# CD review: Albert Ayler – Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited – 2023: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/04/05/cd-review-albert-ayler-summertime-to-spiritual-unity-revisited-2023-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2023-04-05T00:04:49+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Summertime from the LP My Name Is Albert Ayler made me discover Albert Ayler. 
His unique interpretation of Summertime motivated me to go to Lörrach crossing the
border from Switzerland to Germany to listen to the concert of the Albert Ayler 
Quintet in Lörrach on November 7, 1966. This experience has indoctrinated me forever
for the music of Albert Ayler. **

In 1975 I created the label Hat Hut Records and in 1978 I had the chance, thanks
to the support of Joachim Ernst Berendt of South Western German Radio Network (SWR),
who had produced the recording of the November 7, 1966 performance by the Albert
Ayler Quintet, to get the recording for release on Hat Hut Records. The Albert Ayler
Estate, represented 1978 by the mother of Desiree Ayler-Fellows, gave the permission
for the release.

1964 has been described as Albert Ayler’s _annus mirabilis_, the year in which his
music reached maturity and he found his true voice. Arguably, he never attained 
the same heights or levels of cohesion so consistently thereafter. The album under
review, part of the Revisited series on Hat Hut’s ezz-thetics imprint, allows us
to sample his music towards the beginning and end of that year comprising remastered
versions of two releases: _Spirits_ recorded in New York in February and _Ghosts_
in Copenhagen from September (not New York as stated on the back cover). Both albums
were rereleased on the Arista/Freedom label in the early 1970s under the titles 
_Witches & Devils_ and _Vibrations_ respectively. The track order differs from all
previous versions and although no explanation is provided, presumably this is in
line with the order of recording at each session and the documentary nature of the
project. Art Lange supplies excellent notes.

“I like to play something – like the beginning of ‘Ghosts’ – that people can hum,”
said Ayler in a revealing interview with Nat Hentoff in 1966, “and I want to play
songs like I used to sing when I was real small. Folk melodies that all the people
would understand. I’d use these melodies as a start and have different simple melodies
going in and out of a piece. From simple melody to complicated textures to simplicity
again and then back to the more dense, the more complex sounds.”

In part, this echoes a worldview that can be traced back to Rousseau and the Romantics
and which has remained prevalent to this day across a range of cultures – that a
more authentic and less corrupted image of ourselves is to be found in native traditions
and folk-history, a place that also exists in the innocence of childhood, states
in which a purer, more spontaneous version of the self is unrestrained by limiting
conventions and where intuition confers greater understanding than the powers of
the intellect. Also significant is a mythologising tendency reflected in the brief
titles Ayler gave his pieces which evoke a shadowy, numinous realm and a desire 
for things that cannot be explained. Ghosts are emanations from the past appearing
in the present; spirits, witches and devils occupy a spectral region that intersects
mysteriously with our own. Likewise, for Ayler music was a medium in both senses:
a means of communing with others and a form for articulating areas to which the 
rational mind provides limited access, the paradigm of creativity that marries archetypal
with individual sensibilities. It is in the latter that we find the complexity he
mentions. Improvisation provides a dramaturgy for personal voices allowing them 
to move from generic to unique expression. At the same time the music of our age
is essentially fragmentary in which no single voice prevails, yet we yearn for a
past now lost, grounded in some half-remembered union. During 1964 Ayler’s achievement
was to find a way of combining all these elements into music that holds an enduring
fascination – immediate, melancholic, profound – and which remains a touchstone 
for free jazz.

Looking back, there’s a tension in his work between impulses which it took him some
time, if not to resolve then to use in a genuinely creative friction. Ayler wanted
to connect with the foundations of jazz in hymns and song, felt to be imbued with
transcendent values, and to explore the instrumental innovations of bebop and beyond,
to be rooted in the vernacular but also to have a distinctive, contemporary vision.
He’d developed an idiosyncratic way with the tenor saxophone, having power and personality,
yet found no satisfactory format in which his warped pitches, off-key shrieks and
R&B squawks could be properly integrated so they would sound like more than mere
eccentric bursts and indulgent meanderings. He apparently introduced wayward deviations
even when practicing as a child and was told by his father to get back to the melody:“
I’d be standing in a corner playing and trying to communicate with a spirit that
I knew nothing about at that particular age.” As heard on _My Name is Albert Ayler_,
originally recorded for Danish radio in January 1963, with most standards it was
as if he was speaking a hybrid language, unsure of quite what he wanted to say and
at odds with the repertoire and his fellow musicians.

