Cleveland native Albert Ayler may have been the most avant-garde jazz figure of the late '60s, launching gnarly, vernacular explorations of the musical subconscious toward a public accustomed to more regular, accessible sounds. He recorded for ESP and Impulse!, the New York label best known for issuing John Coltrane’s related, later work. A nine-CD box of rare Ayler material, Holy Ghost, was released in 2004 on Revenant. It’s an essential Ayler artifact.
On Friday, March 18, Ayler’s key bassist, Henry Grimes, joined guitarist Marc Ribot, trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr. and drummer Chad Taylor in “Spiritual Unity,” a program of Ayler’s music, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The concert capped a string of Ayler-related events including the showing of the documentary film, My Name Is Albert Ayler, and a scholarly discussion of his perpetually challenging work. Some say Ayler couldn’t navigate the changes and chords any professional jazz musician must know. Others rank him with contemporaries like Ornette Coleman and Coltrane, less divisive but still controversial jazz pillars. Ayler died in 1970 at age 34. His body turned up that November, drowned, in Brooklyn’s East River. His death remains unexplained. His music, meanwhile, marches on.
Tom Welsh, associate director of music, welcomed some 300 jazz cognoscenti, acknowledging Ayler’s parents, who sat midway in Gartner Auditorium. Welsh, who programs the Museum’s music series with Massoud Saidpour, its director of Performing Arts, Music and Film, said that even 40 years after Ayler’s death, “we are still coming to terms with his legacy.”
This quartet performed eight Ayler pieces including “The Truth Is Marching In” (started like a march, detoured into gavotte, all the while churchy and twangy), “Spirit” (the preternaturally calm Grimes bowing bass, Taylor accelerating and decelerating), and “Bells” (Grimes lively on violin, Campbell puckish on pocket trumpet). Ribot, who spent the hour and 20 minutes including encore hunched over, played otherworldly guitar, choking his lines for maximum tension, his harmonics coiled for drama.
At its best, this band played as one, its ragtag sonorities blending organically, rhythm and melody fused. At worst, it seemed diffuse. Campbell appeared indecisive; his trumpet and flugelhorn were less focused than his excursions on the small but mighty pocket trumpet. Taylor was busy, Grimes simultaneously methodical and serious and droll. The sonics conjured a Salvation Army Band from Mars, with forays into country and western and evocations of Reveille. While definitively outside, Ayler’s music is always earthy.
After the band delivered an unusually funky and jagged take on “Spirits,” Ribot made his only statement of the night—a potent one: “It’s an honor to play the music of Albert Ayler here in Cleveland,” he said, acknowledging Ayler’s relatives. Musicians have spent a “long time trying to walk through the doors that Albert Ayler opened.”
