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Revenant Records - Albert Ayler Box Set

With Albert Ayler, sometimes it's not the purely musical moments which raise the hairs on the back of the neck: the laugh at the end of 'Change Has Come' on Live in Greenwich Village, an involuntary explosion of pure joy; the reaction of the crowd to 'Ghosts' on the BluJazz bootleg of the first Fondation Maeght concert with that feeling of all sins being forgiven; and then there's that moment of magic at the end of the spoken introduction on My Name Is Albert Ayler when Ayler says “One day everything will be as it should be” and 'Bye, Bye Blackbird' fades in. Over the years that brief bit of autobiography has assumed much greater significance than was ever intended. It probably made sense to Ayler and the record's producers to include the spoken introduction since this was Ayler's debut album, but as far as I know no one else ever did it. In fact, one American release of 'My Name' dispensed with it altogether, probably because it didn't fit the image of the wild, free, iconoclastic jazzman that they were trying to promote - that quiet, courteous voice, telling the world that he also played golf in high school, did not really conform to the politics of the time and the marketing schemes adopted for the new black music. Ayler probably thought little of it back in 1963, there'd be plenty of opportunities to get his message across and let his voice be heard - plenty of interviews, radio and TV broadcasts, even a documentary film. But, everything seemed to vanish apart from that 1 minute 20 seconds of a young, hesitant but essentially optimistic Albert telling us that “one day everything will be as it should be”. So, it will be interesting to see how our perceptions of the spoken introduction on 'My Name' change when Revenant release their box set which includes 2 CDs of Ayler interviews. For any other artist the announcement that a 9 CD set contains only 7 CDs of music would be greeted with cries of foul (or "what a swizz" as we used to say), but not so with Ayler. So little documentary evidence remains of the man that it could be said that the two interview CDs are perhaps the most important of the lot, particularly to jazz historians. Not only do they contain two brief interviews from Denmark, one from 1964, the other from the European tour of '66, Revenant have also secured the complete Daniel Caux interview which was recently reprinted in The Wire. And to top it all there's an interview with a Japanese journalist, Kiyoshi Koyama, recorded at the Fondation Maeght in July 1970 which is almost an hour long.  So, come October we're going to be hearing Albert Ayler speak again, and this time for a lot longer than 1 minute 20 seconds.

"Rumours of a box set of the unreleased recordings of Albert Ayler from Revenant Records began to appear last year in the music press. I decided to wait awhile before mentioning it here in case it fell by the wayside but I can now announce that Holy Ghost, a 9 CD set of previously unissued Ayler material, is due to be released on October 5, 2004. 

The importance of this can't be stressed enough. One of the reasons I started this site was a fear that Albert Ayler was in danger of being forgotten by the jazz historians and academics, sidelined as a minor figure in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s. The extreme nature of some of his music, its wild originality and uniqueness, combined with the mysterious circumstances surrounding his early death, have assured his cult status, but he has never really achieved 'respectability' amongst the critical community. I get the impression that while Coltrane, Coleman and Taylor are all comfortably housed in the Jazz Hall of Fame, Albert Ayler is still waiting in the corridor outside. The main reason for this is the Ayler discography. It begins with The First Recordings (which I don't think anyone would claim is a great album) and (almost) ends with the last three Impulse titles (which...ditto). In between there's some of the greatest music (not just jazz - but music) ever recorded, but in assessing Ayler's status, the critic has to deal with the entire body of work. If you'll allow me a metaphor, Ayler's recorded legacy is a jigsaw with some boring grass at the bottom, some equally boring sky at the top, an incredibly interesting scene in the middle, lots of gaps in the whole picture and no side pieces at all. The importance of the Revenant box set is that it will provide the majority of these missing pieces so that the critic will finally be presented with a fairly complete picture of Albert Ayler. 

Critics love consistency, they like to know where an artist came from and where he was going. Coltrane will always be king because his career was so well-documented. With Ayler there was never this consistency and his music lacked context. To give just one example, on all of his records (apart from Sonny's Time Now and New York Eye and Ear Control) he was the leader. So what was he like playing as a sideman in the band of another avant-garde genius? The Revenant box set answers the question by including the recording Ayler made with the Cecil Taylor unit for Danish TV in November 1962. 

The Cecil Taylor tape and some of the other Revenant material has been circulating amongst 'collectors' for years, and I don't mean to denigrate the work done by the team which produced last year's 'Ayler Tree', but that was an underground activity and the results were distributed among the cognoscenti. I'm not suggesting that the Revenant set will cause sleepless nights for the likes of Diana Krall, but what it will do is shift all of this Ayler material - 9 CDs worth - from the underground up into the light of day, thus becoming part of the canon of Ayler's recorded legacy and as such available for all future critics and academics to ponder over in the years to come."

Over the next few months, as further details of the Revenant set are released, I will add them here - what's included and what's not. But for now I'll just mention two more items in the set. One is the Ayler brothers' performance of 'Our Prayer' at St Paul’s Lutheran Church, New York, on July 21st, 1967 at the funeral of John Coltrane - because of the circumstances in which it was recorded one of the most emotionally intense pieces of music I've ever heard. This will be its first legitimate release. The other is a track which I've never heard and which as far as I know has not been circulating among the 'collectors'. I mention it here partly to offset any impression that Revenant have taken the easy route of compiling the 'usual suspects' from the bootleg underworld, but mostly because it ties in neatly with the Cecil Taylor recording mentioned above. That was Ayler the sideman when he was starting out in 1962, and this is Ayler as a sideman in 1968:

Pharaoh Sanders Ensemble: Sanders (tenor saxophone); Chris Capers (trumpet); Albert Ayler (tenor saxophone); Noah Howard (alto saxophone); Dave Burrell (piano); Sirone (bass); Roger Blank (drums) 

1. Venus (Sanders) 22:30