[This article was included as an insert with the original pressings of Bells - which explains why the ESP catalogue is added at the end.]

(From National Observer, June 7, 1965) - USA
© Robert Ostermann

They Don’t Call It Jazz

The Moody Men Who Play the New Music

BY ROBERT OSTERMANN

          JAZZ has always occupied the position of a renegade, a maverick, in the U.S. cultural life. It has never won complete acceptance, despite the distinction occasionally brought to it by the rare genius of a Duke Ellington. And its forays beyond the musical barricades into classical fields have been so sporadic as to be almost accidental.
          The reasons are numerous. Jazz has a rude, abrasive, exuberant vitality that can easily frighten an audience raised on Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Jule Styne. Consider, too, that the music is so seldom found in polite circumstances.
          The public also looks with profound suspicion on the men who make the music. It sees jazzmen as eccentric loners with irregular habits and sometimes dubious associations. Fifty years ago or today, the consensus remains pretty much the same: Jazz may be all right in its place. But it isn’t really a very respectable place.
          But a change may be on the way. Today there’s a significant segment of jazz musicians who are determined to overthrow the image of the jazzman as a dissolute vagabond and jazz music as disreputable noise. They’re determined to replace it with a new image of both music and musicians.
          They’re doing it with completely different lives and completely different music. You hear no hipster’s jargon in their speech; they leave that to the rock-and-rollers. These musicians display, according to a close and long observer, “an almost terrifying sobriety, a terrible concern with man’s condition.”
          They keep to themselves, rehearsing long hours every day. They give a lot of thought to their music and are articulate in discussing it; you discover this after talking with them for five minutes.

The Disturbing Sounds

          The music they’re playing is uncomfortable to the ears of most jazz buffs, even those who have grown up with jazz from Dixieland, Louis Armstrong, and Lester Young to such innovators of the last 15 years as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane. It disturbs them. It doesn’t sound like jazz. To some it doesn’t even sound like music.
          What is it listeners hear in the music that disturbs them? Put this question to the musicians and they chide you gently and make a correction. They say it’s not what listeners hear in the music that disturbs them. They’re disturbed by what they aren’t hearing in the music.
          You can put this statement to the test by listening to any of the first four records in the accompanying discography. On them you won’t hear conventional harmony, rhythm, or musical form. The music moves impulsively, repeatedly changes its tonal centers so that it sounds somehow out of key, and unpredictably breaks its rhythmic patterns. You have at the same time an impression of drift as well as direction, chaos as well as order.
          The recognizable element of jazz remaining in this music is improvisation. Jazz has always meant improvising; that is, the spontaneous inventing of his music by the musician as he plays, usually around an established tune. Jazz as most people understand it is a string of improvised solos separated by measures of group playing and backed primarily by drums and a string bass.

Gary Peacock: ‘Learning to listen is a basic problem. Everyone has it.’

Improvising the Tune

          But this contemporary music, currently bearing the atrocious label “The New Thing,” pushes improvisational playing toward its final point. There is no tune; the performer improvises from scratch. More and more group improvisation can be heard taking priority over the solo musician and his performance.
          The direction is from prior composition to what has to be called instantaneous composition, a concept that has been haunting contemporary concert rnusic for many years. Here’s how it occurs: The musicians assemble; they arrange themselves, they play; they stop. There’s no written score.
          The determination to play this music and no other kind is maintained at a great price for most of these musicians. Making their headquarters in New York, they’ve found most club owners and concert managers hostile, and all but a couple of record companies indifferent. They live from day to day, from job to job.
          Of comparable stature in the new jazz music is pianist Cecil Taylor, of whom the great jazz arranger and composer Gil Evans has said: “All I can say about Cecil as a pianist and composer is that when I hear him I burst out laughing in pleasure because his work is so full of things.”

Cecil Taylor: ‘I try to imitate on the piano the leaps . . . a dancer makes.’

