The New Jazz Musings

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...

 Albert Ayler was considered a leading light in Free Jazz (or The New Thing) where form, structure and timing was broken down and restructured in a prepared or improvisational way. Ayler has been the subject in quite a few other of my blog posts, and one thing is for sure, he lived for his art. In a large part, that wasn't too dissimilar to other artists of the period. He struggled to make a decent living from his music, and for prolonged periods of time he was living in poverty.  In the journal Jazz Monthly from September 1967, WA Baldwin argued that Ayler wasn't so revolutionary in a "free" sense, but he was in his sound. Ayler was heavily influenced by composer Charles Ives, and the way he incorporated marching band music into his compositions. Like Ayler, Ives' main recognition only came after his death. I don't have all the articles, but it appears to be a series of five, the last of which I've previously posted  In Defence of Albert Ayler and The New...