. For Ayler, the four discs that followed constituted a creative rebirth, with shorter song forms and lyrics - most supplied by his girlfriend, vocalist Mary Parks (known professionally as Mary Maria) - and reached for a new and more youthful audience.
"You have to make changes in life just like dying and being born again, artistically speaking," Ayler stated. "You become very young again through this process, then you grow up, and listen and grow young again."
---Ashley Kahn, February 2006
Albert Ayler - Tenor Saxophone, Vocal, bagpipes
Don Ayler - (1-2, 4, 5) Trumpet
Joel Freedman - (1) Cello
Lewis Worrell - (1) Bass
Sonny Murray - (1) Drums
Michel Sampson - (2) Violin
Bill Folwell - (2, 6-9) Bass
Henry Grimes - (2) Bass
Call Cobbs Jr. - (3, 7) Piano
Alan Silva - (4, 5) Bass
Milford Graves - (4, 5) Drums
Joe Newman - (6, 7) Trumpet
Garnet Brown - (6, 7) Trombone
Seldon Powell - (6, 7) Flute
Bernard Purdie - (7) Drums
Bobby Few - (8, 9) Piano
Stafford James - (8, 9) Bass
Muhammad Ali - (8) Drums
Henry Vestine - (10) Guitar |
|
CD bolt, zenei DVD, SACD, BLU-RAY lemez vásárlás és rendelés - Klasszikus zenei CD-k és DVD-különlegességek |  | | Webdesign - Forfour Design |
|
|
