Bells retains its happy, ringing instrumental chant. The theme figure races up and down, working its way out of a maze. Love Flower is a plaintive tapestry decorated with filigree of harpsichord and percussion. Zion Hill is characterized by little circular movements and angular trips within the forward motion of the piece as a whole. Universal is a prolonged assault on apathy. He seems to want another register at the upper end and, finding none, forces the top one to extend itself to those heights anyway.
These recordings are by four of the greatest and most diversified of the modernists. They are exemplary of the near past Shepp , the present, and the future. The sad fact is that white all these men have a somewhat greater following in Europe, in a number of cases, the U.
Bureau of Artistic Acceptance still pays its hacks to copy the work of its artists and present it in spayed versions. New York, Le bateau va couler, le bateau coule. Il faut gagner les hauteurs. Ha ha. Ayler has gotten himself together somewhat, lyrical strength that is one of the few valid replies to what Coltrane started.
Graves is still one of the scariest drummers playing, at least as good as Rashied Ali, or Sonny Murray. New Grass. The East Village Other 14 March, - p. Ann Arbor Argus Vol. Jazz Monthly No. I guess that faced with a rock-and-roll album from a notable avant-garde musician one looks first for some kind of outside pressure: there seems to be none. Ayler wrote the material, sings, plays, talks and whistles, and in general shows every sign of having a good time.
Even so, it has its moments; some good, some heart-stoppingly bad. Albert Ayler is one of the driving geniuses 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.
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. 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.
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. There are no kinds of nuianees on the drums. Hard rock, death chatterings. Albert should check out Jr. 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 Appollo. This is where the discovery must take place, not in the context of white rock. This album strains at everything, even social consciousness. 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. 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. 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. Bells 2. Spirits 3. Wizard 4. Ghosts, First Variation 5. Prophecy 6. Ghosts, Second Variation Disc 2 1. Spirits 2. Saints 3. Ghosts 4. The Wizard 5. Children 6. Spirits theme Albert Ayler — tenor saxophone Charles Tyler - alto saxophone 1.
Opera i klasyczna muzyka wokalna. Instrumentalna muzyka klasyczna. In Greenwich Village. Nuits De La Fondation Maeght. Unreleased Recordings. Don Ayler Discography. Ayler Remembered. Appreciations of Ayler. Click image for large version. GBCD Click image for large version. Click image for larger version and booklet].
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