Albert Ayler (born the July 13rd 1936 with Cleveland (Ohio), dead in November 1970 with New York) is a Saxophoniste (tenor, viola, and soprano) American.

Resulting from the black lower middle class, he plays already ten years with his father in a brass band, often at the time of the burials, and, Sunday with the church. He listens at the house of many discs of traditional jazz and Bebop.

After courses of music in a private school and a high school , it takes part in an orchestra amateur rested by a comrade. Its first professional work is a round with the orchestra “rhythm and blues” of the harmonicist Little Walter, in 1952. To twenty-two years, its military service brings it in France, with Orleans (where, in the brass band of the regiment, it gives up the alto sax for the sax tenor), then in Sweden and with the Denmark.

It turns over to the civil life in California, then with Cleveland, but its style in gestation runs up against its audiences. From return in Sweden the following year, it receives a better reception and records in 1962 its first disc with two local musicians: Torbjörn Hultcrantz and Sune Spånberg, then, the following year. The disc “My name is Albert Ayler” with Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen. “Jazzhus Montmartre”, Copenhagen (at the time kind of general headquarter of the Scandinavian jazz), he frequently plays and listens to some almost permanent hosts of this area: Gift Cherry, Gift Byas and Dexter Gordon.

Of return to New York, it is engaged in some night clubs of Greenwich Village, finally carried by the rise of the Free jazz. But, in 1964 its first American recordings (of the negro - spirituals), in company of Sunny Murray, Henry Grimes and of Cal Cobbs, do not find an editor. Firm ESP, dedicated to the jazz of avant-garde, publishes finally the same year the first of a series of microgrooves of compositions of Ayler (the first: “Ghost” is one of proclamations of the free jazz). Success is still not with go. It records however the music of the film “New York Eye and Ear Control” of Michael Snow.

Again with the Denmark, it finds Don Cherry in the Albert Ayler Quartet, then, returned to New York, it manages to occur with its faithful Murray and his/her brother Donald Ayler at the Village Spoils, Town Hall, Judson Hall, Slug' S.

In 1966, a long round again leads it in Europe. John Coltrane, conquered by its style, becomes one of its supports, unfortunately for little time. With its death, they are the Ayler brothers whom it responsible for the ritual funerary music, but where the traditional brass band is reduced to the simple four-bit byte.

Coltrane introduces it near the leaders of the label Impulse!, accommodating all the avantgardists, and who will produce a rather important series of discs until in 1969, accompanied by a fluctuating personnel, but frequently comprising the violonist Michael Sampson, the bass player Alan Silva and the beater Beaver Harris, to which joint the singer (and poly-instrumentalist) Mary Parks (Mary Maria). In 1969, it tries to integrate musicians of Pop music or Rock, in kinds of tests of “fusion”, always without much success.

In 1970, it has time to give two concerts to the Maeght Foundation with Saint-Paul de Vence before dying mysteriously drowned in the port of New York, at thirty-four years.

The jazz abounds cursed artists, but Albert Ayler is an example in a pure, alive state in the rejection, ostracism and the permanent sarcastic remark, which it makes nothing to abolish: violence of the sound amplified by the use of very hard sheers and by a very physical play mobilizing all the power of the breath and the mouth, vibrato hypertrophied, paroxystic, heritage more of fright of the negro - spirituals original that song of the “blues shouters”. Ayler condenses with him all alone all that characterizes the inhabited choral society of “Holy GOST”: character obsessional of the simple topics - to the appearance of canticles, ballades, gospels songs or military marches (the Marseilles and “God save the queen” is never far), and even kind of gigues, brutal scansion, exposed with let us répons by his/her brother, developing in improvisations rageuses/exultantes, quite distant from all forced harmonic or rhythmic, perhaps exultation and perhaps cry of despair, perhaps humor “hénaurme”. No kindness in this speech, not of research of pretty, nor even of the beauty, if not “convulsive”, “dirty” with excess. The canonical structure of interpretation jazz (introduction-topic-soli-topic-coded) suffers from it of course, replaced by a kind of patchwork sound truffle of quotations, the bluette being solved in polyphonic brass band, then bright in various stridencies. It is difficult to distinguish a premeditation in these interpretations, which seem the fruit of the moment a contrario.

The established critic shouted with cacophony, with the simplistic speech of musical illiterate, the rape of the MUSE by the bad taste. It is necessary to rather see there a reflection and a going beyond of the revolt of the ghettos, esthetics dictated by the Uncle-Tomisme and of the seduction of the Cool jazz and the Hard bop the named evil, but not in the violent revolt of the Black Panthers, but in a reactualization of the original jazz, bulges of New Orleans, cotton plantations, and syncretic worships of the beginning of the 20th century. The various anthems and extracts of Western folklores appear, by their heterogeneity even, testimonys of absolute otherness.

Discography

Note: if one excludes some titles under the direction of Cecil Taylor or Sunny Murray, Albert Ayler recorded only his own discs.

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