Tony Pusey Posted September 27, 2004 Report Share Posted September 27, 2004 (edited) After reading Mathews contribution, I wonder if we can still buy this set from a Moral point of view? Does this make this set any different from a Proper box, or one of those Andora thingies? Chuck? anyone? Edited September 27, 2004 by Tony Pusey Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brownie Posted September 27, 2004 Report Share Posted September 27, 2004 Just want to mention that I have had dealings with Revenant Records about the Albert Ayler box. Revenant is using three of my photos in the booklet that comes with the box. I have had quite a number of jazz photos published before but Revenant is the first company to pay money (I must say pretty good money) for it. As far as I am concerned, this is a very serious company. And I trust they will make the royalties available to the rightful heirs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WD45 Posted September 27, 2004 Report Share Posted September 27, 2004 So, this will be ten discs now? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob C Posted September 27, 2004 Report Share Posted September 27, 2004 So, this will be ten discs now? Scott Yanow's review in Cadence mentions a "bonus" disc in addition to the 9 "official" discs! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Posted September 27, 2004 Report Share Posted September 27, 2004 I can imagine a case where who controls the Ayler estate is in doubt, and instead of waiting another twenty years, Revenant got the father's permission to go ahead and, my guess, keep some money in an account awaiting the proper legal decision. Like everyone else, I've heard nothing but great things about the businees side of Revenant, it's just that I was very surprised at the quoted development. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chuck Nessa Posted September 27, 2004 Report Share Posted September 27, 2004 Estates and claims on them can be a mess. Sometimes you just need to move ahead if something is to happen. After negotiations with the estates of Bird, Chet, Mingus, etc I'm a bit "dazed" by the idea of "the right thing". At one point, while trying to pay "somebody", I ran into a situation where the family lawyer said "The estate is closed and distributed - new activity presents problems for all of us." This was resolved by a check for $1000 to the family - don't know the lawyer's cut. Under circumstances like this, labels have some latitude. Dean Blackwood seems to be an OK guy, enjoy the music. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bright Moments Posted September 28, 2004 Report Share Posted September 28, 2004 well, i took the plunge and pre-ordered the box, the price was too good! B-) while i was at it i added a copy of spiritual unity (also at a great price!) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quincy Posted September 29, 2004 Report Share Posted September 29, 2004 (edited) well, i took the plunge and pre-ordered the box, the price was too good! B-) I succumbed too. I was pretty sure I was getting it (have 3 albums) but the price pushed me to "buy." One thing I've noticed about hanging around here is that I now have mentally moved the decimal over one place. So the price of the box feels like it's just $7 and change! And what the hell, it comes with a book! You HAVE to buy it, right? Added 3 Conns and the Teagarden Father of Jazz Trombone as well. This after the 7 Steps box and K2s that are coming this week. Is it Christmas? Edited September 29, 2004 by Quincy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jazzmoose Posted September 29, 2004 Report Share Posted September 29, 2004 I knew I shouldn't have looked at this thread. You people are evil. Sigh. Well, at least there'll be more music on the shelf... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
epistrophy arts Posted September 29, 2004 Report Share Posted September 29, 2004 You won't regret buying this box.... There is so much here to discover, it is ridiculous. Given Revenant's cred, I can't wait to see if mainstream publications like GQ, Wall Street Journal, Time etc will review it... and I can't wait to hear Albert Ayler played on NPR programs! As for legitimacy issues... Revenant is good people. I have every confidence that they are doing everything by the book. As an aside and in the interest of full disclosure. Revenant has been very active in supporting local grass roots cultural activity in Austin. My organization Epistrophy Arts has been presenting concerts locally for 7 years. Revenant has graciously supported our efforts by sponsoring our concert series and providing hospitality to our visiting artists. They are the real deal! check out this nice review in the Guardian.... http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1311272,00.html P.G. Moreno Epistrophy Arts Austin, Texas Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quincy Posted September 29, 2004 Report Share Posted September 29, 2004 I knew I shouldn't have looked at this thread. You people are evil. Sigh. Well, at least there'll be more music on the shelf... But you're not just buying music, you're getting a deluxe molded "onyx" tabletop spirit box! I'm sure Mrs. Moose will be pleased that you're now looking beyond mere music and thinking of jazzing up the surroundings in other ways. So maybe you won't be filing them on the shelf. And psssst, this one sounds harder to hide! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JSngry Posted September 30, 2004 Report Share Posted September 30, 2004 But you're not just buying music, you're getting a deluxe molded "onyx" tabletop spirit box! I'm sure Mrs. Moose will be pleased that you're now looking beyond mere music and thinking of jazzing up the surroundings in other ways. Yeah, chucks dig guys who decorate tastefully. