|
(From Jazz Monthly No. 155, January, 1968) - UK
© W. A. Baldwin ALBERT AYLER—CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION? (4) BY W. A. BALDWIN IT should be clear that I regard these L.P.’s as a very satisfying body of work, especially considering the short period which they cover. I believe that I have judged them by the most demanding standards, possibly to the extent of being unfair to some of Ayler’s recordings. This is particularly the case with some of the performances which I have described as comparatively formless: I think that even the worst of them is far from being totally incoherent, and indeed some listeners may prefer these solos with a looser structure, and regard the solos on “Bells” or “Spiritual Unity” as over-organised and lacking in spontaneity.
I mentioned earlier Ayler’s BBC2 recording which I had the good fortune to attend. This was sympathetically reviewed by Ronald Atkins in Jazz Monthly, and I agree with his review in general, but I must differ on one or two points. It is not true to say that the solos played by the Ayler brothers were just noise, without the “merest kind of structure”. I must admit that Albert Ayler’s soloing meant little to me (although I should prefer to check my impressions with a second hearing before committing myself), but Don Ayler on trumpet seemed to me to play a couple of quite coherent solos, even if he did go on a little too long.
Ronald Atkins was certainly correct in pointing out the change in emphasis in Ayler’s approach in that the brass band passages found on his last two records have been greatly expanded, becoming collective improvisations in a style based on the New Orleans brass bands. Nevertheless I do not feel that such a development is inconsistent with Ayler’s earlier work. In dealing with the Danish Debut/Fontana L.P. “Spirits”, I drew attention to the “archaic” phrasing, the almost anti-modern approach, particularly on Witches and Devils from this album. In spite of this, when first hearing the brass band passages in Bells, I enjoyed them without taking them seriously, and I still cannot take them seriously. It is my belief that Ayler started out by parodying the brass band style in an affectionate sort of way: but on the BBC-2 recording the improvisations were serious and quite profound, although lacking the intensity of Ayler’s solo work.
I think that the reason for this development lies in the nature of Ayler’s style on the 1965 recordings as opposed to the earlier ones. As I have pointed out, this style is in many ways rather limited. It takes the form of solos of great intensity and brevity. It would clearly be impossible to make up a whole programme of such solos. Therefore I believe that the brass band passages, as well as such pieces as Holy Family and Angels from “Spirits Rejoice”, were introduced by way of light relief, and they are effective as such. The reason why these passages have turned into serious improvising (previously they seemed to be pure routine) is, I consider, to be found in my discussion of collective improvising within the New Thing. It is clear that Ayler is concerned with making collective improvisation work, and because it does not work very well when it is really free, as on “New York Eye and Ear Control”, Ayler has turned to base his collective improvising on the New Orleans mdoel, which after all is the obvious model for anyone attempting this kind of improvising.
While Ayler’s borrowings from New Orleans jazz are selective (he is hardly likely to break into an up-tempo Tiger Rag) I still agree with Ronald Atkins that the resulting performances have something of a split personality, due to the obvious differences in style and mood between the collective improvisations and the solos. And I am also inclined to agree with his prediction that Ayler will develop the ensemble style into something more personal and more in keeping with the rest of his music.
At the beginning of this account of Ayler’s work I promised a re-assessment of the New Thing: as I have pointed out however, in my letter to this magazine (printed in the February edition) there is a great danger in generalising about the New Thing because the description seems to cover a wide diversity of different approaches. Nevertheless I shall try to clarify a little my own view of the movement. Firstly, I am convinced that the usual way of looking at the New Thing as a sort of extra-complicated Modern Jazz is largely false. The Parker influence is admittedly strong in Ornette Coleman, but it is tempered with folk-music and blues influences, while such musicians as Archie Shepp and Ayler seem to have avoided modernist influences to a remarkable degree, so that one is led to consider the possibility that this avoidance is conscious. It is clear that the Free Jazz style has its roots in the whole of jazz, and it shows every sign of being a rejection, to some extent, of certain tendencies in Modern Jazz, particularly the tendency towards complexity for its own sake. Archie Shepp has expressed this view very clearly in Down Beat (January 14, 1965):
“The new music reaches back to the roots of what jazz was originally. In a way, it’s a rebellion against the ultrasophistication of jazz.”