Conflict With Teachers

          Mr. Taylor was born in 1933 and started studying piano at 6. His mother played both piano and violin and was also a dancer. He first studied at the New York College of Music, later switching to the New England Conservatory in Boston. There he found his views were often at odds with those of his mentors. “There were certain Bartok scores,” he recalls, “in which I saw things no teacher told me anything about.”
          He plays the piano hard, working so strenuously at it that some have described him as appearing to attack the instrument. “I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes,” he says.
          During his early years in New York City he supported himself by carrying out orders from a midtown coffee shop near Madison Avenue. He also worked as a record salesman, dishwasher, and cook. His music wasn’t popular. Few musicians wanted to play with him.
          He describes his own evolution in style as proceeding from a basis in scales. A single scale became many scales, then combinations of tones. “And then,” he adds, “just intervals spaced differently, not scales at all, just groups of notes.”
          Mr. Taylor loves the dance and poetry, and writes poetry that is described as “beautiful” by those privileged few to whom he will show it. His soft, precise voice says exactly what he wants it to say with unusual precision. He keeps to himself, doesn’t make himself easy to see, and has often been hostile to critics and writers because, in his words, “They couldn’t hear.” He believes the new music reflects “the whole history of America.”
          He rejects the idea that freedom, which is central to the new music, means absence of order. “If a man plays for a certain amount of time, a kind of order asserts itself,” he contends. The musician doesn’t have to put it down in notes or argue about it. It’s just there. There are different ideas and expressions of order, and listeners have to develop the ability to recognize them.
          Despite the enthusiastic praise of Gil Evans and of artists like pianist Dave Brubeck, Mr. Taylor continues to find it exceedingly difficult to get work as a musician. The fact astonishes anyone who has heard him on the few recordings he has made. He lives in constant danger of eviction, but still asks only “a chance to play.” He insists, “That’s all we need.”
          For many of the musicians involved in the new music the making of music is literally a sacred concern going beyond the attainment of prestige, money, or public acceptance. This is what it means to saxophonist Albert Ayler and his brother Don, who plays trumpet.
          “We’re not just sitting down and trying to create beauty,” cautions Albert, who is 28, a stocky man who’s sometimes moody as he talks with you. “We’re making more than pretty, melodic forms. Follow this, please. We’re musicians and we’re asking the whole world to listen—and understand. We’re all together, everybody, and there has to be peace. That’s what we’re saying.”
          The Ayler brothers are deadly serious about their music. They’re convinced that music—their music—can demolish the barriers and divisions between human beings. They refuse to see in their playing a simple expression of their own personal problems or those of the American Negro. “We aren’t selfish enough to limit it to that,” Don says.
          The Ayler brothers assert that the music they play puts a person right where he is and says, “Don’t move. Consider who you are and what you are, where you are and where you’re going.”

          If you attended the recent Town Hall Concert in New York performed by a group under Albert Ayler you might find it difficult to contest that assertion. For 25 minutes no one in the audience moved. One listener reports he had the impression of time stopping, and that everyone seemed to come to at the conclusion of the music. “As if,” he says, “the audience were being pulled up out of the deepest reflective mood.”
          Says Albert: “You start with a feeling. One instrument states this feeling musically, then the other musicians pick it up. We donate to each other, back and forth. The feeling grows with the music.” He says rehearsals are necessary to put the sounds together, to keep the feeling intact and coherent.
          Both Aylers use the word “strong” many times as they discuss the music. “It takes a strong person to play it,” says Don. “Take any two notes, for example,” he explains, pointing with two forefingers located at different levels before his thin, serious face. “Ordinarily you play one, then the other. But for us, we have a tendency to hit both notes and everything that’s in-between all at the same time.”
          Albert finishes: “You have to really play your instrument to escape from notes to sounds. You have to really play. No kidding around.”
          The Ayler brothers agree that the new music attempts to approximate the qualities of the human voice. Don Ayler, 22, directs your attention to the two versions of Ghosts on the record Spiritual Unity. “It’s the parallel of a man making a statement twice,” he explains. “I could tell you something one time, and then tell it to you another time using different words. But it would be the same statement. The two Ghosts are that way. The music is so close to the feeling expressed that the feeling can be expressed in different passages and still speak the same. Music, to us, is like talking.”
          Albert and Don Ayler are virtuosos on their instruments; Albert has been playing for 21 years, Don for 15. They look upon making music as an assigned duty, and so they refuse to play commercially popular music. They don’t like the word “jazz,” judging it inapplicable to the music they play. “Jazz is Jim Crow,” they say. “It belongs to another era, another time, another place. We’re playing free music.”

