The Boy Who Cried Freebird

by Mitch Myers

  Before succumbing to liver cancer at age forty, John Coltrane was inspired by Albert’s intense spirituality and his towering saxophone sound. Late-era Coltrane recordings such as Ascension and Meditations reflect that direct influence.

  Not only did Coltrane endorse Albert in interviews, but he also introduced the Ayler brothers during his portion of a 1966 concert at Lincoln Center called “Titans of the Tenor.” Albert again strode onstage blowing in cacophonous form, and while some spectators were enraptured by the screaming revelations of Coltrane and the Aylers, half the audience walked out.

  “Sonny Rollins brought Yusef Lateef to the Titans of the Tenor, and Trane brought Albert because he thought Albert should be mentioned,” remembered Rashied Ali, who played drums with Coltrane at that time. “He didn’t have to bring Albert to that thing, he could of brought Archie Shepp, he could have brought a lot of different people, but he brought Albert because he respected what he was doing.”

  “Albert’s music challenged all that had come before him,” said ESP’s Bernard Stollman. “From the first moment Coltrane heard Albert play, he acknowledged that Albert was the new force, that Albert had succeeded him in terms of generations of music.”

  At Coltrane’s urging, his record label, Impulse!, signed Albert to a contract, resulting in 1966’s Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village. The album cover resembles a psychedelic poster from the Fillmore, and Albert’s group included violin and cello. On another Village recording, the string section was expanded to a foursome with two bassists. These larger groups created textured variations on Ayler’s hovering, stream-of-consciousness meditations, and they amplified the recurring themes that flowed back and forth between Albert and Donald.

  “All of Ayler’s music is pretty traditional Americana in one sense,” said bassist Alan Silva, who played on some of the Village sessions. “It was coming out of a real spiritual development and that rooted the music in the ’60s. You can listen to the titles and see where he was going. He had a personalized way of playing, and he set up a whole way of thinking about that particular music, especially on a spiritual plane.”

  Veteran jazz scribe Nat Hentoff had another perspective on Ayler’s sound. “The most significant thing I learned from talking to Donald and Albert,” said Hentoff, “is that the ideal listener is the one who doesn’t listen clinically or critically, but one that opens himself up to the whole of the music, not just part. This helped me later in listening to John Coltrane.”

  “Trane touched all of us musicians because he was the king of the avant-garde,” said Rashied Ali. “When he embraced the music it got a little more recognition than it would have gotten without him. It was like a godsend for him to embrace our side because Coltrane could have gone in any direction that he wanted to. He just moved in that direction and Albert and all of them, they just moved with him.”

  When John Coltrane died, free jazz lost one of its guiding lights. Albert and Donald had played at Coltrane’s funeral and were confronted with the void that the saxophonist had left. Impulse! was desperate to find its next saxophone star and was promoting three forceful tenor men: Ayler, Archie Shepp, and Pharoah Sanders. The New Thing had arrived, but Albert was drifting away from his brother, and the extraordinary music that they created together.

  Toward the end of the ’60s, Albert became involved with musician Mary Parks, who was also known as Mary Maria. As his lover, then manager and collaborator, Mary formed a bond with Albert that supplanted his relationship with Donald. Donald’s heavy drinking exacerbated his own emotional problems, and the brothers ceased appearing together in interviews.

  It was clear to some that Donald was headed toward a nervous breakdown. According to bassist Juini Booth, the breach between the brothers had ominous implications. He said, “Albert needed Donald and Donald needed Albert. When they split, that was the beginning of the end of them both.”

  Sonny Simmons recalls Donald complaining about suspicious characters hovering around Albert—shadowy figures and record-industry people telling Albert what to do and turning Albert against him. “Donnie was kind of losing it a little bit during that period, which was real sad,” said Simmons. “The white boys would come over in their suits and ties like Madison Avenue lawyers and tell Donald, ‘Get out. We want to talk to your brother.’ I thought it was strange. I wouldn’t let those cats talk to my little brother like that. Donald was very upset, and it fucked him up mentally. Here was the big brother Donnie grew up with, and Albert discarded him once they got to New York and he gets a big contract with ABC/Impulse.”

