[78-L] Ayler & The Answer (was: M. makes the world safe)^

[eugene hayhoe]

Mike -
 
Sorry I didn't have the chance to get back to this til now, as 'tis the season...; I applaud your openmindedness and willingness to check out Ayler & hope you consider it worth your time, again, kudos. Personally, I enjoy checking out new, unfamiliar things; hope you didn't feel hectored into it, as I certainly wasn't trying to do that. I've never assumed that because I like James P. Johnson I can't like John Cage or Roland Kirk. Sometimes I feel like hearing Duke, sometimes Trane, sometimes Polk Miller or the Dixie Hummingbirds or Blind Lemon Jefferson, the multiple player pianos of Nancarrow and sometimes Hendrix or the 3 electric guitar bands of Miles Davis' mid '70s period, etc.   
 
Never do I long to hear Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra & their successors and predecessors; but there's still plenty of music from the 78 era I'm interested in. I don't think I'm at all escapist or psuedo-nostalgic about it (can you spell PHC?); I'm sure I'd be considered even more of a freak in that early 20th society than I am in this one (I won't bore anyone with the details of why I say this, I'm not withholding anything lurid or particularly interesting).
 
You only listen to those who sing in English?
 
As for Albert Ayler: Your religious references may be not be far off - it is my understanding that Ayler did view his music as prayer as the titles suggest. I haven't a clue about his theology, but given that a belief in the process of playing music is the only religious belief I'll stand behind, I relate to the idea of music as prayer. The childlike aspect of Ayler is generally one of the first things noted by people, the sing-songy theme and variation.  Also, I've heard Eastern European 'folk' double reed players who sound eerily like Ayler.
 
Funny to me that you comment about liking Albert better, as I think that it's accurate to say that Trane was moving closer to Albert's concept in the last couple of years of his life, playing from an emotional place rather than a notes in a chord orientation (and he spoke of the 'sheets of sound' as if he apparently thought 'how can I know which notes of the chord to play unless I can play all of them,' a perfectly logical  idea). 

Ayler's story is essentially a sad one, and it is my suspicion that he would have been more financially successful if he had been a house painter or something, which makes me sad, because his music has given me strength and pleasure since I was a teenager. 
It is also my impression that he was a very sincere person, who felt bad about leading his trumpeter brother Donald into a go nowhere musical career where they were unable to support themselves because of the kind of music they played. 
 
Perhaps because I came to it all at once, hearing for the first time in the same year or so (c.'68-'69) Jimi Hendrix, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Bessie Smith, Big Joe Williams, Son House (and many others), I didn't have much preconception because it was all new and alien to me at the same time, whether contemporary or from the 1920s.
 
Gene
 
P.S. - Regarding Cecil Taylor - he has a long history of interest in and association with professional dancers, so his style has't been an impediment to working with people in that field.
 
 
 
 

--- On Fri, 12/25/09, Michael Biel <mbiel at mbiel.com> wrote:


From: Michael Biel <mbiel at mbiel.com>
Subject: [78-L] The Answer (was: Marsalis makes the world safe for pure jazz)
To: "78-L Mail List" <78-l at klickitat.78online.com>
Date: Friday, December 25, 2009, 12:15 PM


Michael Biel wrote:
>> I would compare the randomness of some avant-garde jazz to the guy who
>> mainly just threw buckets of paint on giant canvasses, Jackson Pollack.  

From: eugene hayhoe <jazzme48912 at yahoo.com>
> > Once saw a show where an expert was authenticating a Pollack
> > and he went on and on about how hard it would be to fake one,
> > despite how easy most people perceive it to be.  Gene 

The first deciding factors would have nothing to do with style -- it
would start with a chemical analysis of the paint.  I wouldn't be
surprised if the gallon cans of paint he used contained now-illegal
amounts of lead.  A forger would have to find (or find someone to
manufacture) paint that would match what was made in the 1950s and 60s.
And find huge canvass and framing that are also from that era.  Next
would be a search thru the photographic records of the studio scenes to
see if something like it is even seen in the background.  Only then
would "style" be necessarily considered.

From: "Michael Biel" <mbiel at mbiel.com>
>>>> I wonder if just ANYBODY could noodle around and play
>>>> in some of these styles and be accepted.  

From: "Francesco Martinelli" <francesco.martinelli at gmail.com>
>>> yes... and anybody can paint like Picasso because he puts
>>> both eyes on one side....  f

>> Bad analogy because Picasso had skill and purpose.  

> and who decides that Ayler hasn't?  fm

One of the joys of collecting 78s and usually of the 78-L is that it
would not be us, because most of us are here because we like the music
and technology of 78s and the 78 era, and are able to avoid the music of
the post-78 era which we might not like or understand.  I don't have to
go up to an Ayler fan and demand that he tell me why he doesn't like
dixieland, or Broadway show music, or big band, or Bix, or Billy Murray,
or Vess L. Ossman, etc. etc.  If I did, the answers might include that
it is too organized, to orderly melodically and rhythmically, too
predictable, too representational, too close to reality, too harmonic,
too structured, too easy to perform because all you have to do is be
able to sing or play on key, in rhythm, in unison with the conductor and
the other musicians,  etc. etc.

