After Love Cry, producer Bob Thiele, who had worked with most of the avant-garde musicians at Impulse, wanted Albert to record with a rock group. Albert agreed, but insisted on choosing his own band (Wilmer 1980: 108).
Recording Session
September 5, 1968, New York.
Albert Ayler (tenor sax, bagpipe chanter, ocarina, and vocal
on all tunes except 7 & 8)
Call Cobbs (piano, organ, and harpsichord)
Bill Folwell (bass guitar)
Bernard "Pretty" Purdie (drumset)
Rose Marie McCoy and Mary Maria (Parks) (vocals) (in the liner notes as "The Soul Singers")(on 1-5 only)
1.Free At Last
2.Everybody's Movin'
3.New Generation
4.Heart Love
5.Thank God For Women
6.New Ghosts
7.Sun Watcher
8.New Grass (sax and bass duet)
9.Message From Albert (recitation by Albert Ayler)
September 6, 1968, Same place.
Burt Collins and Joe Newman (trumpets)
Garnett Brown (trombone)
Seldon Powell (tenor sax, flute)
Buddy Lucas (baritone sax)
Bert DeCoteaux (arranger, conductor)
horn section added to 1-5, 9
5 unreleased. All other titles on Impulse AS9175, (UK) MIPL/SIPL519, (Japan) IMJ80015, New Grass. 1,3, and 9 on Pathe (France) 2C.154-92336/7, La Saga Heroique d'Albert Ayler. 6 and 7 on Impulse AS9257-2, Re-evaluation: The Impulse Years.
Seldon Powell (regarding the September 6 session): Albert Ayler wasn't there. It was an overdub date. I never saw him. I remember because Bert DeCouteaux was the arranger. The rhythm was already on the track with Albert playing solos--we sweetened the date as it was known (Rusch 1989: 13).
Albert Ayler: You have to make changes in life just like dying and being born again, artistically speaking. You become very young again through this process, then you grow up and listen and grow young again (Wilmer 1980: 108-109).
Call Cobbs: We heard some of the critics say he was beginning to get a bit too conventional, but then it was selling and they [Impulse] liked that. He didn't want to sing but he started to on New Grass because his friend Mary Maria suggested it. She had written some lyrics to tunes, so they sang something together and asked me how does it sound. I said it sounds good and it was original, and so I wrote the music out for him (Wilmer 1971).
Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders appeared with Rhythm and Blues style bands in the early 1970's and those seeking to accuse Ayler of selling out found plenty of support in this. Obviously, they thought, all three experimentalists had been forced by Impulse Records to make more commercial product (Davidson and Goldman 13).
Bernard Stollman: Albert was always amazed by people's total incomprehension of what he was doing. He couldn't understand why his gifts weren't accepted for what they were. He once told a friend of mine that there was a clause in his contract with Impulse that stipulated that he had to sing on his albums... (Williams).
This is improbable, since Ayler had no reputation as a vocalist and does not sing on his first Impulse album, In Greenwich Village. Bob Thiele denied that any such clause existed (Wilmer 1997). In fact, just as Miles Davis did with his post-Bitches Brew electric music, Ayler achieved what the writer Kevin Whitehead calls "negative crossover" with his own fusion. Davis' and Ayler's experimentation cost them many of their older fans, who disliked the new styles, and added very few new ones from the rock and soul camps, who were not interested in the seemingly bizarre improvisational variations the jazz players performed on their familiar chordal and rhythmic forms.
It is likely, however, that the dominant influence on this, and Albert's following recordings, rather than the record company, was, as Call Cobbs said, Mary Parks, who used the stage name Mary Maria. Albert had become fascinated by her poetry and recorded it, singing himself, since he doubted that he would be allowed to use an unknown singer (Mary) in his band (Wilmer 1980: 108). Albert had brought Mary into his music, first by teaching her the saxophone, then by recording her words. For the next recording, she sang lead on many songs. The two of them would play their saxophones in Prospect Park, Brooklyn and were once nearly arrested for playing too loud. Mary also rehearsed with Call Cobbs, though not with any of the other band members (Wilmer 1980: 108) in the tradition of the big bands Cobbs had worked with and the blues bands of Ayler's past, which often had a music director, who saved the star the work of actually leading the band.
While the remainder of Ayler's career has generally been written off as a sell-out, this is not the case. New Grass seems to be commercially motivated, but it is highly possible, in light of "To Mr. Jones, I Had a Vision," that Albert felt the need to expose his message to a wider audience than that for "experimental jazz." If Albert truly felt that he had heard Gabriel sound the last trumpet, signaling the coming apocalypse, then his move towards more conventional forms is wholly understandable. Regardless, New Grass is an extraordinary album, whatever genre one chooses to assign it to.