  Did Albert betray his brother? That’s open to interpretation—bandleaders are often compelled to change personnel—but Albert’s sense of guilt was very real. The unstable Donald relied on his older brother for work, and Albert was pressured by his parents to look out for his sibling. Albert never really told Donald that he was out, but by the middle of 1968, he was absent from the group’s lineup.

  Albert played on a couple of Donald’s solo gigs, but the brothers would never work together under Albert’s direction again.

  Albert’s later records were strangely commercial endeavors, with the music conforming to popular trends. Love Cry (1967) still showcased the patented Ayler sound, but that album had been made while Donald was still playing with the band.

  Producer Bob Thiele had pushed Albert to use rock musicians in the studio and while his strident tenor sound remained intact, Ayler and Mary Parks started adding vocal tracks to some of his recordings.

  Thiele made wholesale changes on Ayler’s next album, New Grass. Despite Albert and Mary’s objections, he added a horn section, replaced backup singers, and even swapped some of Parks’s vocals with those of one Rose Marie McCoy.

  On the 1969 album Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe, Ayler had Canned Heat axe man Henry Vestine play some Hendrix-styled psychedelic blues guitar. Albert even played the bagpipes, using his extraordinary breathing skills to create a keening, spiritual drone.

  It all made sense in the context of the late ’60s, but Ayler’s crossover experiments—incorporating modal rock, hard blues, psychedelic soul, mod poetry, and gutbucket R&B—muddled his image as an innovative jazz prophet. Coinciding with Miles Davis’s groundbreaking electric fusion, the Ayler/Parks collaborations were stiff and unrealized, containing peace-and-love sentiments and a general softening of Albert’s fervent sound.

  Albert’s music no longer seemed so daring, and his playing felt less free.

  By 1969, Albert had basically stopped performing in public. He hadn’t returned to Europe for a few years, but still had a good reputation overseas. So, when he was invited to the south of France to perform at a festival sponsored by the Maeght Foundation, there was little reason to refuse. With no advance preparation, Parks and Ayler enlisted his pianist friend Call Cobbs, drummer Allen Blairman, and bassist Steve Tintweiss and sped off to France.

  At the 1970 Maeght Foundation concerts—performed under a geodesic dome in St. Paul de Vence—Ayler chose not to play his rock/jazz fusion. Instead, he entertained the European crowds with his old spiritualized style. The pickup group had never played together before but they gamely covered sanctified Ayler tunes like “Spirits” and “Holy Family.”

  The music at the Maeght Foundation sounded just a little bit melancholy when Ayler began the off-to-the-races melody of “Spirits Rejoice.” Maybe it was because of all the time that had passed since Albert’s sound first exploded like a solar flare onto the free-jazz scene. Perhaps it was just the absence of brother Donald’s ecstatic bugle-boy counterpoint as Albert toyed with “La Marseillaise” one more time.

  The Maeght Foundation gigs reaffirmed Ayler’s saxophone prowess, but stresses at home were mounting. Donald’s mental health continued to deteriorate and he had to be institutionalized. The pressure from Albert’s mother to be responsible for Donald’s well-being was a constant harangue. Impulse! became less supportive and the label ultimately released him from his recording contract.

&n
bsp; The ’60s were catching up with Albert, and just as he was profoundly religious throughout his life, he could also become extremely depressed. He was seen wearing a heavy winter coat and gloves in hot summer weather with Vaseline covering his face, claiming that he had to protect himself.

  Still, Albert had some things to look forward to. An upcoming tour of Japan was slated to make him a great deal of money and a new record contract was being negotiated.

  That’s when Albert wound up dead in the East River.

  Although there is nothing conclusive about the circumstances surrounding his death, Albert may have jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. Mary Parks told the police that he had smashed things in their Brooklyn apartment and then rushed out of the house claiming blood had to be spilled to make it right between him and his family regarding the problems with Donald. She reported Albert missing, but weeks passed before his body was found.

