|
IT IS OBVIOUS that the new jazz is here to stay. Few young musicians who feel drawn to jazz will be attracted to anything other than today’s avant-garde. In light of this, it is the critic’s central task to try to determine the viable directions the music is taking. It is not the critic’s proper job to engage in partisan tactics on the behalf of some style to which he is personally attached and consign all other methods to the rubbish bin.
The current devotion to “political” and pejorative ranting on the part of both critics and musicians has, perhaps, its own value. But in the meantime, the tasks of explication and evaluation remain.
The development, then, of the new jazz probably depends on the emergence of some dominant figures who will determine its course, as such figures have in the past. Without the presence of such players, the new jazz may well founder in a sea of competing alternatives, none of which may achieve realization if there is no one to pull them together and realize some common style that can be consolidated by the talents of lesser musicians.
The strongest contender for this position seems to be tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler. With this in mind it is worthwhile to consider where he comes from and to attempt to discern where he may be going. With someone who has recorded as seldom as Ayler, and whose public appearances have been so few, the difficulties of assessing his work are considerable.
However, his recording of Summertime provides a good starting point.
It is clear that his technique of melodic development comes, stylistically, directly from the work of Sonny RoIlins and Thelonious Monk. Ayler carefully restructures the George Gershwin melody into a plaintive statement of exacerbated lyricism. He never really leaves the melody; rather he concentrates on a shaping of its contours that amounts to an exploration of its rhythmic and lyric possibilities.
Nevertheless, the presence of a conventional post-bop rhythm section hampers his efforts. The pianist tries to guide him harmonically in irrelevant directions, and the drums only accent futilely, for the obvious fact is that Ayler’s rhythmic manner comes from John Coltrane. He requires a non-timekeeping rhythm section that will provide a thick backdrop of percussion around which he can weave a line that sings with his vibrato and cellolike timbres.
On his ESP trio date drummer Sonny Murray and bassist Gary Peacock give him the type of accompaniment he needs—Peacock plays contrarhythmically and contramelodically to Ayler’s line while Murray’s drums lay down an independent quasi-melodic pattern with which Ayler interlaces his improvisation.
With this sort of sympathetic backdrop, Ayler displays his full talent. The almost hypnotic quality of his harsh, brooding tone and line sets up an emotional ambience of deep, nearly shattering desolation. Spirits and the second version of Ghosts are admirable exhibitions of his skill.
However, it is also apparent that Ayler does have certain problems.
The highly tense emotional atmosphere of the improvisations seems to incline him to rather gratuitous howls and snorts that do not, as similar devices in the hands of Rollins do, further the consistent development of his variations. Rather, they seem like fill-ins to cover the momentary failure of inspiration or planning. They work as fillers, much as the fast runs of arpeggios to which the less skillful—and some of the more adept as well—bop players resorted.
Similar problems of full articulation are to be found in the concert recording Bells. Ayler’s work here seems again fragmentary, although this is offset by those fragments that succeed in consistency and lyricism.
Certainly the merely emotion-charged howls and shrieks Ayler contributes can be considered as errors of the still-maturing musician playing in an atmosphere thick with intense feeling. Nevertheless, one must ask of any performer that his performance be clearly expressed and worked out. The only alternative is John Cage, and I don’t think that is Ayler’s way.
The direction that seems more promising for him—and it demands talent and control—is to work further with the technique of “free” improvisation.
Such a procedure requires that both Ayler and his fellow performers achieve the highest sensitivity to each other and their respective styles. It has been the failure of stylistic congruity that has damaged the attempts at “free” jazz from Ornette Coleman to Coltrane. However, considering the relative novelty of the method, it is still too soon to expect any but the most halting of successes. But it does seem that this sort of approach is the only one that can save the jazz musician from the pitfalls of the repetition of the past and the inarticulate grunt.
Of course, an examination as cursory as this cannot take account of many of the major problems facing both Ayler and the other new jazzmen. For instance, without its traditional audience-base in the Negro community, will the new jazz end as only an imitation of modern concert music? Already its audience is now, in the main, made up of disaffiliated intellectuals and their various hangers-on, and this trend is probably not reversible in any creative manner. Also, the despair and anguish of the music may, in the long run, lead to a deadly narrowness of expression.
But Ayler seems to have a better chance than many of his contemporaries to avoid these perils.
His sense of form has already been well displayed, and it is doubtful that any musician with this feeling for structure can be content with formlessness. His rhythmic skills are not yet fully developed, but the rhythmic deftness of his playing and the ways in which he moves, like Coltrane, through and around an implicit time lead one to think he may be able to go beyond the facile, often arhythmic, work of so many of Coltrane’s followers. The lyricism of his work shows he can do more than echo the agitated emotions of his contemporaries.
Ayler may achieve an art which contains love and hate, despair and fulfillment, tragedy and comedy. If he succeeds, he will, indeed, be an artist to reckon with. RECORD REFERENCES:
Fantasy 6016: My Name Is Albert Ayler—Summertime
ESP 1002: Spiritual Unity—Spirits and Ghosts
ESP 1010: Bells Articles |
|