Shepp’s argument is too long to reproduce here but it is well worth looking at. Although I do not regard Shepp as a creative artist on the level of Coleman or Ayler, this may well turn out to have been the most significant single comment on the New Thing. I suspect that Ornette Coleman, as the first of the Free Jazz players (if we exclude the doodlings of the “cool” men) is important not only because he has developed an original and exciting style but because he has done so without making things more difficult for himself. This holds out considerable hope for the future of jazz, which Coleman, if he is followed by the majority of musicians, will have diverted from the path of ever-increasing (and self-defeating) complexity. The ultimate working-out of this latter tendency can, as I have said before, be found today particularly in the work of the “Blue Note” school. The jerky rhythms, the frequent near-incoherence of the final result, all this seems to me to suggest that there is no future at all in the complex approach. It is a mistake to regard this music as ‘transitional”, as bridging the gap between conventional Modern Jazz and the New Thing. In fact it seems to be in total opposition to “Free Jazz”. The more complex such efforts become, the less they resemble the approach of Coleman or Ayler.
It may seem to the reader that I am drawing some rather fine distinctions here. After all, I myself have referred to Ayler’s “complex patterns of cross-rhythms”. The distinction is admittedly not obvious to the casual listener, but is nonetheless extremely important. Ayler often plays phrases which are complex in themselves, but he does not relate in any way to the technique of the latter-day modernists, which is to start off by establishing a complex set of cross-rhythms and then try (hopefully) to fit the actual phrases in as best they can. By contrast with Ayler, the Blue Note men often end up with phrases of banal simplicity (take for example the worst moments of Hat and Beard from the already-mentioned “Out to Lunch” album).
This writer is convinced that with the encouragement of the critics, perhaps even due to the encouragement of the critics, jazz has been headed up a blind alley even since the innovations of the boppers. That critics have failed to see this is, I believe, largely due to a mistaken view of jazz rhythm. The mistake was, as far as I know, originally, and quite ironically, made by Rudi Blesh, who in his advocacy of the merits of New Orleans jazz, claimed to hear in it complex cross-rhythms. Since that time, jazz critics have always been happy to be able to report the existence of cross-rhythms in a jazz performance. Blesh was, of course, mistaken: New Orleans jazz betrays less signs of cross-rhythms than any other kind of jazz—nevertheless he seems to have introduced the idea that we should be looking for them, and that we should judge a jazz performance according to whether we find them.
Now of course jazz means something different to every listener, and I can well believe that to some it finds its highest form in a set of rhythmic exercises: this writer is inclined to feel that jazz is primarily a form of musical expression, and that the rhythmic qualities of a jazz musician should be assessed in terms of the rhythmic drive which he is able to generate, of the degree of relaxation which he is able to retain, and above all of the expression and imagination in his phrasing and timing, not in terms of the number of accents which he contrives to displace. Of course individual and imaginative phrasing may involve the displacing of accents, and one can find a great many examples of this in Ayler’s work, but the major talent of many modernists appears to be to avoid placing their accents on the beat, an exercise which does not necessarily involve any control over phrasing.
I should like to advance the opinion that the really important and distinctive thing about jazz rhythm is the freedom which jazz musicians enjoy in terms of phrasing and timing and accenting, when compared with, for example, the performers in European “straight” music. I should further like to suggest that this freedom of phrasing has little to do with freedom from the beat: in spite of being tied to the beat, many New Orleans musicians enjoy a great deal of freedom in their phrasing and in particular in their accenting (of which more later). Nevertheless there are two styles within what I shall call the jazz tradition in which we sometimes, if not very often, find that the requirements of phrasing and timing override the maintainance of a steady beat—the two styles being country blues and the New Thing. What do these two styles have in common? I believe that they both display this occasional characteristic as a result of being relatively independent of the demands of dance music. I am sure that it has nothing to do with being either primitive or ultra-sophisticated. To advance this view is of course to stand in direct contradiction to the usual story about how jazz musicians have progressively gained more freedom from the beat. I believe nevertheless that it is supported by the facts.
It should be clear that by these standards I regard criticisms of the rhythmic simplicity of New Orleans musicians as being entirely irrelevant—I am also less than impressed by the rhythmic daring of the boppers. There is plenty of evidence that their rhythmic complexity was more of a hindrance than a help to really free phrasing— although they were not admittedly in quite the same desperate state as their followers today. Nevertheless even such an undeniably great musician as Parker is not always as relaxed or as authoritative in his phrasing as many commentators would have us believe.
