Albert Ayler: Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited

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 and 1960s alone. Few if any of us will have heard them all, but it is probably safe to say that not one of them will sound remotely like Ayler's or communicate such intensity of pain-wracked emotion.

In an essay about Chet Baker in his memoir Close Enough For Jazz (Quartet, 1983), Mike Zwerin, referring to a Baker performance of the tune and playing with the lyric, wrote, "Chet Baker is summertime, but the livin' isn't easy." Sure, Baker could pack a truckload of torment into Gershwin's masterpiece, but Ayler takes it to another level—and yet one feels cleansed and invigorated by the experience. Check the YouTube below.

Ayler recorded My Name Is Albert Ayler in Denmark with a pick-up band comprising Nils-Henning Orsted Pedersen on bass, Ronnie Gardiner on drums and, on "Summertime" only, Nils Bronsted on piano. The musicians make little attempt to follow Ayler into the deep blue yonder but it does not matter, because all but one of the other tracks are evergeen jazz standards and the straight-ahead accompaniment serves to emphasise Ayler's out-there trajectory. The only original, "C.T.," Ayler's salute to Cecil Taylor, is also included on Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited. Debut, incidentally, issued a remastered version of the complete My Name Is Albert Ayler in 2010.

Beat poet Ted Joans famously likened the impact of Spiritual Unity to someone shouting "Fuck!" in New York's St Patrick's Cathedral. Ayler's chef d'oeuvre still packs a roundhouse punch in 2023, although in the decades since its release it has become iconic as well as iconoclastic. If you are still reading this review, you will almost certainly know and love Spiritual Unity, recognising it as a masterclass in trio interplay on a par with, can ya dig it... pianist Bill Evans' 1960 group with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. Ayler, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray function as one, in Joe Harriott's immortal words, "like swallows over water."

Sorry, rather too many quotations in this review. What the hell, here is another. In 2014, AAJ's Mark Corroto summed Spiritual Unity up thus: "30 minutes that changed the direction of jazz." All that needs to be added is that Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited includes a fifth track, "Variations" (titled "Vibrations" on the 2014 reissue). And also that the Ezz-thetics' label's sonic jedi, Michael Brändli, has surpassed himself with the remaster.