Two tracks from that session suggested ways forward however, though this may seem
clearer to us now than it did to him. On ‘Summertime’, a ballad of noble simplicity,
Ayler slithers around the melody, chopping phrases into irregular sections, reducing
his line to soft textural trails, giving the performance a heightened expressive
weight threaded to the underlying melody which always remains a point of reference.
On the day after that recording, when first hearing Ayler play, Don Cherry felt 
the same spiritual presence and spontaneous outpouring as in the congregation of
a Baptist church as a child. The final track, ‘C.T.’, a reference to Cecil Taylor,
is a freely improvised piece. Some months before in October 1962 while working in
Sweden, Ayler had seen the Taylor quartet at the Golden Circle in Stockholm. He 
was familiar with the melodic and other innovations of Coltrane, Ornette and Sonny
Rollins, but Taylor’s music was probably the most advanced formal development of
jazz at that point and he wanted to be part of it – “I finally found someone I could
play with” Sunny Murray reports him as saying. Ayler sat in for one night and played
with the trio of Taylor, Jimmy Lyons and Murray during the latter part of their 
residency at the Cafe Montmartre in Copenhagen the following month, though not on
the night the legendary _Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come_ was taped. There
is however, a recording taken from a Danish TV broadcast of the trio with Ayler 
in an extended improvisation of over 20 minutes from a week earlier, considered 
by Mats Gustafsson to be “the missing link”, that first appeared on the _Holy Ghost_
box set under the title ‘Four’. Ayler’s ‘C.T.’, from six weeks later, contains occasional
passing references to a dancing figure used in ‘Four’ but has none of the whirlwind
pace injected by Taylor. In the absence of a strong motivic flow and with musicians
unfamiliar with the idiom the improvisation tends to drift.

After the _My Name in Albert Ayler_ session, he went to New York for further dates
with Taylor, then to his hometown of Cleveland where he sat in with the visiting
quartets of Sonny Rollins/Don Cherry and Coltrane. Returning to New York, he played
in a private session with Ornette and resumed working with Taylor; the last appearance
with his quartet was at the Five Spot in January 1964. In a number of respects Ayler’s
musical temperament was very different – for him prominent melodic content mattered
far more than to Taylor – but in the pianist’s ensemble he found something equally
important: a form of simultaneity where music can be many things at the same time
and ride different currents, superimposed and criss-crossed, not moored in a common
rhythm but wandering within and carried by its own processes. It may be that when
it came to his own music, in Ayler’s mind retaining traces of a blues structure 
and incorporating tunes redolent of an earlier age with this kind of flexibility
enabled him to sustain correspondences between ancestral voices and the diction 
of the present in a way faithful to both, seeing himself as both heir and transmitter.
As he put it at the end of 1964, “The music that we’re playing now is just the blues
of all of America all over again, but it’s a different kind of blues. This is the
real blues, the new blues.”

For the _Spirits_ session in February (tracks 1 to 4 on this album) Ayler used Henry
Grimes on double bass and Sunny Murray, drums, from Taylor’s quartet. Joining them
were two musicians from Cleveland, trumpeter Norman Howard, with whom Ayler had 
played since his youth, and double bassist Earle Henderson. The bass players appear
on different tracks and both play on ‘Witches and Devils’ (Unfortunately, their 
listings on the back cover don’t take account of the track reordering.) The piece
originally named “Saints” has been renamed “Prophecy” for this release, the title
given to the tune on later recordings, and more confusingly it’s the same tune as‘
Spirits’ on _Spiritual Unity_, which is not the same as the track of that title 
here. This suggests that Ayler viewed his themes as sharing collective associations,
and the melodies themselves are in certain instances variants or bear close family
resemblances. Some would be repeated during sets and sessions in different manifestations
and a few years later in live performance he would link them together in contrasting
sequences.

