The Host, the Ghost, the Most Holy-O

{... if anyone really wonders about this "skronk" business, read on. From Stereophile ...}


Nothing exceeds like excess. It’s wisdom not lost on Revenant Records, the over-the-top archival label that specializes in definitive compilations of artists whose work shimmers outside the frames of convention. “Raw musics” is what its late founder John Fahey called it. And after recent, exhaustively detailed box sets devoted to such American originals as Charley Patton and Captain Beefheart, Revenant has found its ultimate subject: the titanic tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler. The square root of skronk, Ayler barreled through the 1960s, a forceful and singular figure even within the revolutionary context of the free jazz scene – which never lacked for outsized personas. Beginning in 1962, when he left the Army to follow his calling, and ending in 1970, when his body was found floating in the East River, Ayler epitomized jazz as unfettered, ecstatic expression.

Across nine CDs (and a brief, bonus disc), Holy Ghost illuminates Ayler’s creative life as a series of passionate excursions. Laid out as a crazyquilt of amateur-taped concert recordings, European radio broadcasts and other scarce ephemera documenting a dozen different performances and several interviews, the package is swollen with historical significance. Ayler was distinguished by many things, including a penchant for green leather suits and cosmic pontifications. But his importance as a musician often has been overlooked. Despite inventing an enduring template for collective improvisation in jazz and staking claim on a whole range of harmonic phenomena on the reeds, he’s never been invited into the canon; instead, he’s became the patron saint of jazz rebels, cited by the burliest saxophonists as their Godhead, no matter how intemperate their howling.

Yet, as this box set proves, Ayler commanded much more than the Vibrato That Ate Cleveland (his hometown). Though he was the most extravagantly “out” saxophonist of his day -- even pushing John Coltrane toward bold, late-career epiphanies -- Ayler forged a sound that drew explicitly from jazz’s most traditional elements and influences. His compositions pulsed with the polyphony of New Orleans parade music, whether exultant or dirge-like, and evoked the primal shouts of holy-roller gospel services, which also inspired the Pentecostal themes of his melodies, with names like “Saints,” “Spirits,” “Ghosts” and “The Truth Is Marching In.”

The truth about Ayler, as revealed on Holy Ghost, is that he was an artist constantly in transition, striving to fashion a sound that was as soulful as it was startling, and unafraid of the risks necessary to achieve his goal. The earliest recording here, from a 1962 gig in Helsinki with a group of Finnish be-boppers, shows off the 23-year-old’s grasp of swing, and his debt to Sonny Rollins, whose “Sonnymoon for Two” leads off the set. Just a few months later, though, Ayler is sitting in with pianist Cecil Taylor on a Copenhagen date recorded for television. This is Taylor’s seminal outfit – with alto saxist Jimmy Lyons and pioneering “pulse” drummer Sunny Murray – in a 21-minute run through the piece “Four.” And as it displays the beginnings of fully open improvisation in a group context as a blueprint for one kind of jazz future – a post-swing future at that – it is also the moment we first hear Ayler off and running. His own trio, with Murray and bassist Gary Peacock, was perhaps his most classic. Featured on Discs One and Two, the combo that recorded the landmark Spiritual Unity for ESP comes off as a seedbed of fiery invention. Ayler’s blistering lines are buoyed by the ceaseless rush of Murray’s drums and Peacock’s eerily singing strings, by turns moaning as if to echo Ayler and percolating with percussive intent.

The saxophonist left behind the organic perfection of the trio (plus occasional guests, like trumpeter Don Cherry) to front a variety of quintets, captured in various concert settings from Cleveland to Berlin to Newport, on Discs Three through Six. The results are as mixed as the musicianship, which varied wildly – despite a succession of distinct and original drummers, including Ronald Shannon Jackson, Beaver Harris and Milford Graves. With the additions of brother Don Ayler on trumpet and Michael Samson on violin, Ayler’s performances became more expansive and otherworldly. Their very peculiarity compels interest, as if some mutant marching band were to twist a melody as sturdy as “Amazing Grace” into a pretzel of droning strings, trumpet fanfare, galloping drums and explosive, skyscraping saxophone. It shouldn’t work, and often it doesn’t, but even then it’s somehow strangely wonderful. Less prone to praise was Ayler’s shift towards a rhythm-and-blues/pop-gospel style during the last two years of his life, with girlfriend Mary Parks (Mary Maria) singing “peace and love”-type lyrics that were as awkward as the bands were ramshackle. Even then, as on Disc Six’s “Thank God for Women,” the melodies are hard to shake. At his wobbliest, Ayler maintained a jaunty dignity.

Much the same can be said for his box set. Definitely not for strict audiophiles, the recordings still sound miraculously good given the dodgy nature of much of the source material, such as poet Paul Haines’s cassette made at a 1964 gig at the Cellar Café in New York – in stereo, no less! -- or the mystery tape of Ayler blasting out “Love Cry” at John Coltrane’s funeral. The packaging outdoes Revenant’s impressive prior efforts: CDs in vellum slipcovers are housed in a faux-onyx “spirit box,” along with facsimiles of artifacts like The Cricket, the 1960s Black Arts zine edited by Amiri Baraka. The 208-page clothbound book sets a high standard for scholarship and a kind of musical investigative reportage, detailing the history while leaving the mystery intact.