The History of Jazz (73 page)

Among the second wave of free jazz players, Albert Ayler would grasp with the greatest clarity the deconstructive phase the movement was now entering. He explained to interviewers that the goal now was to escape from playing notes and enter a new realm in which the saxophone created
sound
. In contrast to Ornette Coleman, many of whose solos could be notated and analyzed for their musicological implications, Ayler defied such assimilation. The well-tempered scales of Western music were incapable of encompassing the bellowing, moaning spasms that fled from the bell of his horn. Ayler was a master of the “dirty” tone, that calling card of the African American musical tradition with a lineage predating Louis Armstrong and Robert Johnson. He was a virtuoso of the coarse and anomalous, with an impressive bag of tricks at his disposal: stomach-churning waverings out of tune; low-register barks and high-pitched squeals; a vibrato so wide that it bordered on parody; darting phrases, hieroglyphics of sound representing some hitherto unknown sublunar mode; tones Adolphe Sax never dreamed of and Selmer never sanctioned.

Yet there was also a traditional side to Ayler’s music. His compositions frequently featured unadorned diatonic melodies, which contrasted starkly with his heated free jazz improvisations. Ballads found Ayler’s expansive vibrato lingering over simple whole-note and half-note patterns. On faster compositions, Ayler’s efforts often sounded like lilting folk songs, evoking quasi-European vernacular music of another place, another century. These influences coexisted with more specific African American sources of inspiration, the residue of Ayler’s personal history. In his native Cleveland, where he was born in 1936, Ayler performed saxophone duets in church with his father, who also introduced his son to swing and bebop jazz styles. During Ayler’s teens, formal saxophone study was supplemented with work in jazz and rhythm-and-blues bands, as well as summer stints on the road with bluesman Little Walter. In his early twenties, Ayler served three years in the military, playing in army ensembles, occasionally gracing the bandstands of European jazz clubs while stationed overseas, and listening to the free jazz sounds that were beginning to gain wider exposure.

Ayler’s first recordings, made during the early 1960s in Scandinavia, find him fighting against the constraints of the mainstream jazz tradition. By 1964, however, Ayler had developed his mature style, distinguished by an untempered excitability. Ayler had meanwhile found a group of sympathetic fellow travelers to support his explorations: drummer Sunny Murray, a master of free-time percussion; bassist Gary Peacock, who could move with ease between conventional structures and atonality, and was especially skillful at exploring the ambiguous middle ground between the two; Don Cherry, who frequently sat in with Ayler and joined his band on a European tour.
Witches and Devils
, Ayler’s February 1964 quartet date, showed how completely the tenorist had broken away from the customary jazz vocabulary. Elements of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane are more prominent in his playing, but they too are subservient to Ayler’s rougher, looser conception. Murray’s drum kit is the epicenter of unsettling reverberations hinting at underlying rhythms, but never resolving into conventional time. The ensuing trio recording
Spiritual Unity
, which featured Ayler alongside Murray and Peacock, was a major statement, the most cohesive ensemble project the saxophonist had undertaken to date. Ayler showed that his radical remaking of the jazz saxophone vocabulary was largely self-sufficient, needing no other horns to set it off or support its blistering attack. It encompassed fervent explorations of harmonics, haunting stringlike evocations in the higher register, and Vesuvian explosions of sonic lava. Peacock and Murray hold onto these energized lines with the determination of cowpokes latching onto steers at the rodeo. To their credit, they grapple masterfully with Ayler’s unpredictable leaps and turns.

Ayler’s brother Donald joined as trumpeter in the band in March 1965 and remained a key colleague for the next three years. The younger sibling contributed uninhibited sound collages that complemented the saxophonist’s fractious work. But he suffered from emotional instability and a drinking problem, which precipitated his firing from the band in 1968. In the latter half of the decade, Albert Ayler’s music began to incorporate elements of a variety of vernacular styles. These included rock, R&B, blues, gospel, vocal harmonies, even bagpipe music. His 1968 release
New Grass
must rank among the strangest jazz albums of the decade, with its attempt to mix freedom music and formulas from the commercial hits of the day. Here Ayler’s untempered saxophony is backed by a hard-grooving rhythm section that includes funkmeister drummer Bernard Purdie, and is overwhelmed by a team of sassy if undistinguished Motown-ish singers. This new direction was mostly lamented by fans of Ayler’s earlier work and did little to broaden his appeal among the dominant rock audience of the day. Shortly before his death, the saxophonist showed signs of moving away from these crossover efforts.

