Words for Albert Ayler : Albert Ayler restored much of the primitive innocence of early jazz to modern music. He either made me laugh or shook me to the depths. There was so much evidence of a warm personality in his tunes and in his sound, and of an honest and truly spiritual dedication in the things he said about his music. Like Jimi Hendrix, his spirit lives on. (From the Letters Page, Down Beat April 1971) THE LEGACY OF ALBERT AYLER by John Litweiler TO BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING. It was Ornette Coleman who revolutionized jazz at the start of the 1960s. It was Coleman with his contemporaries Dolphy, Rollins, Coltrane, and Taylor-who determined that the New Music would be a revolution of sensibility: they did not just introduce new techniques into jazz, they opened the art to a wholly new realm of emotions, discoveries, human statements. Albert Ayler was part of the New Music's second wave, as Joseph Jarman would say. After Coleman and his fellows, an entire musical generation of s...
Jamo Spingal