The Book Cooks Holy Ghost: The Life & Death of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler Chapter X Just a week after recording the epochal Spiritual Unity, the Albert Ayler Trio were recording another new work, this time augmented by alto saxophonist John Tchicai, whom Ayler had met during his time in Copenhagen; trumpeter Don Cherry; and trombonist Roswell Rudd. The six-piece were booked to record the soundtrack for Michael Snow’s black-and-white experimental film New York Eye And Ear Control, which was then released on ESP-Disk’ as ESP 1016. Rather than have the band create a score that would match the mood of the film, however, Snow, a major figure in avant-garde cinema, shot the thirty-four-minute, 16mm film after the soundtrack had been recorded, fitting his images and ideas to the music. The idea stemmed from a commission Snow had received from a Toronto concert organization, Ten Centuries Concerts, who wanted Snow to make a film that utilized jazz music. The director – who had himself played jazz professionally – had heard Ayler at a club (likely the Cellar Café) and was blown away. “I simply said then that I wanted to buy a half hour of music,” Snow later recalled of his initial conversations with Ayler. “But it did have some stipulations, which were that I didn’t want any previously played compositions, and I wanted it to be as much ensemble improvisations as could be with no solos.” Snow wanted the film to be about polar opposites, and he elaborated further on the role of its soundtrack with ESP-Disk’ historian Jason Weiss:
“It’s like the music is a particular kind of experience, and the film is something quite different that you see simultaneously. That’s why the title is New York Eye And Ear Control. It is actually being able to hear the music and being able to see the picture without the music saying, the image is sad, or this image is happy – which is a way that movie music is always used. ... It’s as if the image part of it is very classical and static. In fact, most of the motion is in the music, actually. So, they’re kind of counterpointing and being in their own worlds but happening simultaneously.”
Elsewhere, Snow explained how he “tried to make it possible for the ‘improvised,’ spontaneous, raw ‘vocal,’ raucous, expressionist, emotional, ‘romantic’ music of Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, etc., to co-exist with the ‘classical’ measured, refined, considered, composed, ‘intellectual,’ temporal images. That’s what the title means.” The film featured the “walking woman,” a cut-out silhouette that was a recurrent image in Snow’s films, performances, paintings, and sculptures throughout the ‘60s. In New York Eye And Ear Control, he uses positive and negative exposures of the woman in various permutations in order to explore the ways a two-dimensional figure can be placed and manipulated in a variety of settings. Louis Dompierre, who edited a collection of essays celebrating Snow’s work, considered the results a “portrait and landscape study” based on the interaction between sound and image. Still frames from the film appear on New York Eye And Ear Control’s album cover. The record itself was recorded in a loft owned by the poet Paul Haines, who allowed the group to drill a hole in the floor of their makeshift studio to feed the microphone wires down to the floor below. In the context of Ayler’s oeuvre, this album continues his trend of changing his style for each new work, and it was a radical departure from the Spiritual Unity session from the previous week. Roswell Rudd described it as “free counterpoint ... the basis of what we do, and Albert’s music was a regeneration. He went back as far as back goes, and all the way up to the moment ... but he had many sounds. Such a range of colors and dynamics. There were many spirits in the mix there.” Following a brief intro, titled “Dons Dawn,” each album side consists of a twenty-minute collective improvisation – “AY” and “ITT,” respectively – without themes, just as Michael Snow had requested. As the band played, the director shaped the music according to how he envisioned it in his film. Roswell Rudd recalled instructions such as, “Don, would you play something kind of lyrical, and you other guys just play softly around Don?” Or, “We just need something a little more rubato, sweeter, toned down.” Ayler once explained what collective improvisation meant to him, calling it “a thing of rejoicing collectively to the spirits – or a prayer.” On this record, however, it could best be characterized as “disorganized,” suffering from the characteristics common to much free collective improvisation: a low degree of self-discipline and the lack of a unified conception; creating a collective character under these conditions is nearly impossible, as the music becomes the realization of each individual’s strengths combined to create a collective weakness. Despite the group’s intentions, New York Eye And Ear Control is not a true collective free improvisation, since Ayler’s playing dominates while the other five musicians follow him, or are carried along with his flow. Rudd described trying to keep up:
“It was just the force of his thrust. He had such a strong sense of purpose that the music kind of gravitated toward him. Then his dynamic would change, or he would drop out for a while, and then something else would happen. But by and large, when Albert was on the scene, he was blazing the trail, so to speak. He had a great quality that way. So, playing an accompaniment to him was like playing in a Dixieland band to me, with a strong trumpet player or something. It was kind of a natural, reflex action that happened.”
