I didn’t mean that they intended the destruction of the achievements of their forebears, but that the destruction of the boundaries of the art is essential – both the narrow ideals of the highbrow, and the commercial necessities of the mainstream - which is presumably only possible by taking apart the art itself, losing the elements that people have hung their hats on. Also maybe the attitude that somebody outwardly expresses for what’s gone before might depend not only on how their work is directly descended (or not) from it, but also on whether a sense of kinship or brotherhood is important or needed at the time and place – which it was in the sixties…
you rightly observe that I am more familiar with the likes of Dada, and I'm learning stuff here from you guys as a beginner, but when I listen to and read about Albert Ayler with ears more used to pre-war blues & Monk & co. I struggle to make a link* which doesn't include a hell of a lot of deconstruction so that I can hear the individual bricks much more clearly, rather than everything being 'invisible' within the whole - and I get the feeling he is seeking something essential which has been obscured, reaching back to the distant past too, away from his immediate education in R&B back to the spiritual – and the things which I would interpret as his ‘personal’ expression obviously included for him something else – from God… so when he said that Coltrane was not playing like him, but that they were both just playing what they both felt themselves – it was (to him) something coming from outside of themselves too which shapes not only the form of the music but physically how he attacks it (as with old gospel records)
*no struggle in enjoying it though