The Boy Who Cried Freebird

by Mitch Myers

  But Albert Ayler’s existence has an even greater context that must be considered. “The story really begins in 1899,” said Sonny Simmons. “That’s the year Duke Ellington was born.”

  So then, with the entire history of jazz as a guiding light, let’s examine the life and times of Albert Ayler lest his spiritualized music and buoyant message be passed over one more time.

  On July 13, 1936, in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, Albert was born into the deeply religious, middle-class household of Edward and Myrtle Ayler. Edward played the saxophone and he gave lessons to Albert and his younger brother, Donald.

  The boys performed duets with their father at church, but it was Albert who displayed the prodigious talent. At age ten, under the supervision of jazz enthusiast Benny Miller, he began studying at the Academy of Music.

  When Albert was twelve his mother became handicapped, unable to walk, and his father abandoned the Baptist Church for a more fervent Pentecostal congregation. Albert played alto saxophone and oboe and occupied first chair in the high-school band. As captain of the golf team, he brought home several trophies—an unlikely feat for a diminutive black kid growing up in segregated Cleveland during the early ’50s.

  Intrigued by the big-sounding tenor saxophonists of the time, an underage Albert started sneaking into nightclubs with his friend Lloyd Pearson. Albert also joined his friend’s new band, Lloyd Pearson and the Counts of Rhythm.

  Albert was at a local jam session when he came to the attention of “Little” Walter Jacobs, a tough harmonica player who’d been a mainstay in Muddy Waters’s group. Albert played Cleveland gigs with Jacobs and joined the hard-living bluesman for two summers on the road. He also played (briefly) with the talented R&B singer from New Orleans, Lloyd Price.

  Working the bruising bar circuit with these journeymen was difficult for young Albert. He wasn’t used to the hard traveling, or playing for rowdy audiences. The older musicians drank heavily, and Walter chastised the young man for not knowing how to hold long notes on his saxophone. Albert eventually mastered that crowd-pleasing technique, and other aspects of his education in great black music took precedence. He started dressing the part of a hip, downtown slickster and had no trouble meeting women.

  Graduating from John Adams High School in 1955, Albert considered college, but like many young men of his generation, he joined the army to improve his lot. A fledgling bebopper with alto in hand, he arrived at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1956. There, he met bassist Lewis Worrell and drummer Beaver Harris, both of whom would later “convert” to free jazz and play with Albert (again) in the 1960s.

  And just as he shifted from gospel to R&B and finally to jazz, the army moved Albert from Cleveland to Kentucky and then Europe, where he spent most of his time stationed in Orléans, France.

  He entered the service a straight-ahead jazz musician, but Albert’s army stint pushed him in some unanticipated directions. As part of the U.S Army’s 113th Military Band and later the 76th Adjutant General’s Army Band, he spent hours practicing martial music and consuming the proximal sounds of the French military bands.

  As a member of the 76th, he rehearsed constantly and honed his ability to read music. The army band traveled across France and Germany as Albert played pop, jazz, anthems, and local hits, as well as the requisite military themes.

  Ayler was still listening to the newest records by Coltrane, Coleman, and Sonny Rollins, but he was also digesting the European folk forms of France, Sweden, and Finland. Later in his career he would perform circular renderings of the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” This was before the Beatles used the regal theme to introduce “All You Need Is Love.”

  More significant was Ayler’s sage appropriation of a quaint melody from a 1961 Swedish radio hit called “Torparvisan” (“Little Farmer’s Song”). Ayler’s composition, which he titled “Ghosts,” only tangentially resembles the Swedish ditty, but its joyful, singsong melody would become an unofficial anthem of the free-jazz movement.

  “Most folk music is very simple and not burdened by fancy harmonies,” said Copenhagen-born altoist John Tchicai. “It’s down to earth and original, and in most cases, it’s public property, free for all to use and interpret. If one makes an interpretation of a folk song, it isn’t necessary to think of composers’ rights; you can thereafter call that piece of music for your arrangement. Albert was looking for simplicity. His approach was to go deep into the music, to look for the roots in the material and to express himself with that through his spirituality.”

