Albert Ayler

Albert Ayler (July 13, 1936 – November 25, 1970) was an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist, singer and composer.

Ayler was among the most primal of the free jazz musicians of the 1960s; critic John Litweiler wrote that "never before or since has there been such naked aggression in jazz" He possessed a deep blistering tone—achieved by using the stiff plastic Fibrecane no. 4 reeds on his tenor saxophone—and used a broad, pathos-filled vibrato.

His trio and quartet records of 1964, like Spiritual Unity and The Hilversum Session, show him advancing the improvisational notions of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman into abstract realms where whole timbre, and not just mainly harmony with melody, is the music's backbone. His ecstatic music of 1965 and 1966, like "Spirits Rejoice" and "Truth Is Marching In" has been compared by critics to the sound of a brass band, and involved simple, march-like themes which alternated with wild group improvisations and were regarded as retrieving jazz's pre-Louis Armstrong roots.

Early life and career
Born in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, Ayler was first taught alto saxophone by his father Edward with whom he played duets in church. He attended John Adams High School on Cleveland's East Side, graduating in 1954 at the age of 18. He later studied at the Academy of Music in Cleveland with jazz saxophonist Benny Miller. He also played the oboe in high school. As a teen Ayler played with such skill that he was known around Cleveland as "Little Bird," after virtuoso saxophonist Charlie Parker, who was nicknamed "Bird."

In 1952, at the age of 16, Ayler began playing bar-walking, honking, R&B-style tenor with blues singer and harmonica player Little Walter, spending two summer vacations with Walter's band. After graduating from high school, Ayler joined the United States Army, where he jammed with other enlisted musicians, including tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine. He also played in the regiment band. In 1959 he was stationed in France, where he was further exposed to the martial music that would be a core influence on his later work. After his discharge from the army, Ayler kicked around Los Angeles and Cleveland trying to find work, but his increasingly iconoclastic playing, which had moved away from traditional harmony, was not welcomed by traditionalists.

He relocated to Sweden in 1962 where his recording career began, leading Swedish and Danish groups on radio sessions, and jamming as an unpaid member of Cecil Taylor's band in the winter of 1962-1963. (Long-rumored tapes of Ayler performing with Taylor's group have finally surfaced as part of a ten-CD set released in late 2004 by Revenant Records. ) The album My Name Is Albert Ayler is a session of standards recorded for a Copenhagen radio station with local musicians including Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and drummer Ronnie Gardiner, with Ayler playing tenor and soprano on tracks like "Summertime".

Energy music
Ayler returned to the US and settled in New York assembling an influential trio with double bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, recording his breakthrough album Spiritual Unity, for ESP-Disk Records, 30 minutes of intense free improvisation. Embraced by New York jazz leaders like Eric Dolphy, who reportedly called him the best player he'd ever seen, Ayler found respect and an audience. He influenced the gestating new generation of jazz players, as well as veterans like John Coltrane. In 1964 he toured Europe, with the trio augmented with trumpeter Don Cherry, recorded and released as The Hilversum Session.

Ayler's trio created a definitive free jazz sound. Murray rarely if ever laid down a steady, rhythmic pulse, and Ayler's solos were downright Pentecostal. But the trio was still recognizably in the jazz tradition. Ayler's next series of groups, with trumpeter brother Donald, were a radical departure. Beginning with the album Bells, a live concert at New York Town Hall with Donald Ayler, Charles Tyler, Lewis Worrell and Sunny Murray, Ayler turned to performances that were chains of marching band- or mariachi-style themes alternating with overblowing and multiphonic freely improvised group solos, a wild and unique sound that took jazz back to its pre-Louis Armstrong roots of collective improvisation. The new sound was consolidated in the studio album Spirits Rejoice recorded by the same group at Judson Hall in New York. Ayler, in a 1970 interview, calls his later styles "energy music," contrasting with the "space bebop" played by Coltrane and initially by Ayler himself. This approach continued with The Village Concerts and with Ayler on the books ESP had established itself as a leading label for free jazz.

In 1966 Ayler was signed to Impulse Records at the urging of John Coltrane, the label's star attraction at that time. But even on Impulse Ayler's radically different music never found a sizable audience. Coltrane died in 1967 and Ayler was one of several musicians to perform at his funeral. An amateur recording of this performance exists. Later in 1967, Albert's brother Donald Ayler had what he termed a nervous breakdown. In a letter to The Cricket, a Newark, New Jersey music magazine edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, Albert reported that he had seen a strange object in the sky and come to believe that he and his brother "had the right seal of God almighty in our forehead." Although it is reasonable to assume the Aylers had explored or were exploring psychedelic drugs like LSD, there is no evidence this significantly influenced their mental stability.

