Saxophonist and composer Albert Ayler (1936-1970) was definitely a one-of-a-kind musician and certainly not easy listening. It's understandable why it would be hard to get into what he was doing, but, if you do, you really do.
After an initial tryout with the staggering Live in Greenwich Village, it took a while to get back into it, but acquiring the phenomenal Spiritual Unity did it and a deep dive into the remarkable music generated by Ayler in the space of just a few years from about 1964 to 1967 proved to be an exhilirating experience with the sheer joy, power and spirituality in the music a powerful pull into his singular world.
You'd have to be a dedicated Ayler fanatic to acquire Holy Ghost, but it is a staggering treasure house of riches. Released in 2004 by Revenant Records, formed by the great musician John Fahey and a partner, this retrospective features nine discs, seven of them comprised of live recordings from 1962, when he offered a trio of idiosyncratic covers of jazz standards in a Finland concert, to 1970, when, dealing with tremendous professional and personal problems, he played a festival in France that summer, just a couple of months before his body was found in the East River in New York.
Most of the concert material is from his peak years with performances in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Rotterdam, as well as New York, Newport and two gigs in Ayler's hometown of Cleveland. There are also some real treats here, including a 22-minute workout with the great Cecil Taylor in Denmark in 1962, when the legendary pianist recorded his vital music at the Cafe Montmartre, and three tunes Ayler and band played for the funeral of his mentor, John Coltrane (one can really hear the anguish in Ayler's playing.)
As with his later albums, the performances on the sixth and seventh discs include his eccentric girlfriend/vocalist Mary Parks and are notably different than his best work, but there is also his appearance as a sideman for Pharoah Sanders with his 23-minute opus, "Venus/Upper and Lower Egypt) and two tunes recorded in early 1969 at New York's Town Hall for the band of Ayler's brother Donald and featuring the great Sam Rivers on sax and Richard Davis on bass. The recording quality varies considerably over these discs, but, for Ayler fan(atic)s, this is a true bonanza.
The last two discs are comprised of interviews with Ayler as well as early collaborator (and bridge to mentor Ornette Coleman) Don Cherry and there is a bonus tenth disc of two recordings made while Ayler was in a United States Army band. The package is incredible, housed in a plastic box made from a mold of an onyx original and containing facsimiles of a Slug's Saloon handbill, a photo of Ayler as a boy, essays about the musician and others, while the discs are housed in beautiful rice-paper sleeves.
Then, there is a 200+ page hardbound book with testaments to Ayler, essays by Val Wilmer and Amiri Baraka and others, very detailed information on influences, sidemen, the set's tracklist, and a wealth of photographs. The package is pretty remarkable and a great homage to one of the most distinctive and creative musicians of his time, who once wrote, "the music we play is a prayer, a message coming from God." Whatever it was, the music of Albert Ayler was nothing if not absolutely sincere, totally honest and completely unfiltered and it is a powerful experience.
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