Two tracks, ‘Spirits’ and ‘Holy Holy’, have Ayler and Howard focussing on texture
and delineation, part of Ayler’s gestural arsenal, though in a more rudimentary 
fashion than would be used later. In both pieces the head is dispatched quickly 
followed by long solos, a short duet then a reprise. The solos consist of lines 
that flow and swell with no real relationship to thematic material, an uninterrupted
flux of energy that is all trajectory and contour. Pitches are secondary, arbitrary
even. But for the agitating presence of bass and drums the music would be curiously
static, however – it has potency but lacks dimension. This rendition of ‘Spirits’
doesn’t contain the bristling invention of performances of the piece later that 
year, including a version at the Cellar Cafe in June that begins with primordial
streams of sound and where the theme is frequently alluded to but only emerges fully
at the very end, summoned out of the vortex. ‘Holy Holy’ introduces a little more
variety, particularly in Ayler’s solo which concludes with him playing part of ‘
Ghosts’ in its first recorded appearance.

The other two tracks from the session are of a different order. They assimilate 
melody and improvisation, innovation and raw expression, in a way that would typify
Ayler’s rubato ballads and form part of his legacy. There’s a truly tragic air about
them heightened by an exaggerated vibrato that resembles the trembling melisma of
passionate song. During Ayler’s opening statement on ‘Saints/Prophecy’ the trumpet
provides a parallel commentary in brief stabs outlining the melody, a tune which
lies behind the music like a phantom presence through Ayler’s twists into the upper
registers and Howard’s constrictions, until the final, painful unison. ‘Witches 
and Devils’ is a funeral dirge with the two basses providing a mumbling accompaniment
to the ceremony, released into further laments during their plucked and bowed solo.
At times the nuanced, achingly cracked trumpet almost breaks down. Beneath all this
Murray’s taps, rolls and splashes intensify and subside in weather-like motion. 
It’s a performance of great emotional depth whose elegiac tone and sense of collective
mourning are made all the more poignant by mingling constant change and seeming 
stillness.

Tracks 5 to 10 jump forward to a Copenhagen studio in September 1964 and the quartet
with Don Cherry (cornet), Gary Peacock (double bass) and Murray, and it’s a quite
a leap. As heard on the albums _Prophecy_ and _Spiritual Unity,_ which Hat Hut plan
to release at some point as a complete edition, in the intervening months the trio
of Ayler, Peacock and Murray had taken shape, forming what is still considered a
model of integrated improvisation and intuitive interplay. Peacock’s deep-toned 
yet agile bass was able to handle the metrical shifts and oblique angles of pianist
Paul Bley (see: the Bley quartet’s _Turning Point_ mostly recorded in March 1964)
and his pliable, responsive manner fitted perfectly into the spaces created by tenor
and drums. “We weren’t _playing_, we were listening to each other” said Ayler. He’d
agreed to a residency for the trio at the Montmartre club with the possibility of
other dates and prospects of recording and Cherry, who was already in Europe, joined
them. The other recordings of this quartet have appeared most recently on HATology’s
_European Radio Studio Recordings 1964_ and _Copenhagen Live 1964._ Together with
the current album they document one the great free jazz ensembles.

As with the trio, in the quartet harmonic progression and melodic invention play
a part but are frequently given equal weight alongside other aspects not usually
so prominent or even featured at all. Changes in articulation, velocity and register,
sometimes abrupt, are combined with continuity and contrast borne by the shape and
density of phrases, layered tempos and pure texture. The old hierarchies are not
done away with so much as reconfigured within a wider ambit so that imitation and
resemblance, divergence and variation – the essentials of instrumental discourse–
can function on many levels and in surprising ways, making the music concurrently
familiar and strange. Cherry adds extra colour and refinement, acting as an offset
to Ayler and Peacock plays arco extensively, a multi-hued sonority not heard with
the trio. Murray’s kit is recorded with proper definition allowing a genuine four-
way perspective of the quartet, enhanced by the then common practice of placing 
drums and bass at either side of the soundstage.

