Albert Ayler

Holy Ghost is the first comprehensive attempt to build a monument in sound to Albert Ayler. The settings – radio and TV sessions, studio demos, private recordings, live concert footage – find his music at its most liberated. And with the sponsorship and assistance of Ayler's family, friends, and colleagues, Holy Ghost documents his never-before-heard first and last recordings, bookending rare and unissued music from every stage of his career.

revenantrecords.com

A key early album by Albert Ayler - a mindblowing record even all these many years later, and a key introduction of Ayler's music to the rest of the world! The set begins with a compelling spoken introduction from Albert - really taking the time to introduce himself and his new approach to jazz - then rolls into searing sounds on tenor and soprano sax, played with accompaniment from a European trio that has Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen on bass, Niels Bronsted on piano, and Ronnie Gardier on drums. A number of the tunes are standards - used by Ayler here in ways that are similar to some of Cecil Taylor's initial recordings - as a way of marking his own different in jazz, before setting out on his own compositions in years to come. Given the quartet setting, there's less of the locked horns and rhythms of some of Ayler's ESP recordings to come - but the difference in format also makes the album a real standout in his catalog, too.

Albert Ayler - New Grass (1968) {Impulse! 0602498842195 rel 2005}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 218 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 78 Mb
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© 1968, 2005 Impulse! / Verve Music | 0602498842195
Jazz / Soul Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Saxophone

One of the last albums that Ayler ever recorded – and one of his most memorable! The record shows Ayler at the crossroads, filled with emotion and meaning, struggling to convey his message to a lager audience. At times, he takes a strange soul/jazz format to do so, and has tracks featuring backing by "the Soul Singers" – at others, he plays solo, with some of the most plaintive tones he ever laid down on wax! The record features an incredibly haunting "Message From Albert", plus the tracks "New Generation", "Sun Watcher", "New Ghosts", and "Free At Last". Completely fascinating, and a record that really makes you wonder what would have happened had he not died a mysterious early death!

Albert Ayler - Spirits Rejoice (1965) {Esp-Disk' Japan TKCZ-79102 rel 1993}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 199 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 79 Mb
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© 1965, 1993 Esp-Disk' / Venus Records Japan | ESP-1020 / TKCZ-79102
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Free Jazz / Saxophone

Recorded live at New York's Judson Hall in 1965, Spirits Rejoice is one of Albert Ayler's wildest, noisiest albums, partly because it's one of the very few that teams him with another saxophonist, altoist Charles Tyler. It's also one of the earliest recordings to feature Ayler's brother Don playing an amateurish but expressive trumpet, and the ensemble is further expanded by using bassists Henry Grimes and Gary Peacock together on three of the five tracks; plus, the rubato "Angels" finds Ayler interacting with Call Cobbs' harpsichord in an odd, twinkling evocation of the spiritual spheres. Aside from that more spacious reflection, most of the album is given over to furious ensemble interaction and hard-blowing solos that always place in-the-moment passion above standard jazz technique.

Spiritual Unity was the album that pushed Albert Ayler to the forefront of jazz's avant-garde, and the first jazz album ever released by Bernard Stollman's seminal ESP label. It was really the first available document of Ayler's music that matched him with a group of truly sympathetic musicians, and the results are a magnificently pure distillation of his aesthetic. Bassist Gary Peacock's full-toned, free-flowing ideas and drummer Sunny Murray's shifting, stream-of-consciousness rhythms (which rely heavily on shimmering cymbal work) are crucial in throwing the constraints off of Ayler's playing. Yet as liberated and ferociously primitive as Ayler sounds, the group isn't an unhinged mess - all the members listen to the subtler nuances in one another's playing, pushing and responding where appropriate…