Albert sings on most of the songs, not in the way he had on Love Cry and the Paris version of "Japan," but in the R&B idiom. His singing however, displays the phrasing he has acquired as a saxophonist, and abounds in quarter tones and irregular rhythms. His vocals bear the same relation to Otis Redding or Ray Charles that his saxophone playing does to King Curtis. The lyrics, by Mary Parks, are (as most critics have noted) not excellent poetry, however, they hold up as well as most rock or soul lyrics; to judge them as poetry is irrelevant and condescending, reminiscent of the old Steve Allen comedy routine, where he would recite, as if it were a poem, some classic rock song like "Be-Bop-A-Lula" or "Tutti Fruiti." Park's lyrics are rhythmically effective and gracefully communicate the spiritual concerns of "To Mr. Jones..." without being overbearing.
The band sounds good, though Bill Folwell's approximation of funk bass occasionally sounds stiff next to Bernard Purdie's incomparable groove. Call Cobbs seems in his element, and contributes some truly interesting material, especially on "Sunwatcher," where he provides incredibly rich organ chords in the introduction. What most critics have ignored about Ayler's later recordings is that his saxophone sounds better than it has since Bells. In this new context Albert no longer feels that he has to limit his solos to a particular orchestral role and he utilizes the full spectrum of saxophone tonality for the first time since 1964. He plays "inside," "outside," and, in "Sunwatcher," even switches to ocarina for a chorus after his tenor solo has finished. Taken out of context, Albert's instrumental prowess would only become more apparent from this date on. In context, it would be casually dismissed, because most tunes featured vocals. In fact, New Grass was Ayler's only album to contain R&B music. His later records, while including many vocals by him and Mary, were solidly "Free Jazz."
Recording Session
August 26, 1969, Plaza Sound Studios, New York.
Albert Ayler (tenor sax, voice)
Bobby Few (piano)
Stafford James (bass)
Bill Folwell (bass, bass guitar)
Muhammad Ali (drumset)
Mary Maria (Parks) (voice)
1.Music is the Healing Force of the Universe
2.A Man is Like a Tree
3.Again Comes the Rising of the Sun
4.Desert Blood
August 27, 1969, Same Place.
Same Personnel
5.Birth of Mirth (MM out)
6.Oh! Love of Life (MM out)
7.Island Harvest
8.Masonic Inborn (MM out, AA plays bagpipes and ocarina)
9.All Love (MM out)
10.Poetic Soul
11.Water Music (MM, MA out)
add Henry Vestine (electric guitar), no vocals.
12.Drudgery
13.Toiling
14 Joining Forces
These three songs are probably alternate takes of the same piece.
August 29, 1969, Same place.
Albert Ayler (bagpipe chanter)
Henry Vestine (electric guitar)
15.Untitled Duet
1, 2, 6-8, 12 released as Impulse AS9191, Music is the Healing Force of the Universe. 3-5, 9, 11, 13 as Impulse AS9208, (Japan) SR3122, The Last Album. 3, 5, 10, 11 on AS9257-2, Re-evaluation: The Impulse Years. 7 and 12 on Pathe (France) 2C.154-92336/7 La Saga Heroique d'Albert Ayler.
Robert Palmer: I remember seeing Albert for the last time at the recording sessions for Music is the Healing Force of the Universe-August, 1969, fifteen months before his body was found floating in the East River. He was wearing a new fringed jacket, the kind rock musicians in bands like Moby Grape were wearing. The one musician from the bands heard here [at the 12-18-66 and 2-26-67 shows] was bassist Bill Folwell, who also played bass with rock groups and had followed Albert into an electric, jazz-rock-soul area. The session I attended [8-27-69] was strange. Folwell and guitarist Henry Vestine were interested in laying down the blues bottom Albert seemed to want, but the other musicians heard a freer, less structured sound. The tension in the music was manifested when Archie Shepp walked in, listened to a rough mix of the blues "Drudgery," and glanced at Vestine's long blond hair and pale face. "I'd have liked your playing a lot better," he told Henry, "if I hadn't seen what you look like." (Palmer)
The pieces recorded at these, Ayler's last studio sessions, can be divided into three categories: vocals ("Music is the Healing Force of the Universe," "A Man is Like a Tree," "Again Comes the Rising of the Sun," "Desert Blood," "Oh! Love of Life," and "Island Harvest"), Coltrane-like instrumentals ("Birth of Mirth," "Masonic Inborn," "All Love," and "Water Music"), and blues collaborations with Canned Heat guitarist Henry Vestine ("Drudgery," "Toiling," and "Untitled Duet"). Of the two unreleased songs, "Joining Forces" is almost certainly another take of the themeless blues in F that is "Drudgery" and "Toiling". Nothing can be said for certain about "Poetic Soul," but it is likely that it is a tenor feature similar to "Birth of Mirth," etc.