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jazzmoose Posted September 30, 2004 Report Share Posted September 30, 2004 Yeah, chucks dig guys who decorate tastefully. That's good news! Maybe he'll be impressed enough to reissue Nonaah for me! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brownie Posted September 30, 2004 Report Share Posted September 30, 2004 Holy Ghost! The company that was supposed to deliver the Revenant box to my home goofed. It's supposed to be delivered tomorrow now. What a letdown I was hoping to listen to the music while driving to Normandy tomorrow morning. I'll take the Coltrane at the Village Vanguard box instead! And drive swiftly back to Paris on Sunday to enjoy the music. Truth will be marching in! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Posted September 30, 2004 Report Share Posted September 30, 2004 Yeah, chucks dig guys who decorate tastefully. That's good news! Maybe he'll be impressed enough to reissue Nonaah for me! Put me on that list also Chuck! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chuck Nessa Posted September 30, 2004 Report Share Posted September 30, 2004 Yeah, chucks dig guys who decorate tastefully. That's good news! Maybe he'll be impressed enough to reissue Nonaah for me! Put me on that list also Chuck! Yeah, that's next. Then maybe Saga of the Outlaws. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Posted September 30, 2004 Report Share Posted September 30, 2004 Yeah, chucks dig guys who decorate tastefully. That's good news! Maybe he'll be impressed enough to reissue Nonaah for me! Put me on that list also Chuck! Yeah, that's next. Then maybe Saga of the Outlaws. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gary Posted October 1, 2004 Report Share Posted October 1, 2004 http://www.clevescene.com/issues/2004-09-2...ml/1/index.html Ghost Story A Cleveland avant-jazz great raises hackles again. This time, from the grave. BY CARLO WOLFF feedback@clevescene.com Albert Ayler, a controversial saxophonist known for his startling, otherworldly music, is fanning the flames all over again. Some say the Cleveland native couldn't negotiate the changes and chords that any respectable jazz saxophonist ought to know. Others call him a pillar of avant-garde jazz tenor, along with the similarly divisive Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, the most legitimized and commercial of this titanic trio. On October 5, Revenant Records will release Holy Ghost, a nine-CD box of Ayler material spanning from 1960, when he played in an Army band, to 1970, when he died at age 34; his body turned up that November, drowned, in Brooklyn's East River. Some say he was murdered, alluding to a drug habit that led to mounting debt. Others assert that he touched nothing harder than marijuana. While Ayler's death remains unexplained, his music is beginning to make sense, thanks largely to this remarkable set. Clearing Holy Ghost for release, however, hasn't been easy. "There are several contestants to the estate, and ultimately, all of them will get something out of this," says Ben Young, the set's primary researcher. For some of them, satisfaction might be a long time coming. Carrie Roundtree Lucas, who dated Albert in 1957 and had a son by him in 1958, says Revenant contacted her about the box, and "everything's OK." Their son, Curtis D. Roundtree, has ultimate authority over Holy Ghost, she says. But Arlene Ayler, who was married to Albert from 1964 until his death, hasn't even heard of the Revenant box. Though she says she's not party to Albert's estate, she claims that their daughter, Desiree, is. "I don't want a story put out on this," says Desiree, who receives royalties for her father's work on another label. "I'm going to call my lawyer. There's no story going to come out on this, when I didn't even give the permission for [Holy Ghost] to come out." Also likely to benefit from the boxed set's release are Ayler's father, Edward, who still lives in Warrensville Heights, and his brother, Don. Albert's trumpet foil in their groundbreaking groups of the mid-'60s, Don Ayler is a resident at Cleveland's Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare Center, pending a hearing on charges of gross sexual imposition and sexual battery stemming from an incident last November. Besides his surviving family, many musicians who played with Albert still live in greater Cleveland, among them Lloyd Pearson, a tenor man who led the R&B group the Counts of Rhythm with Albert in the '50s, when Albert was a golf star at John Adams High School and Lloyd was at East Tech. "Albert was a nice cat, a gentle person," says Pearson. "Everybody liked him. He went in the Army and came back with this new type of music. He came back playing a new horn, but he wasn't playing the regular, standard blues changes. He was playing him." Among the Holy Ghost recordings never before available commercially are two full discs of April 1966 concerts at the legendary Cleveland venue La Cave, featuring the Ayler brothers, Dutch violinist Michel Samson, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, and bassist Clyde Shy (aka Mutawef Shaheed), a high school classmate of Don Ayler's. Besides the music, each Revenant box contains a dogwood blossom (intended to enhance the set's "organic" feel), reproductions of posters of Ayler shows, tributes to Ayler from those turbulent times, and a hardbound book of more than 200 pages reflecting on the arc of Ayler's tempestuous career and mysterious life. The