Jazz Articles about Albert Ayler
About Albert Ayler
Instrument: Saxophone, tenor
Related Articles | Albums | Photos | Similar ArtistsAlbert Ayler: More Lost Performances Revisited
by Chris May
A state-of-the-art sonic restoration of obscure but historically important Albert Ayler material by Switzerland's ezz-thetics label, which with its parent label, Hat Hut, has been creating an audiophile archive of Ayler recordings with the support of his estate since 1978. All too often, “more" in an album title means “Beware: barrel scraping in progress." Not in this case. More Lost Performances Revisited is primetime Ayler. The disc draws from three sources over a five-year timespan. The earliest ...
read moreAlbert Ayler: Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited
by Chris May
This landmark reissue contains consummately remastered cuts of the killer (among killers) track from Albert Ayler's relatively unknown My Name Is Albert Ayler (Debut 1964) plus the justly celebrated Spiritual Unity (ESP-Disk, 1965) in its entirety. Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited starts with “Summertime" from the 1964 album. In his survey The Jazz Standards (Oxford University Press, 2012), Ted Gioia writes that over 400 jazz covers of George and Ira Gershwin's song were recorded in the 1950s ...
read moreHoly Ghost: The Life & Death of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler
by Matt Marshall
Holy Ghost: The Life & Death of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler Richard Koloda 312 Pages ISBN: #9781911036937 Jawbone Press 2022 There's a special enthusiasm in the jny: Cleveland, Ohio, jazz orbit for avant-garde saxophonist Albert Ayler—an insistent push to celebrate, memorialize, canonize a legend thought to be unjustly forgotten by his hometown—that isn't seen for, say, Tadd Dameron or Jim Hall. (Leading this charge is New Ghosts, a three-man team dedicated to ...
read moreAvant Hard
by Patrick Burnette
Mike drags Pat out of his blanket fort for close encounters with a couple heavy hitters of the avant-garde, a Chicago legend who doesn't believe in intonation, and a tribute to that legend that gets celestial from time to time. In pop matters Mike talks about a little known jazz short film from the fifties and Pat gets totally tubular. Playlist Discussion of Albert Ayler's album Holy Ghost: Rare and Unreleased Recordings (Revenant) 6:42 Discussion of Cecil Taylor's ...
read moreAlbert Ayler: At Slugs’ Saloon 1966 Revisited
by Mark Corroto
With Albert Ayler it has seemingly always been “what If." What if he had survived that plunge to his death in the East River in 1970? Setting aside the question of whether he was murdered or committed suicide, how would he have altered the course of music if he lived beyond those 34 years? At the time of his passing he had fueled a revolution both in America and Europe for free jazz. Let's not fail to remember that his ...
read moreAlbert Ayler Quintet: At Slugs’ Saloon 1966 Revisited
by Chris May
There continues to be as much discussion about Albert Ayler's personality and motivations as there is about the music he left us. Was he a religious fundamentalist? Was he bi-polar? Was he an attention seeker? Was he some sort of leather fetishist? The evidence suggests Ayler may have been borderline bi-polar, but as for the other questions, the answer is a resounding “No." A clue to where Ayler was coming from, and where he was going to, ...
read moreAlbert Ayler, Jones Jones, Jonathan Reisen & Charles Mingus
by Maurice Hogue
Two previously unreleased recordings by two of the seminal artists in creative music get sampled this time out: Albert Ayler's Revelations—The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings and Charles Mingus' The Lost Album From Ronnie Scott's. For Ayler, this was his last recorded music before he died later that year. The tapes for the Mingus release sat untouched in the Mingus Archives until now. Other new recordings sampled are the Jones Jones Trio of Larry Ochs, Mark Dresser & Vladimir ...
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