In November 1970, Ayler disappeared, and some three weeks later his body was found in the East River. He was thirty-four years old. Death by drowning was the verdict of the New York Medical Examiner’s office. Some commentators mused about foul play, with rumors circulating about a mysterious bullet wound in the corpse (although denied by pianist Call Cobbs, who helped to identify the body). Others recalled signs of depression and mental instability that may have led Ayler to take his own life. Under other circumstances, the 1970s jazz revival would have surely given a major boost to Ayler’s career, but his early death ensured that the accolades would be posthumous.

Yet this saxophonist’s period of peak creativity, for all its brevity, marked an important turning point in the history of jazz. Anthony Braxton has sometimes spoken of a post-Ayler era in the music, setting up this figure as point of demarcation in the evolution of the avant-garde in jazz—a revealing nomenclature that helps us understand why so much later jazz retreated from a full embrace of the freedom imperative rather than try to move “beyond Ayler” into a further stage of liberation from the strictures of Western tonality. In truth, it was hard to conceive what freedom “beyond Ayler” might represent, since the saxophonist’s bold leap outside the world of notes into the full flux of sound seemed more a liminal point than a springboard to the next thing. Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that, almost at the moment of Ayler’s death, the biggest sensation in the jazz world was a rock-inflected album by Miles Davis, called
Bitches Brew
, that rudely countered rather than extended the avant-garde tendencies that had been so powerful during the previous decade.

Jazz has always been a music of fusion. “Nothing from New Orleans is ever pure”—so goes an old throwaway phrase. But even by Crescent City standards, early jazz was an especially complex mélange. The southern mentality that obsessively measured infinitesimal gradations—delineating differences of quadroon from octoroon the way Aquinas demarked archangels from cherubim and seraphim—quickly came to a cul-de-sac in tracing the lineage of this radical new music. Impure at its birth, jazz grew ever more so as it evolved. Its history is marked by a fondness for musical miscegenation, by its desire to couple with other styles and idioms, producing new, radically different progeny. In its earliest form, jazz showed an ability to assimilate the blues, the rag, the march, and other idioms; as it evolved, it transformed a host of even more disparate sounds and styles. It showed no pretensions, mixing as easily with vernacular musics—the American popular song, the Cuban
son
, the Brazilian samba, the Argentinian tango—as with concert hall fare. Jazz in its contemporary form bears traces of all these passages. It is the most glorious of mongrels.

Yet the concept of jazz as music of fusion took on particular relevance at the close of the 1960s. Jazz was on the brink of an especially pronounced period of absorption and expansion. Over the next decade, the music’s leading exponents would attempt ambitious fusions with a dizzying array of popular, ethnic, and classical styles. At times, the resulting hybrids would be so far afield from the music’s tradition that listeners would ask in puzzlement whether the results could still be called jazz. Such experiments would even call into question the jazz world’s most sacred legacy: the syncopated sense of swing. In its place, one now encountered a wide array of alternative rhythms: on-the-beat rock riffs, world-beat drones, smoothly flowing quasi-classical styles, and experiments in free time. The types of fusion would vary widely, from the ethereal concert hall overtones of the ECM sound to the grooving disco beat of jazz-rock, but they shared an increasingly outward-looking focus. By the close of the 1970s, Buddy Bolden’s legacy had truly conquered the world, but the New Orleans pioneer would hardly recognize his own progeny. It had become more than a style of music—it was a perspective that seemingly could encompass all musics.

