albert ayler – truth is marching in

Jen got me the Albert Ayler box set for Christmas, and it’s quite a forbidding object. Encased in a box that looks like it’ll have ghosts and light pouring out of it and melting your face off as soon as you open it, it houses 10 CDs, a pressed flower, postcards, reproduced hotel notepaper messages, a hardback book with essays by the likes of Amiri Baraka, and a highly oxygenated treatise on Ayler and jazz from Paul Haines (“Ayler’s sound is that of a diseased pearl…which is the point exactly where musics are swept up, attacked, and left unharmed in fact but shamed by the acrimonious folding of grievance in your apron – as though the players themselves interfered with their music; as though everything were being done in a manner meant to conceal or cause”). There’s even a reproduction of a black music zine called Cricket, with bits from Baraka, Sun Ra, and a great Onion-predating piece from Ishmael Reed, headlined “Aide Denies LBJ Called Pope ‘A Dumb Cunt’”.

So, a lifetime’s worth of stuff to wade through, and it is wading, no matter how exciting or fulfilling it is – this is very thick, high-viscosity music. Ayler is one of the pioneers of free jazz, a genre that is often alienating in its assertion of the random; Ayler, in reaching towards a new form of expression, actually found the genre’s most meaningful and emotional mode. It’s music that plots the strain of trying to truly know an unknowable spiritual plane, and as such has an intensity and humanity that is unforgettable.

Listening to it all is the sort of project that you should rent a cave in the wilderness for, and as I’m trying to get deeply involved in each CD while also having a life, I’ve only really listened to two of them so far – expect more Ayler posts in the coming months. For starters, here’s a live recording of Truth Is Marching In, which is truly mindblowing. Beginning with a demented, cacophonous melee, the backing band then start to create an ethereal, reedy backbone (a sound that begins at 3.26 and, coupled with the timbre of the live recording, is one of the most beautiful, unrepeatable sounds ever). And then, over the hill, emerges the march, with a bathetic, almost comic raggedness, yet with a pride and determination that is constant throughout the rupture that ebbs and flows around it.

Albert Ayler Quintet – [untitled]/Truth Is Marching In (live at La Cave, Cleveland, April 17th, 1966) (37mb, 320kbps file)

The box is only £40 now. Get it here.