I admit I do not understand that music.  I also do not understand
Italian.  Nor Chinese.  I might occasionally hear sounds in Italian I
can recognize, some root words that are similar to English and other
Romance languages, like I might occasionally hear some melodic notes or
rhythms in avant garde jazz that I recognize.  There is practically
nothing in Chinese for me to recognize, and this might be closer to my
lack of recognition of much of anything in free form jazz.  Chinese to
me is random gibberish, as is much of free-form jazz.  Comedians like
Sid Caesar could imitate the sounds of Chinese with now politically
incorrect ching-chang-chong sounds which any oriental would not think
sounds close to any oriental language.  Anyone who knows how to get
notes out of an instrument can imitate free-form jazz that most of us
would agree sounds like that junk, but a free-form jazz fan would not
think sounds anything like it.  Maybe if you hear enough of it, or grew
up with it, it would be a language you would understand and recognize,
and would be able to appreciate what is good in the form, recognize what
is bad in the form, and know when someone is trying to imitate or make
fun of it without knowing anything about it.  To me it all sounds like
random notes, and I couldn't perceive which is good, which is bad, and
which if fake imitation.  Sid Caesar happened to have started out as a
big band saxophonist and one of his characters was a be-boper in a beret
and goatee, and I bet that he could do a dandy imitation of a free-form
sax that to me and 98% of the world would sound just like the real
stuff!

But you ask about Ayler.  I admit I never heard of him, let alone heard
him, so I figured I might as well try to see what he sounded like.  So I
went to websites and found a pretty official one that had a page of what
is noted to be the editors all-time favorite recordings of him.  That
would be a good start. 
http://www.ayler.org/html/some_mp3s.html

And I found that I like his sound MUCH better than Coltrane.  "Ghosts"
and "Holy Family" had good melodies and harmonies but still sounded like
some kids trying to improvise something that they will work on and
polish and clean up.  I found "Change Has Come" to be really interesting
but for a reason that is probably completely foreign and unknown to the
performers.  I don't wish to bring religion up again, but that's where I
have heard this before.  The opening solo melody had some minor key and
plaintive sounds that sounded slightly Jewish.  Then when the ensemble
enters it has a sound and structure like an Orthadox Jewish service. 
Several times there are long devotionals that might be 15 or 20 pages
long where each member of the congregation is reading and chanting to
themselves at their own pace partially mumbling it and only
approximating the melody.  They are not paying attention to any of the
other congregants because they are in private prayer.  But every once in
a while the Cantor up at the pulpit will clearly chant a phrase starting
a new section to keep the congregation up in pace, and for a while you
start to hear some of the individual congregants at that place a few
seconds later.  Then it happens again and again.  If you do not
understand Hebrew it sounds like a garbling of random sounds, and even
if you do understand Hebrew you will only hear random words because they
are all reading very rapidly and not pronouncing each and every word. 
Likewise, in the music I hear occasionally one of the musicians play a
melody and shortly the others pick it up in their own version and
variation, and when they seem to tire of it someone else plays a melody
and they move on to it.  

Likewise, "Bells" has pretty much the same structure to me except that
instead of an Orthodox Jewish service they seem to be imitating the
Changes of a church bell tower.  In bell ringing there is a continually
changing pattern as the bells seemingly catch up with each other and
then separate again.  Every once in a while one of them plays a melody
and the others join in then separate.  

So these first four were interesting, but then as it moves on to
"Spirits (alternate take)" there was a melody at the start and then
everyone seems to go off on their own and just bleat and bray and honk
like a kid just finding out what sounds can come out of the instrument. 
Then the horns stop and let the bass player be heard before the original
melody is heard again in case we forgot what started this whole thing. 

As an explanation to the records of Jonathan and Darlene Edwards and the
Guckenheimer Sour Kraut Band it was said that you had to be a good
musician to play really bad.  Paul Weston and Jo Stafford were good
musicians just having fun pretending to be bad.  Likewise the
Guckenheimer.  And maybe, just maybe, this is part of that sense of
humor that was cited for avant garde jazz musicians -- that this stuff
like Spirits is just a bunch of good musicians trying to sound really
bad.  Could it be that Ayler is to Be Bop like Jonathan and Darlene
Edwards is to lounge singing and the Guckenheimer is to German brass
marching bands?  That Ayler was pulling our legs -- that he really could
play better.  We know that Picasso could paint better -- that he started
off as a moderately good regular painter.  But that would not get him
noticed because good painters are a dime a dozen.  So he found a style
that was his own, and then many different styles during his life.  You
can see in every Dali that he is a real good painter -- twisted, but
really good.  And maybe Pollack also started out as a good painter but
invented his style that got him noticed.  And money.  Lots of money.  Is
Ayler the Pollack of jazz?  Just because I don't happen to really like
either doesn't mean that Pollack wasn't a good Pollack and that Ayler
wasn't a good Ayler.  Just because most of us would think that anyone
who tosses gallon cans of paint onto canvass is just as good as Pollack
was, and just because most of us would think that any starting musician
noodling and experimenting is as good as Ayler was doesn't mean that
those who understand Pollack and those who understand Ayler  can't
notice the difference.  

Now can I go back to listening to REAL music?  Ah, a Billy Murray
record.  

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com  


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