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Albert 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 ...
read moreAlbert Ayler: Revelations
by Chris May
There are lovingly curated box sets and there is Albert Ayler's Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings. The 5 x LP / 4 x CD set documents in full the two concerts Ayler gave at the high-end performance and visual arts facility in Provence, France in July 1970, just four months before he passed, so tragically and prematurely. Everything about the release is near perfect, from the sonics through to the hundred-page booklet which project producer Zev Feldman ...
read moreAlbert Ayler: La Cave Live-Cleveland 1966-Revisited
by Chris May
Cleveland club La Cave, a grungy cellar which could accommodate around two hundred people, opened as a folk venue in 1962, transitioned into rock mid-decade, and closed in 1969. Along the way, in amongst such counterculture flagbearers as the Velvet Underground and The Fugs, La Cave booked a few of the bad boys of so-called “new thing" jazz, among them tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler, a Cleveland hometown hero. The 2xCD La Cave Live-Cleveland 1966-Revisited comprises just over ...
read moreFire Music: The Story of Free Jazz
by Chris May
Fire Music: The Story of Free Jazz Submarine Deluxe 2021 There is much to like about this lovingly put together history of the so-called free jazz of the 1960s and 1970s. Over a decade in the making, the film, directed by self- declared genre obsessive Tom Surgal, is a compilation of interviews with, and archive performances by, many of the luminaries of the movement. Practically every minute of spoken- word content in the 88-minute ...
read moreAlbert Ayler: New York Eye and Ear Control Revisited
by Mark Corroto
The backstory of New York Ear and Eye Control is a significant factor in the music and the direction free jazz took in the 1960s. Filmmaker Michael Snow commissioned Albert Ayler's trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray to record a thirty-minute soundtrack for a movie, “Walking Woman," he had yet to film. As explained in the liner notes, he “wanted to buy a half hour of music." Also invited to the session were trumpeter & cornetist Don ...
read moreAlbert Ayler: New York Eye And Ear Control Revisited
by Chris May
The development of so-called free jazz in New York during the first half of the 1960s was topped and tailed by three landmark recordings: Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (Atlantic, 1961), John Coltrane's Ascension (Impulse, 1966) and Albert Ayler's New York Eye And Ear Control (ESP, 1966). Of the three discs, only New York Eye And Ear Control broke away completely from jazz's normative structure of theme/solos/theme. Commissioned as an art-film soundtrack, Ayler's recording was also the product of an altogether ...
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