The history of developments in jazz rhythm since the bop era is, to this listener, rather depressing. The initial wildness of the boppers became formalised to an orthodoxy previously unknown in jazz. As far as phrasing goes, the cool school is characterised by a total lack of authority, the impression of groping hesitancy possibly being a mannerism but nevertheless being a symptom of a real lack of purpose; as a reaction against this, the hard boppers developed an equally stereotyped but in this case resoundingly obvious phrasing. Parallel with this came another tendency, namely to avoid phrasing in an obvious way by simply avoiding phrasing at all and just playing as many notes as possible.
Of course it is true to say that in any given style of jazz the majority of musicians phrase in a fairly stereotyped way, and only the outstanding musicians have a very individual phrasing. What is disturbing about recent modern jazz is that although there are individualists in terms of phrasing, it is often difficult to regard them as more creative than the others. The best example of this can be found in Coltrane, who attracted a great deal of favourable critical attention in the late 50’s, largely because his style of phrasing was original: on examination however the “sheets of sound” approach turns out to be nothing other than the above-mentioned tendency to play too many notes taken to its furthest (and most absurd) extreme. Such a performance as Giant Steps appears to be an infallible source of ecstacy to those critics who get their kicks from analysing chord sequences—as a jazz performance it is very near to being grotesque. It is true, of course, that Coltrane moved away from this style, doubtless aware of its limitations, and although his phrasing has often been incoherent—for example in Chasin’ the Trane which was criticised when it came out for every reason except the right one, namely the very poor phrasing—nevertheless one has the impression of a gradual improvement in this respect, and Coltrane’s further development might well have brought some very much more satisfying recordings.
This is mere speculation however, and has nothing to do with our subject, which is the general lack of rhythmic creativity in Modern Jazz. One of the results of the “impasse” which was reached in the 50’s was a tendency to turn to what, in retrospect, can only be seen as slightly desperate measures to try to get away from the orthodox. This has been the era of the odd time signatures, the bossa nova; the thinking behind these moves is clear—if we cannot phrase in an original way by virtue of inspiration, we can at least stop ourselves from phrasing in the same old way by adopting a different rhythm. Significantly, all the most creative of the New Thing musicians have found 4/4 quite adequate for their needs.
The purpose of this long digression is to make clear the contest in which the real importance of the New Thing might become apparent. Most critical comment on the New Thing is entirely on the level of “A is further out than B”. If critics spent less time drawing up charts of the development of jazz, they might well find more time to really listen to the music and discern its real qualities. It is this writer’s view that Coleman and Ayler are the two most important musicians in jazz today not because of any real or imaginary innovations but because they show a real awareness of the ways in which jazzmen express themselves, subtleties of phrasing, of accent, of intonation of which most modernists seem blissfully unaware.
I think that at this stage it might be most instructive to consider the full extent of the innovations which have been credited to the New Thing, in order to see what an uncompromisingly revolutionary movement it is.
First we might consider the “sounds” produced by such as Ayler, the unorthodox effects of intonation which have led to widespread suggestions that Ayler’s music consists of mere noise assemblages. This misconception can only be due to a failure to grasp the melodic and rhythmic development in Ayler’s work. Ayler does nevertheless produce sounds never made before on a saxophone. The interesting thing is that most of Ayler’s sounds have been produced before, but on a trumpet. There is no doubt in my mind that such musicians as Kid Thomas Valentine could easily match Ayler in any sounds-producing contest. The other interesting thing is that New Thing trumpet-players do not even apparently attempt this range of effects. Certainly Don Ayler plays nothing but notes, individually and fairly cleanly articulated notes. I must admit to having been rather amused by all the fuss which has surrounded Don Ellis’s statement that Red Allen was the most avant-garde trumpeter in New York. If the production of unusual tonal effects makes a musician avant-garde, then it is a simple statement of fact.
All that we find, in reality, is that the saxophone has taken over the role of the trumpet—which should not surprise us, since it has become the dominant instrument. Ayler’s range of effects is indeed impressive, but even the most outrageous can be found in earlier styles of jazz. A particular jerky effect (suggestive of stuttering) which Ayler uses is for instance also favoured by Kid Thomas, and something quite similar can be heard on Freddie Keppard’s 1926 recording of It must be the Blues, where Keppard actually selects his notes so as to enhance the effect.