Yet an analysis by Ekkehard Jost suggests that the contrasting temperaments of Tchicai, Cherry, and Rudd are what gives the album its artistic success: that the three horn players inspired Ayler to absorb their styles into his own musical idiom and give a “new direction to the flow of ideas.” Jost highlights Tchicai’s use of repeated melodic patterns as the source of the music’s “motivic linkage” and notes that Rudd used stylings from the old “tailgate trombonists” – those who sat over the back of a horse-drawn carriage while the rest of the group faced forward during a procession – such as fragmentary flourishes in the higher register, as well as growl sounds intermixed with glissandos. For his part, Cherry’s improvisations are, Jost writes, composed of “broad melodic lines” or “sharply accented staccato passages.” According to W.A. Baldwin – who, writing in 1967, put forth the idea that the album’s three pieces simply ended when the tape ran out – the works suffer from a lack of both “overall shape” and of “rhythmic continuity,” problems which render the performances failures saved only by the musicians’ talents. Baldwin’s negative appraisal is based on Ayler’s occasional lapses of taste, such as his low-register honks; in tandem with Tchicai or Cherry, Ayler builds his solos strongly and maintains an assurance of rhythm, but he swings only occasionally. For Baldwin, the other musicians’ performances are also at fault: Rudd’s phrasing is stiff, and bassist Gary Peacock loses the beat because of the excessive freedom; even though he sometimes recovers it, he more often concentrates on bowing his instrument. Not all critics shared this opinion. Writing in 1974, Jost was better positioned to place New York Eye And Ear Control in a more advantageous context in the history of free jazz, and he claimed the record as one of Ayler’s best recordings – one that provided an important link between Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (which was released in 1961) and John Coltrane’s Ascension (which would follow in 1966). Feeling that the give-and-take between the musicians is what controlled the form of the music, he also concluded that the quantity of variation on all levels across “AY” and “ITT” is what differentiated Ayler’s album from the uniformity of emotional content found on Coleman’s. The album’s first piece, “Dons Dawn,” focuses on trumpeter Don Cherry, who puts his solo on a subordinate level to the rest of the group. Indeed, all the solos on the record are secondary to the collective effort. This is seen best in the two long pieces, in which short individual solos serve as transitional phases – ür-motifs for the next collective improvisation. These improvisations are self-generating, being, in Jost’s description “a-thematic.” The sole exception is a short quote by Ayler, from his own “Holy, Holy,” that acts as a trigger in “ITT.” The differences arise when the motifs interact with one another and each musician takes turns in attempting to break out of his envelope of sounds in order to bring himself into a different sound unit. In these instances, fast, pulsing passages lead into slow, melodic passages, full of glissandi. Cherry’s staccato notes arise independently from the rhythm and are then mimicked by the other horns, resulting in a pointillistic chain. Tchicai, in contrast, draws Ayler’s atonal sound spans to a tonal center by utilizing fragments of scales and ostinatos. In Jost’s assessment, several levels of emotion are simultaneously present, coming together as they alternate between calm and agitated; the rhythmic plane alternates via a constantly changing rhythm between arhythmic accents and a complete stop. Appraising Ayler’s legacy in DownBeat in 1971, John Litweiler pre-echoed Jost’s view, noting, “It might have been a disaster like Coltrane’s Ascension, but the more sophisticated shared principles of free time and harmonic basis guarantee part of the music’s success.” Outside of New York Eye And Ear Control, Ayler used collective improvisation only minimally, usually at the beginning or end of a piece. With this album, however, he proved himself adept at working on different and more complex levels of improvisation, expanding on his trio work in order to move to a freer setting.
© 2023 Richard Koloda
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