Never-before released recordings of tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler's 1966 band recording in his home town of Cleveland at club La Cave, recorded over two nights in a superb sextet with brother Donald on trumpet, Frank Wright on tenor sax, Michel Samson on violin, Clyde Shy on double bass and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums, performing Ayler's compositions and Don Cherry's "D.C.".
Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 2-1123 Squidco Product Code: 31352
Format: 2 CDs Condition: New Released: 2022 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at La Cave, in Cleaveland, Ohio, on April 17th, 1966.
"For believers and non-believers alike, it is the Holy Ghost that presents the problem. How are we meant to understand it? As pure spirit? As a revenant? As merely the balance that holds Father and Son together. In Andrei Rublev's most famous icon, the Trinity is portrayed as three vigorous young men, organised without the use of modern perspective, in a dynamic triangle. It is impossible at first glance to tell apart Father, who we would presume to be aged, and Son, who logically ought to be younger. But what of the Holy Spirit: should it (he?) have a physical form at all.Albert Ayler famously said "Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost". It's a description whose tenses seem a little ironic now, because Pharoah Sanders is [in 2021] still with us, while Albert has been gone these fifty years. If he believed that he carried forward the great transformation in jazz that Coltrane represented, he was not fated to do so for long in an earthly way.In a curious sense, Albert Ayler now seems more distant from us - thus maybe confirming some aspects of his boldly blasphemous claim - than either of the other two. Coltrane's music is again all around us, as live tapes and unreleased studio material are made available. Sanders, again, continues to ply his trade past the age of 80, twice that achieved on earth by John Coltrane. But Albert Ayler continues to resist and escape us. In part, this is because his own mind was clouded and his grasp on everyday reality often uncertain. He shared with brother Don a tendency to depression and mental disorder, and in the end that was what destroyed him. Forget the conspiracy theories. Albert was an all too familiar statistic. However horrified we might be by the death by police hands of young African- Americans, there is an even more frightening figure lying down among in the small typeface: the needless deaths of African-American men failed by the mental health system.There are other, more artistic reasons, why Albert Ayler might seem far from us. His music espoused a certain "primitivism" that seemed to evoke the gatherings and rituals of ancestral peoples and early settlers. The word "primitive" itself has to be used with great care, but given that there is a strain of Christianity that identifies itself as such - upper-class Primitive - that should be our point of reference, in the same way as "radical" always needs to be seen as something to do with roots.Albert was a primitive in the same sense that he was a radical. He went back to the origins of things, digging deep. But there is another sense in which he seems fugitive. Quite simply, he didn't leave behind very much. In comparison to Coltrane, who had substantial official recording careers at Prestige and Atlantic & Impulse!, with a single Blue Note title teasingly punctuating the list, in comparison to Sanders who has continued to release music in constantly evolving forms, Albert Ayler left only a scattering of studio releases, of which the last few still provoke fierce discussion. Were they a surrender to r'n'b populism, or were they the logical extension of everything that had gone before? The jury is still out.Hence the excitement fifteen years ago when a whole box of hitherto unreleased Albert Ayler material appeared on the Revenant imprint (which explains that word in the opening paragraph!) as Holy Ghost: Rare and Unissued Recordings 1962 - 1970, the most concentrated documentation of Albert Ayler's work there had ever been.It is almost a market law that box sets are bought and treasured but rarely listened to. They are like family Bibles, full of significant inscriptions, but consigned forever to a shelf. The record you are holding offers an opportunity to listen to Albert at a key moment in his creative life and for the moment unencumbered by the monumentalism of a box set. In between, he had worked as steadily as at any time in his life, making the Village Vanguard recordings that appeared on Impulse! as Live In Greenwich Village and, with essentially the same line-up, the superb European performances from the previous month that appeared on hatART or hatOLOGY and ezz-thetics (all by Hat Hut Records) as Berlin/Lörrach/Paris/Stockholm1966. These are justifiably celebrated recordings and have become key texts in the Ayler story. Other recordings of the time find him in Slugs' Saloon, a hub for hard bop-into-free jazz. Almost unknown was the series of tapes made in April 1966 at a club called La Cave. It was all the more significant because it was located in Albert's home town of Cleveland.Half a century after he left us, we are still catching up with Albert Ayler and still coming to terms with his unique synthesis of the traditional and the avant- garde. This is another important document in that belated journey of discoveries and is some of his emotionally freest playing."-Brian Morton, September 2021