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Summary: Musick hath charms...
Comment: ...to awaken the savage beast. Or to make the somnolent beast savage once more. After the cool/hot intellectuality of be-bop, the classical musician's inevitable favorite jazz repertoire, where could jazz have gone but to Albert Ayler?
One previous reviewer declared that Ayler paid no attention to the past of jazz or of music at large. It couldn't be farther from the truth. Ayler went straight back to the lower Mississippi, the muddy bottom, the House of the Rising Sun, to reconnect jazz to its raw origins, to the sound of a slave band funeral procession, half wailing in grief, half rollicking in anticipation of a long night's drunk.
Ayler's tone on his sax is blatantly crude. He means it to be so. He has no stomach for prettiness. Just listen to the few seconds of the amazon samples. You'll get the idea. You'll instantly hate it like George W's simian grin, or you'll gasp, as I did the first time I heard Ayler, and shout out "This is what jazz almost forgot about!"
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Summary: albert has fun
Comment: Albert unquestionably took jazz to its 'logical' conclusion with his caustic fire-breathing, not for the faint of heart. This disk shows him in all his split-tone howling speaking-in-tongues refinement, with powerful backing by Sunny Murray's light-as-knitting-needles-playing and Gary Peacock's inventive bass antics. Rarely if ever in jazz will you hear a trio speak to one another so intricately; Ayler recorded many fine sides, but this surely stands among his best. Three songs are fast, one slow, though it goes into the same turgid territory of the others. But familiar with his entire catalog, you get the sense that Albert's having a heck of a lot of fun here with his odd micro-melodies, frantic peals and squeals of notes (that yes, were a huge influence on Coltrane, who was quoted as saying that Ayler got beyond what he was capable of playing). Music for that rainy day? If it's raining fire and the four horsemen are prancing on the rooftop - a great album with no apologies. (For those of you who love Ayler, be sure to check out Charles Gayle's early work. I saw him live, first row, and with his first gutteral tenor blast he pinned me to the seat and kept me there, "bringing it home" from first blast to final scream - yow!)
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Summary: A correction to even further validate this recording
Comment: The reviewer "El Lagarto" may want to note that the release date of John Coltrane's "Ascension," his first proper free jazz album and first major foray into the avant-garde, is June 28, 1965. "Spiritual Unity" precedes that album by approximately a year, and if I am not mistaken, Coltrane cited Ayler as an influence which helped vault him into his late period recordings.
This recording is a masterpiece and must have been a revelation at the time to all with open ears. For an even more complete and brilliant document of Ayler's influential sound and immense presence, check out the Complete Greenwich Village recordings on Impulse! That is all for now.
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Summary: Even an Olympic swimmer might not like the Ocean
Comment: This album skipped a few (hundred?) decades and took jazz straight to its logical conclusion. Fast forward several million years, far past our own epoch in this particular cosmic cycle, and you will hear this album playing as the universe dissipates back into its perfectly entropic state.
Don't get me wrong, this is not an album I listen to often. You wouldn't really play it in the car or at a party (unless it's a REALLY good party). This one takes some acclimation...like astronaut camp.
Yeah it's noisy and chaotic, but make no mistake: there is DEFINITELY music here. It's amazing that you can even hear it, let alone that someone actually wrote it, but it's here. Use with caution. This album will liberate your mind and incite a riot in your head, if you let it.
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Summary: As The Spirit Moves
Comment: Certain albums seemed destined to capture the public's imagination and win widespread, unequivocal acceptance almost instantaneously. One thinks, for example, of Tapestry by Carole King, Rumors from Fleetwood Mac, and the Johnny Cash landmark effort, At Folsom Prison.
Others, like Brilliant Corners (Thelonious Monk) and Sail Away (Randy Newman) required time, tireless advocacy on the part of convinced music critics, and risk-taking listeners before assuming the iconic status they enjoy today.
Spiritual Unity, which may be Albert Ayler's Guernica, falls into neither category. It was born in obscurity where it has lived ever since, like a prisoner whose slim hopes are sustained only by infrequent visits from family members.
Jazz listeners are a small subset of all music listeners, but jazz itself is a big tent covering various splinter groups. There are those who believe that the sun set on real jazz when Sidney Bechet died. The majority of jazz lovers consider the WWII big band years of Basie and Ellington to be the halcyon era. Hipsters and flipsters latched onto Bop, but many, including Cab Calloway, rejected Bird and Diz. Cab Calloway called Bop "Chinese music."
The herd of jazz enthusiasts was culled even further by the arrival of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and others who expressed a wanton disregard for melodic traditions. For many, Coltrane's squawks, squeals, and rapid fire scales were indistinguishable from underwater parachuting - an idea whose time hasn't come. However, Coltrane's disciples followed him and followed the horn players he influenced, like Roland Kirk. By now the herd, though fiercely loyal, was tiny. Then came Ayler.
Ayler blew with maniacal intensity, passion, delirious joy, and complete disrespect for the past. He played as though he'd never heard anyone else play, as if he'd discovered a horn in the desert and was single-handedly inventing music. Ayler did not play from his head or even his heart but directly from his soul. In jazz clubs around Manhattan cries of, "Check please," and, "I think I hear my mommy calling me," and, "Oops, this is my stop," rang out like chimes, followed soon thereafter by hasty retreats.
In a sense, Ayler took abstract jazz to its absolute breaking point; it really can't get much further out than this without sounding like jets warming up on a runway. His music defies evaluation, it even defies judgment. Almost everyone hates it and would pay to not have to hear it. Those who love it, as I do, respond to a spiritual awakening and freedom transcending the bars and dots on sheet music, pointing straight to the next world. For me, this is astonishing, glorious music, but then, I'm in a small herd.
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