Albert Ayler: ‘You have to really play your instrument to escape from notes to sounds.’

          Byron Allen, a 25-year-old alto sax player from Omaha, Neb., is in complete agreement. He protests against putting labels on music. “There’s music and there are human beings,” he says. “That’s all. I’m not playing jazz. My mother didn’t bring a jazzman into the world; she brought a human being. That’s what I’m playing—human music.”
          Mr. Allen began playing when he was 8. His first musical experiences were with Ravel and Bartok, and then he heard Thelonious Monk play piano. “I learned from Monk what to do with the music I heard in Ravel and Bartok,” he says. He sums up his own conception of music in this way: “Time isn’t speed, it’s distance. And sound is measured motion.”
          He carries improvisation further than most. “I don’t even have rehearsals,” he says. “I give the other musicians a direction and that’s it.”
          Where does the direction originate? “What I say at the moment of playing depends on how I feel, on how everything is around me. Life is instantaneous. I live every moment. I project what I’m experiencing at that moment. That’s the direction I want the group to take.”

          At the moment of recording the selections on his Trio record, Mr. Allen was very conscious of the fact that he’d just learned his wife was pregnant. “Her being pregnant, that’s what I was thinking about. I wanted to put happy music on the record. I gave them a sound pattern to spring off of and we worked from there.”
          He invites you to listen closely to the record to see that although improvisation is complete, he still retains control over the musical ideas. “I use segments from the original sound pattern,” he explains, punctuating each key phrase with the jab of a blunt forefinger. “People think it’s chaotic. But you listen to it. It’s not at all chaotic.”
          Mr. Allen says this is the way he has always played; this is what he has to do. “I found out what I was playing long after I had perfected it,” he says. “Then I studied what I was doing, to learn from it.”
          After a moment his voice grows tense and angry. “I don’t create music to try to make myself look important. I’m trying to lay down something solid for the youngsters. That’s why I play the best things out of life. I know there’s lots of ugliness in the world but I’m not giving that to anybody.”
          The total improvisation of Mr. Allen’s music is the basic inspiration of percussionist Milford Graves. He puts it this way: “Everything in the music is being constructed right at that moment. Life is made every moment. New and fresh. That’s the music.”
          To appreciate what this means for the drummer in the new music you have to understand the function of the drummer in conventional jazz. There the drummer was a timekeeper. He maintained the beat, nothing more, even though he occasionally hammered away in a solo performance. Now he has to create sound suitable to his equipment’s interpretive and expressive possibilities. Listen to Mr. Graves:
          “You can use any part of your drum set in any way at any time. Your drums are now an instrument and you have to use them to make music, not just hold together the rest of the instruments playing. The drummer really has to hear his instrument now. Before he wasn’t hearing it, he was only proceeding on a worked-out formula of actions involving the different parts of his set. He was a mechanic, not an artist.”

