|
(From Jazz Monthly No. 177 - November, 1969.) - UK NEW GRASS:
Albert Ayler (ten); Bill Folwell (el-bs)
New York City September 5 and 6, 1968
New Grass
add Cal Cobbs (p); Pretty Purdie (d); Ayler (ten; vcl-1, whistling-2)
same dateNew ghosts - 1 :: Sun watcher - 2
Burt Collins, Joe Newman (tpt), Garnett Brown (tbn); Seldon
Powell (ten); Buddy Lucas (bar); Rose Marie McCoy, Mary Parks
(vcl - 3); Bert DeCoteaux (cond, arr); Cobbs plays organ, electric
harpsichord; Ayler (ten, vcl -1, monologue - 4)
same date
Message from Albert - 4 :: New generation - 1,3 :: Heart love
- 1, 3 :: Everybody’s movin’ - 1, 3 :: Free at last - 1, 3
Impulse SIPL ((m)MIPL)519 (37/5d.) WELL HERE’S a thing. I guess that faced with a rock-and-roll album from a notable avant-garde musician one looks first for some kind of outside pressure: there seems to be none. Ayler wrote the material, sings, plays, talks and whistles, and in general shows every sign of having a good time. So then one looks for musical justification; if a man has his musical freedom he should be just as free to do something like this as something more sophisticated, and certainly in the past Ayler has made use of various Afro-American idioms in his music, the most notable I suppose being the New Orleans marching band bit, and more recently he’s used a lyrical method owing a fair amount to Johnny Hodges, but these folk-memories have in the past been considerably altered from their origins to fit an overall musical conception, while here the material hasn’t been subject to the same transformation. Rather the reverse: Ayler’s playing has been grafted onto a straight pastiche of the soul style, and though often the playing itself is good Purdie’s drumming is particularly finely detailed and very accomplished in its way the end result shows an uneasy mixture rather than any enriching of or development within the area of music that Ayler has in the past marked out for himself. Even so, it has its moments; some good, some heart-stoppingly bad. The best things come when there’s less people about, on the bass and tenor duet of New Grass, or on Sun watcher, both of whom offer new chances to study Ayler’s phenomenal high-register technique. But in general his thinking gets trapped in the beat and his playing hasn’t the fluency and logic of his best work. So in the end, while it’s nice to see the local Impulse boys finally letting some of Ayler’s work into the shops, one wonders why they chose this one and bypassed the Village Gate performances or the fascinating Love cry album available to them. JACK COOKE *** (From The Cricket - November, 1969.) - US NEW GRASS/ALBERT AYLER Personnel: Albert, tenor sax; Call Cobbs, piano, Electric Harpsichord and Organ; Bill Folwell, Electric bass; Pretty Purdie Drums, Burt Collins, Joe Newman Trumpets; Seldon Powell, tenor sax and flute, Buddy Lucas, baritone sax; Garnett Brown, Trombone. Albert Ayler is one of the driving geniuses of the Music. He has clearly put forth a definite sound; a different and fascinating way of thinking about the world as sound; as movement; as the ghostly memory of the Spiritual Principle. Albert’s sound at its best is the field holler and the shout stretched like a piercing shaft from Alabama cotton fields to New York, and on into some cosmic world of strange energies. At his best, Albert’s voices buzz and hum with awesome deities.
When most of us first heard Albert, he really blew our minds, opening us up to not only new possibilities in music, but in drama and poetry as well. He was coming straight out of the Church and the New Orleans funeral parades. He had all kinds of Coon songs in his horn. He had compressed, in terms of pitch, all of the implied cycles in the blues continuum. His thrust was shattering. So that we must acknowledge that anything we say about this album must be seen against Albert’s fantastic possibilities.
But lately Albert’s music seems to be motivated by forces that are not at all compatible with his genius. There is even a strong hint that the brother is being manipulated by Impulse records. Or is it merely the selfish desire for popularity in the american sense?
At any rate, this album is a failure. It attempts to unite rhythm and blues dynamic with the energy dynamic of Ayler. But in attempting to unite the two styles certain very fundamental things have been overlooked. First, rhythm and blues is rooted in a popular tradition which has allowed for innumerable innovations in and of itself. It is a tradition that demands respect. Men like Jr. Walker demand respect. Because like Bird, they are the masters of a particular form. Therefore, any contemporary musician who attempts to use R & B elements in his music should check out the masters of that form.
