why did albert ayler abandon his unique band to make RnB records for i

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

did bob thiele co-erce him into doing it, or did he feel his free jazz wasnt catchin on and he wanted a hit, or what was it....listed 2 some samples of new grass, and music is the healing force of t he univerese, its not like the holy ghost set at all-- what happened 2 him?

[brownie]

Yes, it was Bob Thiele's idea. Albert Ayler agreed to it in the hope that the move would enable him to get more recognition!

[clifford_thornton]

For whatever reason, I've not been able to get all that into the later Impulse LPs; even the Shandars, though pretty good, don't capture what I felt Ayler's music could do at that earlier, rawer stage. Even with Silva and Graves eddying about on Love Cry, it's not one of my favorites either.

[brownie]

Never met her but I get the feeling that Mary Parks/Mary Maria was Ayler's Yoko Ono!

[AllenLowe]

I will say that virtually every jazz musician that I've known of a prior generation (born, say, between 1930-1940) told me, at some point, looking at rock and roll's popularity, that they knew they could play in that style and make a million bucks if they wanted to. A bit delusional, yes, and based on a frustrated feeling of superiority, mixed, in the case with black muisicians, with certain racial resentments. So I have a feeling (and this is purely intuitive) that this was as much Ayler's idea as anyone else's-

Edited November 28, 2006 by AllenLowe

[B. Clugston]

I believe New Grass grew out of Ayler’s wish to record songs with Mary Parks’ lyrics and to reach a wider audience, plus Impulse was trying to tone down the fire and brimstone.

If you listen to the demos on Holy Ghost, the original sessions had a rawer R & B feel. It’s a long way from Spiritual Unity, but I actually quite enjoy them.

Once Impluse got its paws on them, the songs got butchered with robotic bass lines and an overdubbed horn section.

The later stuff shouldn’t be lumped in with New Grass.

[RDK]

It's also human nature to strive for success.

[7/4]

It's also human nature to strive for success.

tell that to shrub.

[Simon Weil]

There's a story in Leroy Jones' "Tales" - "Now and Then" which is based on Don and Albert Ayler:

This musician and his brother always talked about spirits. They were good musicians, talking about spirits, and they had them, the spirits, and soared with them, when they played...

But when they stopped, the brothers, they were not that strong...

It's one of those uncomfortable things.

Simon Weil

[John L]

Could it not be that Ayler himself was getting bored with what he was doing? I belong to what must be a small minority of jazz fans who like much of the more commercial stuff that Ayler did for Impulse better than what he was doing before that with the Quintet with his brother and Michel Samson. I have a lot of trouble listening through all the live Cleveland qunitet stuff on the Holy Ghost box. I could imagine Ayler getting bored of that night after night.

The Impulse stuff is uneven, but I really enjoy hearing Ayler in some of the different contexts provided by Impulse (the four bar blues of Drudgery, for example).

Of course, the trio recordings and the quartet with Cherry are in a class of their own.

Edited November 28, 2006 by John L

[paul secor]

For whatever reason, I've not been able to get all that into the later Impulse LPs; even the Shandars, though pretty good, don't capture what I felt Ayler's music could do at that earlier, rawer stage. Even with Silva and Graves eddying about on Love Cry, it's not one of my favorites either.

Love Cry is, to some extent, a record company concept. Impulse must have wanted short performances - tho perhaps Albert Ayler wanted a record like that also. I heard that band in concert (w. Junie Booth replacing Alan Silva) playing some of the Love Cry compositions, and they were played as a continuous medley - not broken up into separate pieces as they are on the record. I have to believe that's what Ayler wanted the music to sound like.

[Soul Stream]

It's funny, but as much as many think Ayler's later Impulse stuff is R&R garbage. I think it's the jazz equivilant of Muddy Water's "Electric Mud" in a sense that I think it's been very influencial to later generations of jazz and rock musicians.

Edited November 30, 2006 by Soul Stream

[ep1str0phy]

I'll concur with Soul Stream on this one. I don't have the liners with me, but Pete Brown (Cream's lyricist and one-time head of the Battered Ornaments and Piblokto!) said something very much to that effect.

For my part, I think it's clear that Thiele was a driving force in the more "commercial" direction of the Impulses. However, several accounts suggest that Ayler was always involved with the prospect of reaching a wider audience (Nils Edstrom's essay on the Ayler website points to some interesting connections between the saxophonist's capacity for sound projection and his desire to affect the audience; Charles Tyler suggests in numerous spots that Ayler was making overt "commercial" concessions as far back as the Samson band; the 1966 Hentoff interview, of course, has the classic "putting more form in the free form" quote, as well as lots of stuff about reaching a wider audience). Maybe Ayler was embarassed about these later recordings, but, if so, he didn't let it show to too many people (the interviews on the HG boxed set have Ayler dishing what sounds like praise regarding the compositions on New Grass, alongside lots of stuff about the frustrations of the jazz business).