          Mr. Graves is 23 and has four children. He teaches music at the Black Arts Repertory Theater founded and operated in Harlem by the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones. He doesn’t have many working dates as a musician, and his family’s finances flash up and down unexpectedly. “That’s the music, too,” he says, “full of surprises, perhaps a little uneven and rough.”
          When you press him hard to analyze his experience as a drummer more fully he moves uncomfortably in his chair. “I don’t want to define what I’m doing,” he says, almost visibly edging away from your request. “I prefer to do something, learn from what I’m doing, and then go on from there. I want to undefine. This is discovery.”
          He feels strongly about the charges some writers make that the new music is destructive, and compares the new musician’s approach with that of a child with a strange toy. “The toy delights him,” says Mr. Graves. “He loves it. It gives him love. He doesn’t analyze it. He just wants to experience more of it, and this sometimes leads him to break it up. That isn’t deliberate destruction. It’s the result of his own intense feeling about the toy.”
          Unlike most other performers playing the new music, Gary Peacock, who plays the string bass, came to his present musical vocabulary by way of a different jazz experience. He was born 30 years ago in Burley, Idaho (“There’s no jazz in Burley!” he says, full of laughter), and started playing bass in 1955. He has been a sideman under a string of exceptionally talented leaders: Bill Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, and Paul Bley.
          It was during a period of five years working in Los Angeles that he gradually began to get dissatisfied playing “tempo” music. “It was a natural evolution from conventional jazz to the music I’m now playing,” he says. “There wasn’t any abrupt change. It just grew in me and there I was.”
          The first version of Ghosts on the Albert Ayler recording, Spiritual Unity, illustrates what happens when a bass player stops keeping a strict tempo and freely improvises, combining shifting rhythms with an eloquent melodic line. It’s like hearing the string bass for the first time.
          If you ask him directly, Mr. Peacock will admit he isn’t surprised when critics and listeners don’t know what to say about the new music. “The musicians don’t always understand what they’re doing,” he says. “But they aren’t really supposed to understand. They play. The music is their gift, of imagination if you like, to other people. They follow their inspiration. Everything follows from that.”

The Message in Music

          In his view there’s nothing radically new in this music. He points out that all music has a nonrepresentational, non-sensory content, a message. This is in music no matter how familiar and conventional. But music also has a personality, and he says the message doesn’t get through to listeners if they stay at the level of the music’s personality. He guesses most people aren’t hearing all of the music they claim they like and know. “Learning to listen is a basic problem,” he says. “Everyone has it.”
          Mr. Peacock pursues his point. He reminds you that all musicians in the jazz idiom have always played to each other; this was true even in the tradition of the long, extended solo performance. They’ve exchanged musical ideas, then passed them back more fully developed than they started, supporting arid invigorating each other’s imaginations.
          “That’s what we’re doing,” he insists, “and there’s nothing new about it. The fundamental, essential musical elements are in our music. You’ll hear them if you listen.”
          That’s probably the final word. Listen.

—ROBERT OSTERMANN

Reprinted from National Observer, June 7, 1965

______________________________________________________________________________________

HERE IS THE ESP CATALOGUE OF NEW MUSIC.

ALBERT AYLER TRIO: ESP-1002 (monaural only) (with Gary Peacock & Sunny Murray)

PHARAOH SANDERS QUINTET: ESP-1003 (with Jane Getz, Stan Foster, Marvin Pattillo, William Bennett)

NEW YORK ART QUARTET: ESP-1004 (with LeRoi Jones, Milford Graves, Lewis Worrell, Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai)

BYRON ALLEN TRIO: ESP-1005 (with Maceo Gilchrist, Ted Robinson)

GIUSEPPI LOGAN QUARTET: ESP-1007 (with Milford Graves, Don Pullen, Eddie Gomez)

PAUL BLEY QUINTET: ESP-1008 (with Marshall Allen, Milford Graves, Dewey Johnson, Eddie Gomez)

BOB JAMES TRIO: ESP-1009 (with Barre Phillips, Bob Pozar)

ALBERT AYLER AT TOWN HALL (BELLS): ESP-1010 (with Don Ayler, Charles Tyler, Sunny Murray, Lewis Worrell)

RAN BLAKE PIANO SOLOS (VANGUARD): ESP-101l (monaural only)

LOWELL DAVIDSON TRIO: ESP-1012 (with Milford Graves and Gary Peacock)

GIUSEPPI LOGAN AT TOWN HALL: ESP-1013 (with Milford Graves, Don Pullen, Reggie Johnson)

SUN RA, THE HELIOCENTRIC WORLDS OF VOL. 1 ESP-1014

LIST PRICE for both monaural and stereo is $4.98

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ESP-1016.PAUL BLEY TRIO: (with Steve Swallow and Barry Altshul)

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THE GIUSEPPI LOGAN CHAMBER ENSEMBLE IN CONCERT. ESP-1018

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