Like it’s not too cool to get to the Rolling Stones or The Grateful Dead to learn things that your old man can teach you. And this is the feeling that I get from listening to New Grass. I mean the direct confrontation with experience as lived by the artist himself is not there. And this is a painful thing for me to say cause I have always dug Albert. I know what the Brother is trying to do. But his procedure is fucked up.
The rhythm on this album is shitty. There are no shadings, no implied values beyond the stated beat. The guitar is shitty. Most of the singing is shitty, especially the songs “Heart Love,” and “Everybody’s Moving.” The Sister sounds like she is straining, trying to find some soul in a dead beat. There are no kinds of nuianees on the drums. Hard rock, death chatterings. Albert should check out Jr. Walker’s band, or Bobby Blue Bland’s rhythm section. He should dig the long version of James Brown’s “There Was a Time.” He should note the heavy spiritual blueness in the bass guitar. He should dig how the rhythm and blues people embellish the beat, how they use space.
All this information is immediate. Most of the good bands come through the Appollo. This is where the discovery must take place, not in the context of white rock. This album strains at everything, even social consciousness.
But Albert’s attempt is fundamentally correct. It just must be focused sharper. The music must find ways of reaching into the pulse of the people; ways of taking ordinary elements out of their lives and reshaping them according to new principles. In this procedure, therefore, the music moves us toward national unity and spiritual unity. A Unity Music. A music that is so total, so fully informed by a Black ethos that it meets a more collective and less specialized need. Music can be one of the strongest cohesives towards consolidating the Black Nation. The music will not survive locked into bullshit categories. James Brown needs to know Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Pharoah Sanders. I would like to see the Dells (“Stay in My Corner”), with Pharoah or Archie Shepp. Implied here is the principle of artistic and national unity; a unity among musicians, our heaviest philosophers, would symbolize and effect a unity in larger cultural and political terms. Further, there should be more attempts to link the music to other areas of the Black Arts movement.
LIKE: REVOLUTIONARY CHOREOGRAPHERS LIKE ELEO POMARE,
JOHN PARKS, JUDI DEARING, TALLY BEATY SHOULD BE
CHECKING OUT CECIL TAYLOR’S MUSIC WHICH IS
HEAVILY POSITED ON DANCE CONCEPTS. ************************************* HOW DOES POETRY AND MUSIC OPERATE IN THE CONTEXT
OF POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS
GATHERINGS? ************************************* PHAROAH NEEDS A TEMPLE.
SUN RA IS A BEAUTIFUL BLACK INSTITUTION. ************************************* POETS SHOULD WRITE SONGS *************************************
And so on. Back to Albert, The so-called New Music represents at the core of its emanations the philosophical search of Black people for Self-definition. Unlike the blues, its placement is more directed at our possibilities in the cosmic sense. Every aspect of the music can feed on the other. There are still a myriad of possibilities for musicians in the area of the human voice. Max Roach and Donald Byrd showed the way; and there is still a lot of space left as Coltrane, Pharoah, and Albert indicate.
There are some profound possibilities in the area of tribal chorus. (Check out volume two (2) of the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Columbia, KL-205) But these possibilities, as relevant as they are, will not be realized if we approach them as gimmicks adopted from jive white boys. What we will get in that case will be bull-shit “universalism.”
Albert you are already universal. You were universal when you cut My Name is Albert Ayler; and even there the context was bad. Swedish nightmares. If you speak to your Brothers and Sisters, to us who really love, and care not just for you, but for us, you will be in fact universal. Check out your context black musicians. Who is your primary audience? Ed Sullivan, Janis Joplin, timothy leary ....? Or are you about something that relates to us; and even though we be slow in digging you sometimes, just the fact of you being nearby, around the corner; we all working it out together, reaching for that Unity Form; just this fact alone deepens communication and strengthens in a concrete spiritual manner.
GREAT SPIRITS, HELP US TO SEE AND HEAR
ASANTE Larry Neal
Back to: Record Reviews Discography: New Grass Bibliography |
|