  According to the New York medical examiner’s office, it was a death by drowning. With little evidence of foul play, authorities found no reason to conduct an autopsy. Sunny Murray once maintained that “hoodlums and drugs” were to blame and that Albert was in the “wrong place at the wrong time.” Others who knew him said he wasn’t likely to take his own life.

  After his death, rumors swirled—that Ayler was found at the bottom of the river tied to a jukebox or that he’d been shot in the back. Donald—who has been in and out of group homes for decades and unable to live independently—expressed sentiments that Parks knew more about Albert’s death than she revealed.

  While Ayler’s passing remains a mystery, the important question is this: What kind of music would he be creating had he survived? Of course, that riddle is unanswerable, but clues can be found on Holy Ghost, a nine-CD boxed set containing rare Ayler recordings from 1962 to 1970.

  The title Holy Ghost refers to Ayler’s comment, “Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost.” The massive CD collection includes early European performances with Cecil Taylor and Don Cherry as well as Albert’s groups with Donald and other freedom fighters. There are interviews with Ayler and Cherry, and outtakes from the later Impulse! sessions.

  Albert once said that his playing was a reaction to what was going on in America, but that he had found peace and then transformed that peace into a silent scream.

  Bassist Steve Tintweiss heard Ayler’s love cry during one of their Maeght Foundation performances. “Albert picked up his bagpipes and went to the front of the stage,” Tintweiss explained. “He started playing very intensely, but there was no sound coming out. There was some sort of problem, and Albert was trying harder and harder, but there was no sound at all. Instead of doing what almost any other musician would have done—stopped, put it down, and picked up another horn or had someone else solo while they tried to adjust their instrument—Albert didn’t do that. He just kept playing and imagining the sound of what he was doing. He was getting more intense, and the audience started applauding and yelling and urging him on, and it looked like to me that for several seconds he levitated while he was playing. At that point, he looked like he had transformed into some sort of gremlin or a character like the mythological Pan on steroids. The audience was totally captivated and when he stopped there was this huge applause.”

  Albert Ayler is still at peace. Let his silent scream prevail.

  OHM ON THE BRAIN

  It was 9:00 A.M. in the year 2058 and Mrs. Abraham’s third-grade class had just started their day. “Students,” she said brightly. “Today we’re going to learn all about electronic music!” The room of young boys and girls let out a low moan.

  “There, there,” Mrs. Abraham reassured them. “It won’t be that bad. Now, will everybody please plug the information cable coming from the top of your desks into the receptor slots below your cerebral cortices? And that includes you, too, Billy Fields—no more disruptions.”

  All forty-five students complied with the instructions and swiftly became silent. Their eyes glazed and a few started to drool as their teacher pushed a button on her control pad and a cool synthetic voice began the three-hour lesson.

  “In the latter half of the twentieth century, the union between man and machine manifested itself in a variety of systems, which prompted the advancement of electronic music into our mainstream population,” the voice droned. “These were primitive times, however, and progress came quite slowly. While a groundbreaking instrument like the Theremin first appeared in the 1920s, three minutes of electronic music in 1952 could still take up to six months to program—and all of the work was done by hand!”

  Mrs. Abraham walked slowly around the room as her students listened to the computerized voice and accompanying sounds inside their heads: “Innovators like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen introduced new conceptual possibilities in music, and experimental composer Edgard Varèse employed tape recorders as authentic music production devices. Certainly, the advent of Robert Moog’s synthesizer was an important event in the genesis of modern music, but so were the works of Milton Babbitt, Morton Subotnick, David Tudor, and Luc Ferrari. While performances by composers like Terry Riley and Holger Czukay are now considered to be ‘pop music,’ they were once thought to be unconventional and appealed only to academics and hippie drug users.”

  Mrs. Abraham’s class was well into the second hour of their music lesson when something went awry. They’d been listening to the excellent chapter on sound-design artists like Klaus Schultze, Jon Hassell, and Brian Eno when thick red smoke suddenly erupted from Billy Fields’s ears.