  While he eagerly absorbed contrasting musical disciplines, Ayler’s quest for his own sound was an ongoing struggle. He was hip to bebop icon Charlie “Bird” Parker—Ayler was sometimes called “Little Bird” back in Cleveland—but while playing at the USO clubs and the Paris cabarets, Albert took a hard left turn.

  Deconstructing well-known standards on the bandstand, his savage sound and fractured sense of time became increasingly aberrant. French audiences howled, and fellow musicians were quick to leave the stage when he heedlessly disrupted the familiar bop melodies.

  Still, Ayler cut a sharp figure in Europe, and the little black man, dressed in tailored leather suits and multicolored hats, was by all accounts outgoing and sociable. His new sound was just too freakishly emotional for conventional jazz fans and he was ridiculed to his face, behind his back, and on the bandstand.

  Some musicians maliciously called Ayler “The Dwarf,” and after making him wait all night to sit in, they’d desert the stage or simply refuse to play. Undaunted, Albert kept searching for new musical allies.

  Albert had switched from alto to tenor saxophone, giving him a more emotive, fundamental sound. Illuminating his great black heritage, Ayler’s raw playing traced a lineage from the Baptist church and gospel hymns to blues shouts and jumping, moaning R&B. It connected Albert to previous generations of saxophonists like Lester Young, Illinois Jacquet, and Earl Bostic, as well as progressives like Rollins and Coltrane. His was the lost history of jubilant Dixieland, not to mention boss tenor players like Big Jay McNeely, crowd-pleasing honkers who performed lying on their backs or walking the bar at crowded speakeasies.

  In early 1961, Ayler was transferred to Fort Ord, California, near Monterey, to await discharge. He was only in California for a short time, but the jazz community there still managed to reject him, just as they’d snubbed Ornette Coleman years earlier.

  When Albert finally returned to Cleveland, he was a changed man. His saxophone style was barely recognizable and he was already planning a return to Sweden, where the women were blond and the music fans more receptive to new ideas.

  Sweden wasn’t everything that Albert had expected, however, and he ended up playing on conventional tours with unremarkable dance combos. He tried to sit in with musicians whenever he could, but Albert mostly alienated the Scandinavian players, as well as the cash-conscious club owners and their unsuspecting patrons.

  Meanwhile, his tenor attack was growing even stronger, his use of vibrato more strident, and Albert was promptly banned from jam sessions in Stockholm.

  Ayler met several legendary jazz players in Sweden, as northern Europe was a haven for black musicians with its appreciative audiences, paying gigs, and relief from America’s racism. Albert encountered his hero Sonny Rollins, elfin trumpeter Don Cherry, and, most important, pianist Cecil Taylor.

  Albert was ecstatic upon hearing Cecil Taylor’s group in Stockholm; he’d finally felt the rapport he was searching for and pushed himself onto Taylor’s band, playing with them in Copenhagen and extracting a promise of more jobs in New York. He enjoyed a special affinity with Taylor’s drummer Sunny Murray and began making his plans to return to the United States. With his own sound emerging, Albert had heard the call of freedom.

  “Albert was one of the free medicine men that we had bestowed on us by the creator; John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Ornette,” explained Sunny Murray. “Albert and I were part of the 1936 baby boom—and we’re all medicine men.�
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  Before leaving Europe, Ayler made two recordings as a bandleader. His first album, Something Different!!!!!!, was cut at the Stockholm Academy of Arts with an unremarkable Swedish rhythm section and an audience of twenty-five people.

  Three months later, just days before returning to America, Albert taped a radio program in Copenhagen with Danish pianist Niels Brønsted, a (phenomenal) sixteen-year-old bassist named Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and a fellow American expatriate on drums, Ronnie Gardiner. The radio session was subsequently released as My Name Is Albert Ayler.

  On this recording, after a shy, spoken-word introduction, Albert Ayler abandoned his mild manners and embraced a decidedly ardent sound. He performed four standards and one original tune. You can hear the struggle between the group’s bop-conservatism and Albert’s new, visceral expressiveness.