‘Ghosts’ is a tune Ayler based on the folk ditty ‘[Torparvisan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4CyvVvRBMo)‘(
Little Farmer’s Song) that had been part of his set while touring Sweden with local
musicians, though in his hands it couldn’t be more different. (Later, he was to 
incorporate ‘La Marseillaise’, originally a marching song, into ‘Spirits Rejoice’
and other pieces.) There are two versions of ‘Ghosts’ here, opening with the longest.
After cycling through the theme all is rent asunder. Like starting from scratch,
motivic segments are caught in a swirl of conflicting tonal centres. Ayler’s off-
kilter tenor is wide open then reduced to a surge of screams and honks, taken up
by Cherry’s sinuous cornet that eventually reintroduces the theme in a recognisable
form for what sounds like a natural conclusion; save that the bass continues oblivious,
skittering over the melody before being joined by the others for a rousing unison
which this time brings the piece to an end. The second version of ‘Ghosts’ has no
solos and highlights the differing character of the tune’s constituent parts: haunting
then ebullient then back again.

Ayler’s characteristic handling of intonation and timbre owes a debt to vocal techniques,
replicating those subtle tremors, inflections, and occasional brittle edges employed
by singers, even the open throated exaltations of voices raised in supplication.
On ‘Mothers’, he uses the chord changes of the gospel song ‘Sometimes I Feel Like
a Motherless Child’ for a melody delivered in a sobbing, coarse-grained tone. By
way of contrast the slightly detached cornet plays the tune shorn of adornment. 
During the next iteration Ayler’s weeping saxophone elicits sympathetic wails from
Cherry and in the concluding statement both ascend and merge into their highest 
registers. Peacock’s bass is scraped and bowed throughout in a threnody of veiled
counterpoint.

‘Vibrations’ is an Ornetteish theme that includes a sharply rising figure transformed
into an adrenaline rush of coruscating distortions and refulgent fanfare blasts 
shadowed by heavily plucked, resonant bass and the persistent chatter of Murray’s
snare drum, ending as a disintegration into silence. In ‘Holy Spirit’ a repeated
chant calls forth fierce confabulations interrupted by an interlude for Peacock’s
chiselled thoughts and waves of percussion. Like much of this music, what holds 
the performance together is not a common metre but a shared respiratory rhythm, 
what Ben Young has called an internal gyroscope, to which individual parts seem 
related even in contradiction giving the improvisations their own endogenous balance.
It’s a quality now taken for granted in free jazz.

Cherry said that Ayler was a pure folk musician, meaning instinctual and without
artifice. Some of those early critics were right; at times there’s an amateurish
feel to execution and phrasing, but it’s a deliberate absence of cultivated sound
that taps into what we think of as natural, uncontrived sentiments, which permeate
the music. ‘Children’ is begun by Ayler as a sombre lullaby, rising and falling 
with swooning glissandi, then suddenly changes direction and is played at breakneck
speed. The remainder of the piece alternates between tender ministrations and upbeat
flurries, empathy and exhilaration, topped off by the cornet’s final peep.

After 1964 Cherry continued working in Europe and pursued the wider implications
of the folk and roots aesthetic, moving towards greater collective improvisation
and a synthesis with the music of other cultures. His ‘Suite for Albert Ayler’ from
Montmartre in 1966 is one of the first musical recognitions of Ayler’s importance,
a melding of ‘Ghosts’ – a tune he once suggested should be adopted as a new national
anthem – and snatches of his own ‘Infant Happiness’, the only non-Ayler composition
played by the Ayler/Cherry quartet and which Ayler had recorded again in 1965 under
the title ‘D.C.’.

Sonically, the remastering from analogue tapes has resulted in greater presence 
and richer textures. Previous releases are a little opaque and monochrome in comparison.
_Spirits_ has particularly benefitted: there’s a more pronounced identity to the
two basses on ‘Witches and Devils’ and Howard’s trumpet positively sings out. For
those with the albums in their collection already _Spirits To Ghosts Revisited_ 
is a definite upgrade, and if you don’t have them it carries a mandatory recommendation.

1 Summertime
 2 C.T. 3 Ghosts: First Variation 4 The Wizard 5 Spirits 6 Ghosts: 
Second Variation 7 Variations

![Summertime to Spiritual Unity, revisited | Albert Ayler | Albert Ayler on  ezz-
thetics](https://i0.wp.com/f4.bcbits.com/img/a1453014293_10.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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