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| Albert Ayler New Grass |
Below is a review of New Grass by Larry Neal in The Cricket (Black Music in Evolution) magazine/fanzine from 1969. The Cricket was a highly influential Black culture publication and the same edition included an article written by Ayler. Ouch ! This must have hurt, but it was a genuine review and appeal to Ayler by Larry Neal.
Neal suggested Impulse were driving Ayler in this more crossover and commercial direction. I don't believe this was the case. Bob Thiele was still at Impulse in 1968 and his only interest in crossover was recording two generations of jazz artists together.
NEW GRASS/ALERT AYLER
Personnel:
Albert, tenor sax; Call Cobbs, piano, Electric Harpsichord and Organ;
Bill Folwell, Electric bass; Pretty Purdie Drums. Burt Collins, Joe
Newman Trumpets; Seldon Powell, tenor sax and flute, Buddy Lucas,
baritone sax; Garnett Brown, Trombone.
Albert Ayler is one of the driving genuises of the Music. He has
clearly put forth a definite sound; a different and fascinating way
of thinking about the world as sound; as movement; as the ghostly
memory of the Spiritual Principle. Albert‘s sound at its best is
the field holler and the shout stretched like a piercing shaft from
Alabama cotton fields to New York, and on into some cosmic world of
strange energies. At his best, Albert's voices buzz and hum with
awesome deities.
When
most of us first heard Albert. he really blew our minds, opening us
up to not only new possibilities in music, but in drama and poetry as
well. He was coming straight out of the Church and the New Orleans
funeral parades. He had all kinds of Coon songs in his horn. He had
compressed, in terms of pitch, all of the implied cycles in the blues
continuum. His thrust was shattering. So that we must acknowledge
that anything we say about this album must be seen against Albert's
fantastic possibilities.
But
lately Albert's music seems to be motivated by forces that are not at
all compatible with his genius. There is even a strong hint that the
brother is being manipulated by Impulse records. Or is it merely the
selfish desire for popularity in the american sense?
At
any rate, this album is a failure. It attempts to unite rhythm and
blues dynamic with the energy dynamic of Ayler. But in attempting to
unite the two styles certain very fundamental things have been
overlooked. First, rhythm and blues is rooted in a popular tradition
which has allowed for innumerable innovations in and of itself. It is
a tradition that demands respect. Men like Jr. Walker demand respect.
Because like Bird, they are the masters of a particular form.
Therefore, any contemporary musician who attempts to use R & B
elements in his music should check out the masters of that form.
Like
it's not too cool to get to the Rolling Stones or The Grateful Dead
to learn things that your old man can teach you. And this is the
feeling that I get from listening to New Grass. I mean the
direct confrontation with experience as lived by the artist
himself is not there. And this is a painful thing for me to say cause
I have always dug Albert. I know what the Brother is trying to do.
But his procedure is fucked up.
The
rhythm on this album is shitty. There are no shadings, no implied
values beyond the stated beat. The guitar is shitty. Most of the
singing is shitty, especially the songs "Heart Love,“ and
"Everybody‘s Moving.“ The Sister sounds like she is
straining, trying to find some soul in a dead beat. There are no
kinds of nuances on the drums. Hard rock, death chatterings. Albert
should check out Jr. Walker's band, or Bobby Blue Bland's rhythm
section. He should dig the long version of James Brown's "There
Was a Time." He should note the heavy spiritual blueness in the
bass guitar. He should dig how the rhythm and blues people embellish
the beat, how they use space.
All
this information is immediate. Most of the good bands come through the
Apollo. This is where the discovery must take place, not in the
context of white rock. This album strains at everything, even social
consciousness.
But
Albert's attempt is fundamentally correct. It just must be focused
sharper. The music must find ways of reaching into the pulse of the
people; ways of taking ordinary elements out of their lives and
reshaping them according to new principles. In this procedure,
therefore, the music moves us toward national unity and spiritual
unity. A Unity Music. A music that is so total, so fully informed by
a Black ethos that it meets a more collective and less specialized
need. Music can be one of the strongest cohesives towards
consolidating the Black Nation. The music will not survive locked
into bullshit categories. James Brown needs to know Albert Ayler, Sun
Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Pharoah Sanders. I would like to see the
Dells("Stay in My Corner"), with Pharoah or Archie Shepp.
Implied here is the principle of artistic and national unity; a unity
among musicians, our heaviest philosophers, would symbolize and
effect a unity in larger cultural and political terms. Further, there
should be more attempts to link the music to other areas of the Black
Arts movement.
LIKE:
REVOLUTIONARY CHOREOGRAPHERS LIKE ELEO POMARE,
JOHN
PARKS, JUDI DEARING, TALLY BEATY SHOULD BE
CHECKING
OUT CECIL TAYLOR'S MUSIC WHICH IS
HEAVILY
POSITED ON DANCE CONCEPTS.
***********************************
HOW
DOES POETRY AND MUSIC OPERATE IN THE CONTEXT
OF
POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS
GATHERINGS?
******************************
PHAROAH
NEEDS A TEMPLE.
SUN
RA IS A BEAUTIFUL BLACK INSTITUTION.
*************************
POETS
SHOULD WRITE SONGS
********************
And
so on, Back to Albert. The so-called New Music represents at the core
of its emanations the philosophical search of Black people for
Self-definition. Unlike the blues, its placement is more directed at
our possibilities in the cosmic sense. Every aspect of the music can
feed on the other. There are still a myriad of possibilities for
musicians in the area of the human voice. Max Roach and Donald Byrd
showed the way: and there is still a lot of space left as Coltrane,
Pharoah, and Albert indicate.
There
are some profound possibilities in the area of tribal chorus. (Check
out volume two (2) of the World Library of Folk and ‘Primitive
Music, Columbia, KL-205.) But these possibilities, as relevant as
they are, will not be realized if we approach them as gimmicks
adopted from jive white boys. What we will get in that case will be
bull-shit "universalism.“
Albert
you are already universal. You were universal when you cut My Name
is Albert Ayler; and even there the context was bad. Swedish
nightmares. If you speak to your Brothers and Sisters, to us who
really love, and care not just for you, but for us, you will be in
fact universal. Check out your context black musicians. Who is your
primary audience? Ed Sullivan, Janis Joplin, timothy leary
....? Or are you about something that relates to us; and even though
we be slow in digging you sometimes, Just the fact of you being
nearby, around the corner; we all working it out together, reaching
for that Unity Form; Just this fact alone deepens communication and
strengthens in a concrete spiritual manner.
GREAT
SPIRITS, HELP US T0 SEE AND HEAR
ASANTE
Larry
Neal
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