nuits de la fondation maeght vol. 1 & 2
Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, Vol.1 and 2
Shandar 10 004 and 83 503
Albert Ayler / tenor saxophone, Call Cobbs / piano, Steve Tintweiss / bass, Alan Blairman / drums, Mary Maria / vocal (on “Music Is…” only).
Volume 1: “In Heart Only”, “Spirits”, “Holy Family”, “Spirits Rejoice”.
Volume 2: “Truth Is Marching In”, “Universal Message”, “Spiritual Reunion”, “Music Is The Healing Force Of The Universe”.
Recorded: July 25 & 27, 1970, St. Paul de Vence, France.
Albert Ayler’s music was a complex phenomenon; at its best as pure and profound as any music could be, as high an art form as any, in jazz or out. But yet, like Parker’ s art, it seems not to have convinced its creator, and after the burst of activity that defined his music on record (it ended with Spirits Rejoice, ESP 1020) he let himself be led, by his own ideas or those of others, into unsatisfactory compromises or, finally, total misapplication of his talents.
One of the important factors in seeing Ayler’s music whole lies in being able to grasp the basic paradox involved. In his greatest work totally new techniques were being developed to say totally new things. An improvisational method was developed that created logic from these new techniques, that welded seemingly disparate, sometimes brief and completely disassociated bursts of sound into a coherent whole over a wide and flexible time-scale.
These constructions were erected over what were apparently simple bases, but were not: short theme lines of great melodic attractiveness, exactly calculated to imply folk-memories and an ingenuous, unsophisticated approach to music. The whole idea of this music, compositionally, instrumentally, in ensemble, rests on the use of sophisticated techniques to produce primitivistic effects. And the attempt to simplify it, popularise it, that happened on Impulse was an attempt to re-work or transplant this primitivistic surface without regard for the sophisticated substructure that lay beneath it.
Up to the point of Albert Ayler In Greenwich Village (Impulse 9155) it’s reasonable to assume that Ayler’s records represented fairly exactly what was happening in his personal appearances. Certainly on the only occasion I ever saw him, late in 1966, it sounded very much like this: already beginning to break up a bit but tremendously exciting to be up close to nevertheless. But what these Fondation Maeght recordings imply is that after Love Cry (Impulse 9165) the gulf between records and concert appearances becomes quite significant as Impulse and Ayler pursued that disastrous novelty-ridden program.
These tracks retain some sort of sanity most of the time. There’s nothing anywhere as dense, as monumental as, say, second “Ghosts” (on ESP 1002) nor is there the ensemble power that the group could raise on things like “Spirits Rejoice” on ESP. Yet Tintweiss and Blairman are compatible, Blairman particularly seeming able to maintain something of the loose yet consistent forward momentum that Sunny Murray used to provide and which Ayler appeared to miss so much after parting company with him. It’s not entirely back to old times, however, for Cobbs gives a final convincing demonstration that after an on-off association lasting around five years he still hadn’t the faintest idea of what Ayler’ s music was about. In parts it doesn’t matter: “Holy Family” or “Music Is…” have to cope with greater problems than him, and the schmaltzy rhapsodising on “Universal Message” and others is simply comical, but when it comes to a running foolishness like that perpetrated throughout “Spirits” - an accompaniment more suited to a tap dancer or a juggler than an improviser of Ayler’s stature - then it’s a more serious matter. And of course raises the question of how Ayler could let all this happen, unless he himself wasn’t completely aware of, able to define or fully realize, the nature and implications of his own ideas.
The single-horn format has provided Ayler with plenty of space here, and though once in a while it sounds a bit thin-textured - Cobbs’ piano rippling adds hardly any density - there is at least opportunity for the tenorist. He gives a pretty convincing display overall, and shows that if by that time he’d largely abandoned the ferocity of his earlier days for a more lavish, legato method of expression, the old fire could at least glimmer through fairly regularly.
And certainly he could still play his horn. The charging improvisation on “Truth Is Marching In” is entirely admirable, while the long expressive theme of “Spiritual Reunion”. with its powerful sudden upward spirals into falsetto, is equally good in its way. And at the point where his playing does falter, on “Spirits Rejoice” particularly, it underlines for us what a colossal technique we always simply expected him to have. “Spirits”, too, in spite of Cobbs, has moments of real glory: this could have been the climactic track of the collection and even flawed, probably still is; while the weird calypso-type “Holy Family”, though it doesn’t encourage Ayler to raise his game, at least allows him to revert back to and confirm the evidence of Rollins’ music that can be found in his early playing.
Mary Maria appears only on the final track, “Music Is…”, singing lyrics of quite frightening naivety: again another example of trying to make simple what is not. But she’s not in a position here to distort the situation to the extent that she did on the last Impulses. In the end then it has to be admitted that these tracks are not as good as Ayler’s finest music. Yet they are by no means negligible, certainly preferable to anything in the studio-recording line from New Grass (Impulse 9175) onwards. So stay with the ‘63, 64′ 65′ records, by all means, but hear these. For something like the truth of Ayler’s music goes marching in here for the last time. Jack Cooke, 1974
Posted:
Sunday, February 25th, 2007, 15:32.
Filed under: bells.
| 456 Views.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment | Trackback.
Loading ...