HAT HUT Records Releases Ayler Live in Copenhagen

When the most adventurous of the jazz players in the Sixties ventured boldly into avant-garde practices, saxophonist Albert Ayler may well have been the most provocative. Enjoying the benefits of retrospection, jazz historian Ted Gioia, in his 2011 The History of Jazz, called Ayler a “virtuoso of the coarse and anomalous.” For the benefit of readers who expected saxophonists to provide them with smooth melodic lines, Gioia explained that first adjective by observing that Ayler was more interested in discovering and exploiting new sonorities than in giving clear and polished accounts of the notes.

Ayler was far from the only one to explore this territory. Among saxophonists the names of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Eric Dolphy should come to mind immediately. However, Coltrane had the benefit of having mastered more traditional approaches to playing jazz. His reputation provided him with the “bully pulpit” from which he could pursue such adventurous projects as Ascension and Meditations and provide Dolphy with work as a member of his combo. While Ayler never played with Coltrane, the latter was there to help the former out with financial support.

In 2002 the Albert Ayler Estate released a CD entitled The Copenhagen Tapes, an audio document of the quartet that Ayler led during a visit to Copenhagen in September of 1964. (Ayler’s dead body was found in New York’s East River on November 25, 1970, and his death was presumed to be a suicide.) The quartet began earlier in 1964 as a trio in which Ayler performed against a rhythm section of Gary Peacock on bass and Sunny Murray on drums. In July of that year, Ayler provided a freely improvised soundtrack for Michael Snow’s film New York Eye and Ear Control; and his trio was augmented by Don Cherry on trumpet, John Tchicai on alto saxophone, and Roswell Rudd on trombone. Cherry would then join the trio on their trip to Europe. They were to have been joined by Dolphy, but Dolphy died in Berlin on June 29.

The Copenhagen Tapes was the result of two sessions. The first six tracks were recorded live at the Club Montmartre on September 3. Alternate takes of three of those selections, “Vibrations,” “Saints,” and “Spirits,” were then recorded in studio by Danish Radio on September 10. At the end of this past April, all six live tracks were reissued by the Swiss label HAT HUT Records under the title Albert Ayler Quartet: Copenhagen Live 1964:

from Amazon.com

Those unfamiliar with how far Ayler ventured from conventional jazz practices will definitely find their curiosity satisfied by this recording. Indeed, there is something unabashedly (and unashamedly) primal in what Ayler and his colleagues brought to Copenhagen. Even the fact that each track has a title that is a simple plural noun reinforces those primal qualities. Indeed, those who visit this site regularly will find on these tracks the sorts of qualities that have inspired me to refer to the most adventurous of avant-garde efforts as being out on the “bleeding edge.”

Those without a taste for such adventures may find themselves uneasy in listening to this album. Some might even call the listening experience painful. Such listeners need to bear in mind Gioia’s approach to Ayler as a maker of new sonorities. Those sonorities were so new in their time that they were even more shocking than Edgard Varèse’s effort to compose music for thirteen percussionists (“Ionisation”) about half a century earlier. Indeed, when Frank Zappa started pursing his own “bleeding edge” interests with larger ensembles, there is a good chance that he wanted his saxophone players to follow in Ayler’s path.

The six tracks on this recording may not be for the faint of heart, but those willing to steel themselves for the listening experience will have much to discover on this album.

Ornette Coleman and Edgard Varèse

Ornette Coleman’s interview with Art Taylor for the book Notes and Tones throws some interesting lights on the origins of his particular approach to the free jazz movement, or at least how that approach found its way to Atlantic Records by way of an encounter between Coleman and Nesuhi Ertegun at Tanglewood in 1959.  The mere fact that it happened at Tanglewood says a lot about both of these men, since it implies a certain convergence between the experimentation of those composers who followed in the wake of Anton Webern and those looking for new ways to play jazz.  However, beyond any attempts to account for that convergence, there are underlying questions of technique that come up among those who accuse Coleman of playing three different instruments (saxophone, violin, and trumpet), none of them particularly well.