  He mostly used the tenor on My Name Is Albert Ayler, but Albert did play soprano sax on “Bye Bye Blackbird” and another old chestnut, “Summertime.” On Ayler’s “Summertime,” George Gershwin’s plaintive tune becomes a bent, musical psychodrama as Albert’s vibrato-laden tones sweep and search, wringing every bit of mawkish emotion from the tune’s familiar melody.

  So began Ayler’s ascension in the new-jazz ranks. But things moved slowly upon his second return to Cleveland and in spite of an opportune jam with Coltrane’s quartet, Albert was still treated with confusion and rebuffs. He was spotted hawking Something Different!!!!!! on the streets of his hometown, to no great success.

  Thanks to the availability of an apartment in a house his aunt Beatrice owned on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, Albert moved to New York and began his revolution in earnest.

  Word spread about the forceful young saxophonist and when Albert joined Cecil Taylor’s group onstage at Philharmonic Hall on New Year’s Eve 1963, the anticipation was high.

  “We were all waiting for Albert to come onstage, and all of a sudden we hear this towering tenor sound from the dressing room,” remembered pianist Burton Greene. “He just came straight out of the dressing room with this towering sound and walked onstage. The only way I can describe it is ‘towering’—and it’s kind of an earth-shattering experience to hear that. The power coming out of this little guy, it was just a constant stream of energy.”

  Albert was gaining a reputation, but he was still hard up for paying work. He frequented clubs like the Half Note and the Cellar Café, where he sat in with Coltrane and other jazz musicians including Canadian pianist Paul Bley and bassist Gary Peacock.

  “I met Albert in 1963,” recalled Peacock. “Paul Bley and I were working the Take 3 coffeehouse down in the Village. I asked if there were any horn players who might be able to join us. (Sun Ra’s) John Gilmore wasn’t available for this one gig, but he said, ‘Do you know who Albert Ayler is? You might want to check him out.’ Albert came down, and that was the first time I heard him play. As far as shocking me, I had never heard anybody play like that before. One time he stopped by my place in Chelsea and said, ‘I have a surprise for you. Around three o’clock this afternoon listen for me.’ He had gotten on a ferry to go to Staten Island and from where I lived in Chelsea you could hear the ferry when they blew their horn. I’ll be damned if at three o’clock in the afternoon I couldn’t hear him on the ferry. He was exceptional that way.”

  Albert was no longer working as a sideman with Cecil Taylor, but he received new opportunities as a bandleader. And just before a lengthy tour of Scandinavia with Gary Peacock, Sonny Murray, and Don Cherry, he made two cutting-edge recordings, Witches and Devils and Spiritual Unity.

  Spiritual Unity, a trio date with Peacock and Murray, is considered to be Albert’s landmark session. It was released on ESP, a record label founded by Bernard Stollman, an entertainment lawyer who’d worked on the estates of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. Stollman was enamored with the cultural avant-garde and his label reflected the outer limits of underground taste: no producers, one-shot recording sessions, and psychedelic packaging. “Only the artists decide what you will hear on their ESP-Disc,” was their credo. Later on, the label exclaimed, “You never heard such sounds in your life.”

  ESP—so named for Stollman’s support of the contrived universal language Esperanto—released records by fringe jazzmen like Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. ESP was also the home of beat/rock/folk misfits like the Fugs and Pearls Before Swine. But the very first artist to have his own album released on ESP was Albert Ayler.

  Recorded July 10, 1964, Spiritual Unity is arguably the first “free” jazz album. While Ornette, Cecil Taylor, and a few others had made records pioneering the avant-garde, Spiritual Unity was the first album that completely eliminated the concept of time. That is, the new music wasn’t at all dependent on rhythm.

  Even the groups of Coltrane and Coleman had relied on conventional rhythm sections. But on Spiritual Unity, Peacock and Murray did not play in any sort of lockstep repartee. Instead, the bassist and drummer provided blatantly individualistic responses to Ayler’s cathartic improvisations. Their performances did have a certain velocity—a sometimes-wavering momentum that was either fast or slow—but the dialogue between Ayler, Murray, and Peacock came from hard listening and active spontaneity.