  It turned out that young Billy had been secretly manipulating the frequencies of his music lesson by attaching the information cable to his mood regulator instead of his cortex. The brat was getting high on modulated sound until a system overload caused a cerebral hemorrhage and an electric surge to occur simultaneously—which quite naturally fried little Billy’s brain.

  As a result, Mrs. Abraham’s class was sent home early and her lesson on electronic music was removed from the weekly schedule.

  ROCK ’N’ ROLL HEAVEN

  To quote the wisdom of that immortal sage, Tommy James, from his classic foray into psychedelic bubblegum, “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” not “Crimson and Clover”…

  Look over yonder.

  What do you see?

  A new day is coming.

  Most definitely.

  Well, I’ve looked over yonder and the new day has finally come. Telltale signs have been popping up for years. Really, it’s as plain as the nose on Ringo Starr’s face.

  We first saw glimmers of this grand cultural shift with films like Velvet Goldmine and Almost Famous. Later on, the very same message would be driven home in School of Rock.

  But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Why do you think I keep mentioning writers like Nick Tosches and Richard Meltzer? Aren’t those two just old dudes who scribbled record reviews for magazines like Creem and Rolling Stone in the late ’60s? Is there much value in the collected works of men who didn’t even listen to some of the records that they critiqued? Are the blasphemous musings of Meltzer and the hard-boiled journalism and fiction of Tosches really that important?

  The answer to that last question is—yes.

  And what of the audacious music journo, Jim DeRogatis, choosing to author Let It Blurt, the first published biography of a rock critic in the entire history of mankind? Jim’s subject, of course, was the late Lester Bangs. Bangs was a fanatical music scribe who came up the ranks at the same time as his drinking buddies, Meltzer and Tosches, both of whom devote plenty of space to Lester in their respective anthologies. Naturally, Richard and Nick get mentions in the Bangs bio; pictures, too! Lester died in 1982 at the age of thirty-three, but left an indelible mark on rock writing and continues to rouse hard-core fans to this day.

  Another telltale clue to this conundrum can be found in the movie High Fidelity, which was an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s rock novel. High Fidelity was filmed and set right here in
my hometown of Chicago and starred John Cusack. He plays the owner of a small record shop who has trouble making commitments in his relationships but knows more rock trivia than Rodney Bingenheimer.

  What exactly am I getting at with all of this rock ’n’ roll nonsense? Okay, I’ll spell it out for you. ROCK GEEKS ARE FINALLY COOL! Yes, all of you hepcats that know who played bass with the third edition of King Crimson can rejoice, your time has finally come.

  Our hero in High Fidelity is cool because the movie star, John Cusack, is portraying him. Actor Jack Black stole the show by being an even cooler geek than Cusack, but Black’s character transcended his status as a rock geek in High Fidelity (and again in School of Rock) by becoming a rock performer—and that goes double for Black’s mock-rock pursuits with Tenacious D.

  That’s what every rock geek really wants deep down inside anyway—to be a performer—which is why rock geeks have always been so UNCOOL to begin with.

  Of course, Meltzer and Tosches are totally cool because they turned their backs on music writing years ago. Bangs is cool for one main reason—the guy is dead. All we really have to remember him by are two posthumous collections, the DeRogatis bio, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s strange portrayal of Lester in Almost Famous.

  Now, I must admit that those old rock writer guys inspired me. I’m pretty sure that they influenced DeRogatis, not to mention his partner on the Sound Opinions radio show, critic Greg Kot. Yes, once a week you can hear two white guys sitting around playing records and talking about rockstuff. Cool, huh? And with the rise of satellite radio, this sort of rock ’n’ roll discourse is becoming even more plentiful.

  Honestly, I think that all geek-speak should be conducted in the privacy of one’s own home and then only with consenting adults present. Otherwise it’s like going out on a double date and spending the entire evening talking sports trivia with your buddy (sorry—not cool).