Coleman does not evade that criticism in his interview with Taylor.  When Taylor asked him why he took up violin and trumpet, Coleman gave about as direct reply as one might expect:

I started tying to play the violin and trumpet because I didn’t want to be known as the best saxophone player, or the best this or that, just to have a gig.

This struck me as being honest without being evasive.  It reminded me of a quotation from Edgard Varèse that I cited when I was writing a preview for the coming season of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players:

I am not a musician:  I employ rhythms, frequencies and intensities.

This seems like a fair thing to say about Coleman, going all the way back to The Shape of Jazz To Come, the Atlantic recording to come out of his first session in their studios on May 22, 1959.  No one would accuse Coleman of having a refined sound in that session.  Indeed, the coarseness of his sound is particularly apparent when one of his solos is followed buy one taken by Don Cherry, who had no trouble sounding smooth, even on cornet.  Nevertheless, there were any number of remarkable features in how Coleman could deal with the basic physical qualities of raw energy, particularly those qualities of rhythm, pitch, and amplitude that were of such interest to Varèse.  (Where rhythm is concerned, I find it extremely significant that Coleman and Cherry could play exactly the same rhythmic pattern as precisely as they did.)

Ultimately, I accept Coleman rejecting the idea of being best at anything.  I am not interested in whether he is better than Thelonious Monk, and more than I care whether he is worse that Albert Ayler.  All that really matters is that, when I listen to any of his tracks, it helps to prepare myself with the proper mindset.  I have never encountered any evidence that Coleman knew about (let alone was inspired by) Varèse;  but I find it helpful to know that I can approach listening to Coleman’s jazz in the same way that I would approach listening to performances of most of Varèse’s compositions.

On the "Historical Record" of Modern Jazz

Anyone who has seen the German documentary, Blue Note - A Story of Modern Jazz, as I did back when the Ovation Channel was still in business, can be forgiven for taking it to be the story of modern jazz. However, while there is no denying the major role that Blue Note played in cultivating the necessary listening skills for the new sounds of jazz that began to emerge after the Second World War, it would be a mistake to overlook some of the other labels that issued recordings without which any historical study of jazz would be woefully inadequate. Consider, for example, those two works that had been so influential to Anthony Braxton, Albert Ayler's "Bells" and John Coltrane's "Ascension," both of which were produced by Bob Thiele for Impulse! Records. Admittedly, Creed Taylor would not have been able to launch Impulse! in 1960 had Blue Note not prepared listeners for their "new wave of jazz;" but, if we are to accept Ashley Kahn's epithet for Impulse! as "The House that Trane Built," we should remember that Coltrane's work with Blue Note was relatively modest (which is not to dismiss the significance of Blue Train) and that much of his truly formative work (including his recordings with Miles Davis' "first quintet") was produced by Prestige. I find myself writing this because I have come to realize that much of my appreciation of "emerging voices" comes from the Prestige anthologies I have acquired over the years, which include (in alphabetical order) John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins. These CD collections are products of meticulous compilation by Eric Miller (Dolphy and Monk) and the venerable Orrin Keepnews (Coltrane, Davis, and Rollins); and they are invaluable resources for anyone (like myself) who believes that both composition and performance are best understood through opportunities for diachronic listening. When I then consider the richness of the notes that accompany each of these collections, I realize how clueless "Audiophiliac" Steve Guttenberg is in his despair over a report that "projects that it won't be until 2012 that download sales surpass CD sales." However, this is not the first time I have had to recognize that Guttenberg seems more interested in listening to high-quality digital sounds, rather than high-quality performances of music!

Listening to Anthony Braxton

When Mosaic Records first announced their release of The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton, my first reaction was my usual concern about space being at a premium in my condominium (the same reaction I had a year earlier when my wife received the Brilliant Classics Bach Edition as a gift). I figured that the few Braxton CDs I had accumulated would be sufficient. I certainly enjoyed those recordings, as I enjoyed the ways in which Braxton pushed the envelope of classification.