Personally, I like a lot of the Impulse stuff--and not talking critically/historically/musicologically, just that, commercial machinations notwithstanding, there's some fine groove/playing there. Perhaps it's just easier to like in hindsight (I think Love Cry is pretty mark, although even Last Album--which is not quite the jarring affair that New Grass is, and probably better on the whole than Music Is...--suffers from some overly restrained playing).

[JSngry]

The guy had a message he believed in and wanted to reach people with it.

Imagine that.

[paul secor]

It's funny, but as much as many think Ayler's later Impulse stuff is R&R garbage. I think it's the jazz equivilant of Muddy Water's "Electric Mud" in a sense that I think it's been very influencial to later generations of jazz and rock musicians.

No matter how "influential" it may have been, Electric Mud sounds like crap to me. Just my opinion.

[ep1str0phy]

Glib, JS, but I guess in all the erudition it's easy not to say the basic point (I guess the way Ayler dealt with his desires for a wider audience was just less successul than, say, Ornette--and maybe that had something to do with the specific intensity of the desire, I don't know)...

I like Electric Mud.

Edited November 30, 2006 by ep1str0phy

[Soul Stream]

It's funny, but as much as many think Ayler's later Impulse stuff is R&R garbage. I think it's the jazz equivilant of Muddy Water's "Electric Mud" in a sense that I think it's been very influencial to later generations of jazz and rock musicians.

No matter how "influential" it may have been, Electric Mud sounds like crap to me. Just my opinion.

I think that's my point. "Electric Mud" isn't something I ever got into. It was one of the albums you skipped over in the used vinyl when you were looking for the "real" shit. That said, I think it takes fresh ears to imagine things that even the artists themselves may have not imagined. I'm sure Muddy thought that LP was lame. But Chuck D. of Public Enemy loved the hell out of it. It influenced HIM and HE went on to make great recordings. Much could be said of the New Grass Ayler. Maybe a hardcore Ayler fan doesn't dig it. But the guy who plays sax for Charlie Hunter may put it in his top 10.

I guess this is the point of the conversation when I say..."it's all good."

Once "art" is out....it\t's out of the artist's and critic's control. The "the people" can make whatever they want out of it.

[ep1str0phy]

That "mixed" group they strung together for Scorsese's "Blues" (the Electric Mud backup group + a few rappers) is a good indication of this. The younger beat/groove crowd loves the hell out of Electric Mud (maybe Verve was counting on a similar thing with the New Grass reissue?).

Edited November 30, 2006 by ep1str0phy

[Simon Weil]

I don't think these are bad records. I'm sure it is right to say that he wanted to reach a wider audience. Of the last three, I have two and they sound constrained, like his spirit was pushed down into this narrow stylistic tube and forced to operate within those veins. If you could say the previous two spheres (The Sunny Murray and Don Ayler bands) were arterial - the music flowing outward, full of life and expansive - this return to the source (his formative years in r+b) can't really encompass the expanse of his spirit as it had developed.

That's what I think is wrong with these records.

Simon Weil

(His whole thing is about returning to the source - the golden age myth. It just didn't work for him. I don't think you can go back. Not really.)

Edited November 30, 2006 by Simon Weil

[king ubu]

After having seen that recent Danish documentary about Ayler, I really wonder about the part of mysterious (self-styled mystery and immaculate?) Mary Maria Parks... she seemed to have played a major part in tearing the brothers apart, and also in isolating Ayler from virtually all of his friends... so if it was his wish to do a record with her singing, maybe it was her wish to have him wish to do it, first? A rather problematic character, it seems...

And Don Ayler's situation is tragic, to say the least. Very, very sad!

[ep1str0phy]

It's late, but it's nice to hear so much passion about this stuff...

I'm not sure that Ayler's music ever really had a "width"--only that his music sounds truly self-designed up to the Impulse sides. I think the '65-'66 band is one of the most stylistically "centered" ensembles of the whole free generation (hence, I'm sure, why some folks don't like it). I feel as if the Impulse material is more "all over the map", if you will, but it's certainly not Ayler's map--that's for sure (that's what the Cricket New Grass review was saying, in more vitriolic terms).

[Simon Weil]

It's late, but it's nice to hear so much passion about this stuff... ...

[The late stuff]...it's certainly not Ayler's map--that's for sure (that's what the Cricket New Grass review was saying, in more vitriolic terms).