  Thanks to the dissolution of metric time, solos in the conventional sense were dispensed with and Spiritual Unity became a collective exhibition in creative freedom.

  But that’s not all. “He played beautiful melodies,” insisted Carla Bley. “It wasn’t just that he could play free or that he invented playing free. He played beautiful melodies and that’s just something that people respond to.”

  Spiritual Unity included two different versions of Albert’s classic, “Ghosts,” and another tune entitled “Spirits.” Names of other Ayler compositions—“Witches and Devils,” “Saints,” “Prophecy” and “Spirits Rejoice”—give a further indication of his reverent perspective. The ethereal titles betrayed Albert’s extreme religiosity and his messianic bent. For just as he experienced his music to an intense degree, so did Albert feel—and see—his religious convictions to an extreme.

  Albert had visions; at least that’s what he claimed in a 1969 essay penned for jazz journal The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution. He wrote, “It was at night when I had this vision. In this vision there was a large object flying around with bright colors in a disc form. Immediately I thought of the flying scorpion that I had read about in the chapter of Revelation from the Holy Bible, but when the object started turning I saw that first it was flat then it turned sideways and started to shoot radiant colors at first then it would turn back to the same position. I was running with my brother when it aimed at us but it didn’t touch us at all. I guess this is what they are calling the flying saucers. Anyway, it was revealed to me that we had the right seal of God almighty in our forehead.”

  Albert’s European tour in the fall of 1964 was successful, and not without positive controversy. But trumpeter Don Cherry, who’d worked as a foil for saxophone legends like Ornette, Trane, Rollins, and Archie Shepp, wasn’t interested in staying with Ayler. And even before Cherry left that winter to pursue his wanderlust, Albert had already spoken to his own brother, Donald, in Cleveland, encouraging the younger Ayler to ready himself to join the band.

  Donald Ayler had only recently switched from alto sax to trumpet when he got the call from Albert. Less mature than his older brother, Donald had made his own pilgrimage to Sweden and returned claiming to have hitchhiked thousands of miles to the North Pole. The prospect of working with Albert’s group demanded rigorous preparation, so Albert enlisted a Cleveland altoist named Charles Tyler to help get Donald up to speed.

  But no matter how much practicing Donald might do, he would never be a virtuoso like his brother. Albert’s bandmates questioned the logic of bringing Donald into the group; his playing sounded infantile compared to the impassioned spitfire of Don Cherry. What could Donald really contribute? Many say not as much as Cherry. But the kinetic synergy, the harmonic kinship, and musical twins
hip between Albert and Donald would not be denied.

  When the Aylers played together, something occurred that went beyond conventional wisdom. He wasn’t technically gifted, but Donald’s energetic trumpet magically resonated with Albert’s saxophone style.

  So, besides showcasing his ecstatic squawks, guttural honks, rapid-fire delivery, dazzling multiphonics, and a wrenching vibrato, Albert was now playing his high evangelical sound alongside his brother, Donald, echoing the church duets of their youth and evoking the joyous spirits of ragtime.

  Together, the brothers embraced the simple melodies of European folk songs and the vintage Americana of Stephen Foster. They played the marching music of military bands and old familiar bugle calls, and when they embraced the revolving themes and shimmering free-jazz anthems like Albert’s “Truth Is Marching In,” it was a complete, consecrated communion.

  “Albert and his brother sounded to me like they were from New Orleans or someplace down South,” said bassist Henry Grimes, who met Albert in the early ’60s playing with Cecil Taylor. “That’s where I thought they came from. Their music was so strong that it went back to roots that nobody ever pronounced.”

  Although they were gigging in Manhattan and Europe, the brothers were perpetually broke and required frequent relief. And much like writer Jack Kerouac endlessly returning to his mother, Albert and Donald would often seek refuge with their parents in Cleveland.

  Besides parents Edward and Myrtle, there was only one other person who acted as a benefactor to the Ayler brothers, and that was John Coltrane. For when it came to Albert, Coltrane was a true believer. The two men were close; they often spoke on the phone and even corresponded via telegrams.