Organizing my personal collection has never been an easy matter. It took me a while to converge on a systematic approach that I could actually use when I was trying to find anything specific. I ultimately resorted to a technique I learned about 25 years ago from the librarian at KUSC. She hit on the idea of organizing everything according to the old (and now defunct) Schwann record catalog, saving back issues of the catalog to keep track of recordings that had gone out of print. (She delighted in being able to call her method "Schwann's Way.") I have pretty much picked up this method in spirit. Since Schwann is no longer with us, I have saved only one old issue each of Schwann Opus (for classical music) and Schwann Spectrum (for everything else), not for assistance in finding specific items but just as reminders of the basic categories.

Unless I am mistaken, Braxton is one of two composers whom "Schwann's Way" assigns to different categories, some recordings classified as classical and others as jazz. (The other composer is John Zorn.) Personally, I think the Schwann classifications had more to do with the publisher than with the content itself; but I have decided to honor their guidelines as best as I can.

What interests me more than his defiance of conventional categories is that Braxton is almost exactly a year and a month older than I am. Taking into account my having skipped a grade in elementary school, there are many ways in which we have probably shared listening experiences during our formative years. True, while I went straight from high school to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I then remained for my doctoral studies, Braxton entered the army after high school; and, as Mike Heffley documents in the Mosaic notes, it was during his service in Korea that "he discovered the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Albert Ayler's Bells, Coltrane's Ascension, then returned to Chicago." Barry Kernfeld's biographical entry for Grove Music Online has him spending two years at Roosevelt University "reading" philosophy and composition, meaning that he probably did not earn a degree; but, more importantly, he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and formed a trio with Leroy Jenkins and (now Wadada) Leo Smith, which recorded in New York as the Creative Construction Company and travelled to Paris in 1969. According to Heffley, the trio's nickname was "the slide rule boys." After returning from Europe, he spent "some quality time around the post–John Cage Wesleyan University" (Kernfeld's words), which probably put him in touch with Alvin Lucier, Richard Teitelbaum, and Frederick Rzewski. This would have been shortly before Lucier received his faculty appointment at Brandeis University, which is when I first became aware of his work and his colleagues in the Sonic Arts Group. Braxton was thus looking for a path that would lead to innovation through innovative thinking about structure, which is basically the same sort of path I had been trying to explore in my own approach to computer music in my doctoral research. My guess is that it is only through bad luck that I missed any opportunities to hear him perform around the same time that I was encountering other composers, such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich; but, as I said, what strikes me the most is the extent of overlap in our listening contexts.

The breadth of Braxton's listening context is more evident in the Mosaic collection than it can be in any of the individual recordings I had previously acquired. Only through a project like this one would Rzewski end up in my jazz collection by virtue of a performance of Braxton's "Opus 95 For Two Pianos" along with Ursula Oppens. There is a sense of Rzewski's presence in Braxton's listening context, but this composition is still very much a product of Braxton's own voice. Similarly, the "Opus 82," conceived for four 39-piece orchestras, reflects the influences of Charles Ives, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis but also points the way to Braxton's later "Composition No. 165" for eighteen instruments, recording almost fifteen years later by New Albion (and classified as "classical" by Schwann). The period covered by the Mosaic collection (1974–1980) also includes innovative (but decidedly jazzy) approaches to Scott Joplin, Lionel Hampton, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy. This is a collection that takes the ear in far more diverse directions than just about any other anthology in either the jazz or the classical category. Nevertheless, as the Discography in Braxton's Wikipedia entry indicates, the 8 CDs in the Mosaic collection are actually a rather modest sample of his work; and, as far as I can determine, he is still taking that work down new paths!

My Grove Press copy of Henry Miller's Topic of Cancer includes an essay about Miller by Karl Shapiro entitled, "The Greatest Living Author." I still remember this sentence about Miller's work from that essay:

Let's assemble a bible from his work, I said, and put one in every hotel room in America, after removing the Gideon Bibles and placing them in the laundry chutes.

In a similar vein I would like to envisage a world in which one may start one's day with Braxton's music in the company of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and John Coltrane. Sadly, even with my XM satellite service, I have yet to hear anything by Braxton through a broadcast medium. I suppose that means that I shall just have to fashion this world for myself, without the prospect of sharing it with others!