Passion....vitriol...If you want passion and vitriol, all you have to do is go to, well, all the people who've hated Ayler over the years. Check out Ted Gioia. He positively rages at Ayler. And this is about the free soloing Ayler. This is what people get passionate about, for or against. If you love it (and you do love it), then you lament its absence - and that's where your angst comes from. If you hate it, well you hate its presence as Jazz.

I mean passionate music produces passionate responses.

Simon Weil

Edited November 30, 2006 by Simon Weil

[JSngry]

So much talk about "wanting to reach a wider audience", with the implication(?) that at some level it was some sort of "business decision". I'm not convinced.

If you were alive (and old/young enough to be a part of the "vibe") then, you can remember how there was this window where it seemed that the notion of "universal brotherhood" was definitely within reach, perhaps just around the corner. Knowing what we know about Ayler's inclinations, I've got no doubt that he too was feeling this sense of possibility in his own outsized way, and willingly made those records in that spirit - not as a "career move", but as a genuinely felt, if possibly "delusional", outreach.

Now, we also know that by the time he was making those records that his overall mental condition had changed (I would say "deteriorated", but I think it's more complicated than that), and I think that that's what accounts for the quality of those records. He really was "losing himself" in all kinds of ways, ways that play directly into the whole "messianic" trip, and ways that no doubt felt as inevitable to him as they seemed disturbing to many "on the outside".

I think it was Charles Tyler who said that the Aylers had that "old time religion" so deep inside them that it eventually messed them up. I think you can look at the desire/compulsion to preach to the world what you percieve as profoundly overpowering simple truths in what you perceive as profoundly overpowering simple ways has as much to do with the records we're talking about here as anything. That's how I hear them anyway - they're disturbing in a way that the earlier musics aren't, and the most disturbing thing for me is that I can rationally hear the delusionality at work as easily as I can irrationally believe in it.

Even as he was irretrievably slipping into another place, Albert Ayler had a seriousass mojo.

[Simon Weil]

So much talk about "wanting to reach a wider audience", with the implication(?) that at some level it was some sort of "business decision". I'm not convinced.

Well, no, not a business decision. More like a mix of a desire for money (largely unconscious) and a desire for adulation (seen as proof that he was getting his message across).

....we also know that by the time he was making those records that his overall mental condition had changed (I would say "deteriorated", but I think it's more complicated than that), and I think that that's what accounts for the quality of those records. He really was "losing himself" in all kinds of ways, ways that play directly into the whole "messianic" trip, and ways that no doubt felt as inevitable to him as they seemed disturbing to many "on the outside".

I think there's a lot of truth in this. But inevitable, no I don't know about that. I mean there's all sorts of tangential forces operating on people to drag them off their path - by which I mean the place where they are artistically fully expressed. I think, when you are on that path, there is a kind of rightness to it and I don't think these records have that. There is a somewhat lost quality (not totally lost, he's still there) to them.

I think it was Charles Tyler who said that the Aylers had that "old time religion" so deep inside them that it eventually messed them up. I think you can look at the desire/compulsion to preach to the world what you percieve as profoundly overpowering simple truths in what you perceive as profoundly overpowering simple ways has as much to do with the records we're talking about here as anything. That's how I hear them anyway - they're disturbing in a way that the earlier musics aren't, and the most disturbing thing for me is that I can rationally hear the delusionality at work as easily as I can irrationally believe in it.

I've never really bought that - about the old time religion messing them up. I mean it's some weird psychological stuff working through (maybe) religion, if it's that. I think it really did break his heart that no-one (or very few) in America listened to his stuff and was moved by it. In a sense it's about religion, but it's also about an artist, who's not really satisified with being an artist. I mean he wanted to be ultra-avant-garde and yet be famous and this is really an impossible combination (at least it is 99% of the time). You can get to be famous years later, that's the standard thing.

Ayler was a guy who loved creating an impression - someone called him a peacock. I think that's what dragged him into making these records, mostly. That desire to have people looking at him. But it didn't happen. He didn't please the mass audience and he certainly didn't please the avant garde fans. I think that's the tragedy.

Even as he was irretrievably slipping into another place, Albert Ayler had a seriousass mojo.

Well, I don't disagree. At least not mostly.

Simon Weil

[ep1str0phy]

Agree with Simon on these points. There's a gulf between pure "business decision" and economic dynamics conspiring with a desire for money/reaching more people. Then you factor in the psychlogical aspect, and that Ayler was living in dire straits throughout the better part of his stay in NY, and the family situation...

As far as the Tyler quote (it was in the Wilmer book, I think)--I subscribe to the old time religion thing. Ayler's Christian messianism is as crucial part of the puzzle as any, at least inasfar as concerns these later years (and the motivation for reaching folks) and the tragic end...

Edited December 1, 2006 by ep1str0phy