book is crammed with information about all of Ayler's known performances and recordings, considerations of his art by Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones; the black militant philosopher was among Ayler's earliest champions) and British journalist Val Wilmer, and reminiscences by a wide range of friends and acquaintances. Ernie Krivda, a Lakewood-based tenor saxophonist, jammed with Ayler in the early '60s at "105," a legendary strip on Euclid Avenue around East 105th Street. "At this particular time, guys are starting to do different stuff, and the 'new thing' is kind of at hand, so cats are experimenting," Krivda remembers. "Albert Ayler would come in and play, and it would be kind of upsetting to a lot of people. There's a sense of irony to this, because he wasn't the only one doing this, but something about his demeanor got him banned. The funny thing is, [early Ayler disciple] Frank Wright was also sitting in, and he was as 'out' as you could be, but they liked him. "The thing with these particular guys was, they fundamentally weren't real solid. Everybody tries to draw comparisons to the music of [Arnold] Schoenberg, [Anton] Webern, that kind of thing, but those people were fundamentally very sound. But it was an interesting time, and it did challenge the music, and there are things that were part of it and we could use." Accessible Ayler tunes, such as "Spirits Rejoice," "Our Prayer," and "Bells," seem to spring from a timeless well of marches, spirituals, gospel, even folk. Ayler was a marvelous, accessible melodist, as well as a challenging, exhausting improviser. That juxtaposition makes his music striking -- and much more aggressive than he was in person. "He and his brother were really, really friendly guys," says Jon Goldman, an aficionado of imaginative jazz. "In the '70s and '80s and '90s, you would read interviews with rock musicians who listed him among their influences, whereas he encountered a lot of hostility from mainstream jazz musicians." Wynton Marsalis, Goldman recalls, "admitted to me that despite the fact he'd never really even heard an Albert Ayler record, he still disparaged his approach to music." That approach and Ayler's complexity appeal to Dean Blackwood, who co-founded Revenant Records in 1996. His mission: to present "raw musics" in upscale, meticulously recorded and researched packages. The seven-CD, $150 Revenant box Screamin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton won three Grammy awards in 2003. The Ayler box, retailing for $100, is likely to win a Grammy or three of its own next year. "You've got this guy from a fairly conventional background -- he grew up in fairly comfortable circumstances, he was captain of the golf team in high school, and he played as a teenager in Little Walter's blues band -- and suddenly he decides to make a complete break with not only jazz convention, but really, musical conventions of pitch and form, to really break out on his own," Blackwood says. "While he had certain models in Coltrane and Ornette, they weren't necessarily musical blueprints; they were more like spiritual and moral models. His music sounds nothing like any of these guys. The kicker is, despite repeated and violent rejections at every turn, not only from audiences but from fellow musicians . . . this guy soldiered through." "At first, I couldn't understand it," Edward Ayler says of his son's music. "But later on, I really took to it, saw where he was coming from and that he was really exceptional, that the music was out of this world. I understood it then. I have never heard any music like that." clevescene.com | originally published: September 29, 2004 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brownie Posted October 3, 2004 Report Share Posted October 3, 2004 The box finally came in And I am starting to dig into it. An excellent production job with a real book, exact copies of the Paul Haines booklet that accompanied the first run of the Ayler ESP 'Spiritual Unity', the issue of 'Cricket, a flyer from an Ayler appearance at Slug's. The box has nine discs plus an additional one that has two tracks from a 1960 rehearsal by the US Army76th AG Band! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Posted October 4, 2004 Report Share Posted October 4, 2004 Finally! This is the week. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brownie Posted October 4, 2004 Report Share Posted October 4, 2004 The box was on sale at the Virgin Megastore on the Champs-Elysees today. Price? $115. The Megastore has (almost) always been a pretty expensive place... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jazzbo Posted October 4, 2004 Report Share Posted October 4, 2004 Yes, finally! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gslade Posted October 4, 2004 Report Share Posted October 4, 2004 My CDuniverse order shows the status as shipping! Hot Damn Ive been listening to AA (and some Miles) for the last couple of days I always get excited when I have an order coming but this is one that I have really been waiting for since I first found out about the project Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
king ubu Posted October 6, 2004 Report Share Posted October 6, 2004 When may we get it? Have no experience with pre-ordered CDUniverse items... hope it arrives soon! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jazzmoose Posted October 6, 2004 Report Share Posted October 6, 2004 Five pounds? I'll be afraid to open the box! Maybe I'll just put it on the shelf and look at it reverently from time to time... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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