Ayler Quintet, Albert

Stockholm, Berlin 1966

Label: Hatology Country: Switzerland

"Albert Ayler's 1966 European tour produced several of the most inspired concerts of his sadly abbreviated career. Of the surviving tapes from that tour, those from the Berlin concert have been the most abused, while those from Stockholm are all but unknown. This is the first release of these performances, in digitally remastered sound, to be approved by and officially and legally licensed from the Ayler Estate and the copyright holders of these tapes."-John Litweiler

"The writer Amiri Baraka described the scorching sax sound of Albert Ayler - the free-jazz saxophonist who died in 1970, aged 34, in New York's East River - as "like the singing from a black hole". But for all its stark expressionism, Ayler was blasting this spine-chilling noise across a familiar landscape of early-jazz street marches, spirituals and gospel. This album features remastered versions of tapes made in Berlin on this once-controversial artist's European tour of 1966, plus the first release of music recorded in Stockholm on the same trip. Ayler's blazing shows were following sets by Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz and other more orthodox jazz artists, but his finales roused the European crowds to ecstatic acclaim just the same. Sometimes the music sounds like the work of a dishevelled Salvation Army band, sometimes like a series of strange, hooting operatic arias, in which jaunty themes Sonny Rollins might edge their way into the midst of big, rapturously lamenting harmonies. The repertoire is much the same from both gigs (including a shimmering Truth Is Marching In and the see-sawing, lamenting Bells), and has an even more emotional quiver for the addition of fine Dutch violinist Michel Samson, meshing evocatively with the vibrato and clarion lead-lines of Ayler's trumpeter brother Donald."-John Fordham, Guardian UK

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