Yet for most listeners during this period, the term
fusion
had a very narrow and specific meaning. It described highly commercial attempts to combine jazz with rock music. Miles Davis’s recording of
Bitches Brew
at the close of the 1960s was a signal event in this regard. It legitimized a whole new area of exploration and experimentation for jazz musicians. This emerging rock-tinged sound substantially broadened the jazz audience, and one suspects that it played a decisive role in spurring the improving financial environment for all jazz styles during the 1970s. Fans who were introduced to jazz through fusion soon developed a taste for other styles of improvised music. As a result, the economic base of jazz broadened and stabilized during this period, after years of stagnation and decline. New clubs opened, jazz labels proliferated, and expatriate musicians returned from their overseas exiles.

Sales figures for
Bitches Brew
provide an impressive measure of this change of affairs. A typical Davis mid-1960s release, despite the critical acclaim and lasting significance of this music, would sell fewer than 100,000 units at the time of release. But fans purchased 400,000 copies of
Bitches Brew
within its first year. Davis built on this new audience with a vengeance: he recorded prolifically over the next eighteen months, amazing Columbia executives, who had previously found it difficult to entice him into the studio; he showed up at company publicity functions and played on television shows; he agreed to perform in rock venues, such as Fillmore West and Fillmore East, even when it meant serving as lead-in act for another band. Davis was also now working with a wider range of musicians and sounds—for instance, the
Bitches Brew
sessions found Davis using twelve sidemen, ten of them in the rhythm section. Only Wayne Shorter was a holdover from the mid-1960s quintet.

Some critics accused Davis of selling out. Yet the remarkable thing about
Bitches Brew
was how little Davis attempted to mimic current trends in pop and rock music. All but one of the tracks lasted for over ten minutes—virtually guaranteeing that Davis would receive little radio airplay. The songs studiously avoided slick commercialism. Listeners seeking tight arrangements, melodic hooks, simple dance beats, or memorable lyrics were inevitably disappointed. This was raw, unfiltered music, rambling, discursive, and often unwieldy. The large rhythm section created thick, soupy textures. And the bandleader remained coy, often allowing the sidemen to work over long static vamps before entering on trumpet. Even then, Davis’s horn lines were far from solos in any conventional sense. Instead, they seemed just one more layer of sound, placed on top of the churning cauldron underneath. This record may be, as many claim, the father of 1970s fusion. Yet if so, one struggles to see its paternal resemblance to the overly arranged, ever-so-slick Grover Washington and Spyro Gyra releases it supposedly spawned.

Davis built on this aesthetic vision in a series of follow-up projects. Producer Teo Macero took on an increasingly important role at this time, employing radical tape-splicing techniques to sculpt finished performances from the mass of studio and live material that Davis was recording. On the release of Davis’s soundtrack music for the film
Jack Johnson
, one of the trumpeter’s strongest projects from the period, Macero created a dramatic shift in Davis’s piece “Yesternow” by incorporating excerpts from “Shh/Peaceful”—recorded over a year before with a different band. The contrast is unnerving and disjunctive, yet very much in keeping with the helter-skelter sensibility of the new Davis sound.
Live-Evil
, from this same period, offers a similarly bizarre contrast, with the results of Davis’s intriguing studio project with the quirky Brazilian instrumentalist-composer Hermeto Pascoal strangely juxtaposed with live performances of Davis’s working band. At times it almost seemed as if Davis were defying the rock audiences who were now flocking to see him. Above all, he avoided the onstage recapitulation of hit records—the time-honored formula for popular bands—in favor of a restless linking of sundry fragments, set to a miasma of rhythmic sound.

Yet the rawness of this music, one suspects, accounted for much of its commercial success. It displayed a rebellious streak that was in tune with the counterculture attitudes of the late 1960s, giving Davis credibility with younger listeners who probably would have been “turned off ”by a slicker format. The proof of this came with Davis’s 1972
On the Corner
. Here Davis was willing to employ more overtly commercial elements, especially more insistent dance rhythms. Yet critics mostly panned the new sound, and sales failed to meet Davis’s expectations. With
Bitches Brew
, Davis had tapped into young and mostly white rock listeners, but with
On the Corner
and its follow-up projects, Davis looked to draw an urban black following. In truth, many of Davis’s former sidemen were passing him by in this regard. In 1975, Davis was relegated to touring as warm-up act for Herbie Hancock, whose jazz fusion/funk band Headhunters was reaching the same young black audience to which Davis merely aspired.