Final years
For the next two and half years Ayler turned to recording music not too far removed from rock and roll, often with utopian, hippie lyrics provided by his live-in girlfriend Mary Maria Parks. Ayler drew on his very early career, incorporating doses of R&B, with funky, electric rhythm sections and extra horns (including Scottish highland bagpipe) on some songs. 1967's Love Cry was a step in this direction, studio recordings of Ayler concert staples such as "Ghosts" and "Bells" with less free-improv and more time spent on the themes.

Next came the R&B album New Grass, which was generally reviled by his fans, who considered it to be the worst of his work. Following its commercial failure, Ayler attempted to bridge his earlier "space bebop" recordings and the sound of New Grass on his last studio album Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe, featuring rock musicians such as Henry Vestine of Canned Heat alongside jazz musicians like pianist Bobby Few.

In July 1970 Ayler returned to the free jazz idiom for a group of shows in France (including at the Fondation Maeght) but the band he was able to assemble (Call Cobb, bassist Steve Tintweiss and drummer Allen Blairman) was not regarded as being of the caliber of his earlier groups.

Ayler disappeared on November 5, 1970, and he was found dead in New York City's East River on November 25, a presumed suicide. For some time afterwards, rumors circulated that Ayler had been murdered. Later, however, Parks would say that Ayler had been depressed and feeling guilty, blaming himself for his brother's problems. She stated that, just before his death, he had several times threatened to kill himself, smashed one of his saxophones over their television set after she tried to dissuade him, then took the Statue of Liberty ferry and jumped off as it neared Liberty Island. He is buried in Cleveland, Ohio.

Influence and legacy
On his 1969 album Folkjokeopus, English guitarist/singer-songwriter Roy Harper, dedicated the song "One for All" ("One for Al") to Albert Ayler "who I knew and loved during my time in Copenhagen". Harper considered Ayler to be "one of the leading jazzmen of the age". In the Folkejokeopus liner notes Harper states, "In many ways he (Ayler) was the king".

Ayler's unconventional approach to musical composition, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, have transformed him into one of the few cult artists in the history of jazz music. "Ghosts"—with its bouncy, sing-song melody (rather reminiscent of a nursery rhyme)—is probably his best known tune, and is something of a free jazz standard, having been covered by Lester Bowie on All the Magic (1982), Gary Windo, Eugene Chadbourne, Crazy Backwards Alphabet, Joe McPhee, John Tchicai and Ken Vandermark, among others. The saxophonist Mars Williams led a group called Witches and Devils, named after the Ayler composition, and recorded several of his works. Peter Brötzmann's Die Like A Dog Quartet is a group loosely dedicated to Ayler. A record called Little Birds Have Fast Hearts references Ayler's youthful nickname. The Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded "Lebert Aaly .. dedicated to Albert Ayler" on Phase One (1971). David Murray's dedication "Flowers for Albert" appears on Flowers for Albert: The Complete Concert (1976), Solo Live (1980), Murray's Steps (1984), Acoustic Octfunk (1994), South of the Border (1995), and The Tip (1995) and has been recorded by Tiziana Simona and The Skatalites. The bassist Jair-Rohm Parker Wells produced Meditations on Albert Ayler with Tony Bianco on drums and Luther Thomas on alto sax. This live trio improvisation was produced for and released by Ayler Records on what would have been Ayler's 71st birthday.

On Sept. 20, 1996, the first Albert Ayler Festival was held at the Washington Square Church in Greenwich Village, NY. Performing that day were Gary Lucas, Amiri Baraka, Joe McPhee Quartet, Peter Brotzman- Thomas Borgmann Quartet, Joe Giardullo Quartet, Sunny Murray, Joseph Jarman, and Thurston Moore.

Marc Ribot cites Ayler as an influence and has regularly performed his compositions. He recorded "Bells" on Shrek (1994), "Ghosts" on Don't Blame Me (1995), "Saints" and "Witches & Devils" on Saints (2001) and in 2005 released an album consisting entirely of Ayler compositions, and dedicated to the ethic of collective improvisation, entitled Spiritual Unity.

In 2005, the Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin released a documentary film about Ayler's life called My Name Is Albert Ayler. The film includes detailed interviews with Ayler's father Edward and brother Donald, as well as the only live concert footage of Ayler known to exist (of concerts in Sweden and France).

Ayler is featured prominently in the Astral Project manga by Garon Tsuchiya.