On the first point therefore, concerning those unusual effects, we can hardly credit the New Thing musicians with very much in the way of innovation. And it should be clear from what I have already had to say on the subject that we are going to find even less in the way of rhythmic innovation. While many of their contemporaries are struggling to play in unlikely time signatures, the leading free form stylists seem quite content with 4/4. The freedom from the beat and from a steady tempo which many commentators claim to find in Ayler’s work becomes less apparent with further listening, and it is quite evident to this listener that Ayler’s work not only implies a definite “beat”, but that this beat is maintained throughout his solos with no changes of tempo. It is a remarkable reflection on how one’s listening ability can sharpen that I already feel inclined to withdraw my criticisms of Ayler’s work on Spirits Rejoice on the grounds that it is not very strongly rhythmic, only a few months after having written it. From my own experience I am inclined to suspect that the listener grasps the beat in a jazz performance as much from the shape of the phrases as from any actual accents: perhaps the best example is Lester Young, who can play entirely arhythmic lines which swing like mad as soon as one can appreciate the shape of his phrases. If the listener is unable to deduce the implied rhythm from the shape of the phrases, no particular rhythm is apparent at all. How else can we explain initial dismissal of Pres, of all people, on the grounds that he did not swing?
I think that it is safe to say that most listeners can already appreciate the swing of Ornette Coleman’s playing, whereas until quite recently Coleman’s alleged failure to swing was the principal issue in the controversy that surrounded him. Coleman is actually more unconventional than Ayler, in that he is prepared to change tempo in the middle of a solo, although he uses this device sparingly for the most part.
As I have endeavoured to make clear, the conception of phrasing which we find in the work of Coleman and Ayler is distinctly traditional when compared with the “sheets of sound” approach of Coltrane; one area in which commentators have found a degree of innovation is in the accenting of the New Thing musicians, who make frequent use of percussive accents. This is usually believed to derive from a Monk influence further developed in Cecil Taylor’s work. Now it is true of course that in the context of modern bop-influenced jazz Monk’s use of percussive accents was quite a departure from the norm—indeed it was considered to be quite an eccentricity until comparatively recently. Nevertheless this writer cannot help feeling that the mistake is too commonly made, when assessing the stature as an innovator of a New Thing musician, to compare his work only with Modern Jazz. In fact percussive accents are a fairly common feature of pre-bop piano styles, most particularly boogie. In this latter case it might be argued, with some justificaton, that the use of percussive effects is as much a matter of dynamics as of rhythmic surprise; one can however find plenty of examples in the earliest jazz of the use of such accents for their own sake.
It needs to be pointed out, with regard to Modern and Mainstream jazz, that although the placing of accents in relation to the beat is less predictable than in New Orleans jazz, the actual strength of the individual accents is often very much more predictable. Until the present day, I think that it is true to say that the most imaginative of the New Orleans horns have been almost alone in recognizing the importance of the strength, or, perhaps more accurately, the sharpness of an accent. Two elements are involved in this “sharpness”—the force with which the accent is struck and the length of time for which it is sustained. It has always seemed remarkable to this listener that, in all the discussion surrounding the Hot Fives and Sevens, (including the accusations of rhythmic primitivism), no-one seems to have indicated the real source of the individuality of these recordings, namely the frequently startling use made above all by Armstrong but also by Dodds of accents with a percussive quality. Much the same is true of another highly individual set of recordings, again very much a subject of continual controversy, the Bunk Johnson American Musics, where all three front-line men make highly creative use of this device, even, surprisingly enough, Jim Robinson, on whose other recordings this approach is much less in evidence. A paradox frequently noted with regard to these recordings is that although Bunk’s style is never overtly aggressive, say in the manner of Kid Thomas, these recordings surpass all other recordings in jazz in their powerful drive. It is an imaginative use of percussive or semi-percussive accents, at times almost becoming an interplay of accents between the horns and Baby Dodds on drums, which largely accounts for this drive. In view of these examples, and a great number of other, less remarkable instances, it should be clear that, even in this respect, the New Thing is merely reviving an old technique rather than inventing a new one. Albert Ayler — Conservative Revolution? (5) Articles Bibliography |
|
