blakey
22.11.06, 19:48
Albert Ayler--The Truth Is Marching In
An Exclusive Online Extra
11/17/1966
In a restaurant-bar in Greenwich Village, tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler was
ruminating on the disparity between renown and income. In his case, anyway.
Covers of his albums are prominent in the windows of more and more jazz
record stores; references to him are increasingly frequent in jazz magazines,
here and abroad; a growing number of players are trying to sound like him.
"I'm a new star, according to a magazine in England," Ayler said, "and I
don't even have fare to England. Record royalties? I never see any. Oh, maybe
I'll get $50 this year. One of my albums, Ghosts, won an award in Europe. And
the company didn't even tell me about that. I had to find out another way."
All this is said in a soft voice and with a smile but not without controlled
exasperation. Bitterness would be too strong a term for the Ayler speaking
style. He is concerned with inner peace and tries to avoid letting the
economic frustrations of the jazz life corrode him emotionally. It's not easy
to remain calm, but Ayler so far appears to be.
In manner, he is reminiscent of John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet--a
gentle exterior with a will of steel, a shy laugh, and a constant measuring
of who you are and what you want. Ayler's younger brother, trumpeter Don, is
taller, equally serious, and somewhat less given to smiling.
"I went for a long time without work," Albert said. "Then George Wein asked
me to come to Europe with a group of other people for 11 days starting Nov.
3. I hope to be able to add five or six days on my own after I'm there. Henry
Grimes and Sunny Murray will be with Don and me. But before I heard from
Wein, I'd stopped practicing for three weeks. I was going through a thing.
Here I am in Time, in Vogue, in other places. But no work. My spirits were
very low."
"That's what they call the testing period," Don volunteered. "First you get
exploited while the music is being examined to see if it has any value. Then
when they find there's an ideology behind it, that there's substance to it,
they'll accept it as a new form."
"What is its ideology?" I asked.
"To begin with," Albert answered, "we are the music we play. And our
commitment is to peace, to understanding of life. And we keep trying to
purify our music, to purify ourselves, so that we can move ourselves--and
those who hear us--to higher levels of peace and understanding. You have to
purify and crystallize your sound in order to hypnotize. I'm convinced, you
see, that through music, life can be given more meaning. And every kind of
music has an influence--either direct or indirect--on the world around it so
that after a while the sounds of different types of music go around and bring
about psychological changes. And we're trying to bring about peace. In his
way, for example, that's what Coltrane, too, is trying to do.
"To accomplish this, I must have spiritual men playing with me. Since we are
the music we play, our way of life has to be clean or else the music can't be
kept pure."
This meant, he continued, that he couldn't work with someone addicted to
narcotics or who otherwise is emotionally unstable.
"I couldn't use a man hung up with drugs, because he'd draw from the energy
we need to concentrate on the music," Ayler said. "Fortunately, I've never
had that problem. I need people who are clear in their minds as well as in
their music, people whose thought waves are positive. You must know peace to
give peace."
I asked the brothers about the primary influence on their music.
"Lester Young," Albert answered. "The way he connected his phrases. The
freedom with which he flowed. And his warm tone. When he and Billie Holiday
got together, there was so much beauty. These are the kind of people who
produce a spiritual truth beyond this civilization. And Bird, of course. I
met him in 1955 in Cleveland, where they were calling me 'Little Bird.' I saw
the spiritual quality in the man. He looked at me, smiled, and shook my hand.
It was a warm feeling. I was impressed by the way he--and later, Trane--
played the changes.
"There was also Sidney Bechet. I was crazy about him. His tone was
unbelievable. It helped me a lot to learn that a man could get that kind of
tone. It was hypnotizing--the strength of it, the strength of the vibrato.
For me, he represented the true spirit, the full force of life, that many of
the older musicians had--like in New Orleans jazz--and which many musicians
today don't have. I hope to bring that spirit back into the music we're
playing."
"The thing about New Orleans jazz," Don broke in, "is the feeling it
communicated that something was about to happen, and it was going to be good."
"Yes," Albert said, "and we're trying to do for now what people like Louis
Armstrong did at the beginning. Their music was a rejoicing. And it was
beauty that was going to happen. As it was at the beginning, so will it be at
the end."
I asked the brothers how they would advise people to listen to their music.
"One way not to," Don said, "is to focus on the notes and stuff like that.
Instead, try to move your imagination toward the sound. It's a matter of
following the sound."
"You have to relate sound to sound inside the music," Albert said. "I mean
you have to try to listen to everything together."
"Follow the sound," Don repeated, "the pitches, the colors. You have to watch
them move."
"This music is good for the mind," Albert continued. "It frees the mind. If
you just listen, you find out more about yourself.
"It's really free, spiritual music, not just free music. And as for playing
it, other musicians worry about what they're playing. But we're listening to
each other. Many of the others are not playing together, and so they produce
noise. It's screaming, it's neo-avant-garde music. But we are trying to
rejuvenate that old New Orleans feeling that music can be played collectively
and with free form. Each person finds his own form.
"Why," I asked, "did bop seem too constricting to you?"
"For me," Albert said, "it was like humming along with Mitch Miller. It was
too simple. I'm an artist. I've lived more than I can express in bop terms.
Why should I hold back the feeling of my life, of being raised in the ghetto
of America? It's a new truth now. And there have to be new ways of expressing
that truth. And, as I said, I believe music can change people. When bop came,
people acted differently than they had before. Our music should be able to
remove frustration, to enable people to act more freely, to think more freely.
"You see, everyone is screaming 'Freedom,' but mentally, everyone is under a
great strain. But now the truth is marching in, as it once marched back in
New Orleans. And that truth is that there must be peace and joy on earth.
Music really is the universal language, and that's why it can be such a
force. Words, after all, are only music.
"I'm encouraged about the music to come," Albert said. "There are musicians
all over the States who are ready to play free spiritual music. You've got to
get ready for the truth, because it's going to happen. And listen to Coltrane
and Pharaoh Sanders. They're playing free now. We need all the help we can
get. That Ascension is beautiful! Consider Coltrane. There's one of the older
guys who was playing bebop but who can feel the spirit of what's happening
now. He's trying to reach another peace level. This is a beautiful person, a
highly spiritual brother. Imagine being able in one lifetime to move from the
kind of peace he found in bebop to a new peace."