The musical accompaniment to the vocal performances by Albert and Mary clearly shows that New Grass was only a temporary flirtation with R&B. Ali, James, and Few play in the idiom of John Coltrane's last groups, formless dense kinetic improvisation. They provide a static backdrop to the singing and saxophone soloing. Their work shows the difficult situation of free jazz at the end of the 1960's; what had originally been a wide open arena for unlimited expression had, through the widespread imitation of the original innovators, acquired its own set of cliches, as confining as those it had been created to oppose. For example, on "Island Harvest," Ayler plays a swinging latin rhythm throughout, yet the rhythm section only gradually realizes that this is the feel he wants, and refuses to groove in a metrical fashion. Unlike the multi-directional interaction that Ayler had pioneered with Peacock and Murray, the accompanists on these albums simply thrash independently, without truly listening to one another. This is the constant risk in Ayler's open arranging style, which Ronald Shannon Jackson described as telling the players to "fill it up with sound." Gary Peacock had expressed this back in 1964, when he described what was such a powerful and productive concept at that time:
Gary Peacock: When Albert Ayler plays, I play, and I don't know what I play and I am glad not to know. In a way, it is very impersonal; the emphasis is more on the action rather than doing a certain thing or not doing something else (Quersin 31).
On the instrumentals, this distinction between foreground and background is even more clear. The style of these pieces is amazingly close to late Coltrane, as if Albert, having decided that he is a "universal man" like Coltrane, feels the call to preach from the master's platform. These pieces, while they include sax playing that shows how Ayler, like Coltrane, was always progressing to greater and greater technical mastery, are fairly monotonous, due to the unremarkable work of the rhythm section. Two songs that are exceptional among this group are "Water Music," on which the drums do not play, creating the same beautiful texture that Ayler used on "Prophecy" (with Call Cobbs), "For John Coltrane," and "Masonic Inborn," where Ayler plays the bagpipes and ocarina using overdubbing to record several simultaneous solos. The sound is startling, especially when a deliberately out of tune bowed bass joins the bagpipe drone to make a sound like a beehive. Ayler's melodic playing on the bagpipes is reminiscent of the work Dewey Redman and Ornette Coleman were doing at the time with the musette (also called the shenai or Indian oboe) and one wonders if he was inspired by them (which would be apt, since it was Ayler who first persuaded Coleman to play instruments besides the saxophone).
Another, more obvious circle that closes with this session can be found Albert's return to the blues. "Untitled Duet" is the only piece with Vestine that is not a straight blues. It features bagpipe chanter (the melody part of the instrument, with the drone removed) improvising against distorted electric slide guitar. Ayler seems limited by the chanter; it cannot be overblown or played chromatically. Vestine's contribution to this piece is the more radical, droning, using string noise, and quarter tones. Though it is unexceptional in the context of rock, where Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck, to name just two, used these techniques on many hit records, the only player in jazz to experiment on this level at this time was Sonny Sharrock.
The blues numbers are incredible, with some of Ayler's best soloing ever, using all of his discoveries to reunite the vocalized tone of avant-garde sax playing with the vocalized tone of R&B sax playing. Vestine plays typical psychedelic white blues guitar, and the rhythm section is kicked along by Bill Folwell's switch to electric bass. "Drudgery," the last performance by Albert Ayler released on record in his lifetime, seems like a deep meditation on his first professional work, with Little Walter and Lloyd Price.
Work was impossible to find in the United States. Albert may have performed once in August of 1970 with Leroy Jenkins (violin), Don Pullen (piano), Mary Parks, and unknown others, but there is no reliable record of this date (Hames 28). Also, Impulse Records dropped him form the label. Albert believed that he had had a four year contract, but it was likely for two years, with an option for two more, an option that it was not in the best financial interests of Impulse to exercise (Hames 28).
Albert's next, and last gig would be in France, where he had first developed his original musical ideas during his military service.
Performance
July 25, 1970, Nuits de la Foundation Maeghnt, St. Paul de Vence, France.
Albert Ayler (tenor and soprano saxophones, voice)
Call Cobbs (piano)
Steve Tintweiss (bass)
Allan Blairman (drumset)
Mary Parks (soprano sax, voice)
unknown titles
July 27, 1970, Same place.
Same personnel. Ayler plays only tenor. Mary Parks appears only on 8, singing.
1.In Heart Only
2.Spirits (actually a variation of "New Ghosts")
3.Holy Family
4.Spirits Rejoice
5.Truth is Marching In
6.Universal Message
7.Spiritual Reunion
8.Music is the Healing Force of the Universe
Several unissued songs from this concert, as well as all of the July 25 show exist, probably in the possession of Shandar Records.
issued as Nuits de la Foundation Maeghnt Volumes 1 and 2, Shandar (France) SR10000 and SR10004, SH83503 and SH83504, RCA (Japan) SHP6201 and SHP 6202. Volume 1 contains 1-4, 5-8 are on Volume 2.
Call Cobbs remembered that before playing "Holy Family" at this concert, Albert, amazed at the large, receptive French audience, turned to him and said, "Let's do something I don't normally do, let's play some blues."
Call Cobbs: ...and the people went wild about it! I saw the scope of the things he was doing and I had a very good ear and I wrote things out. People would say "that sounds good" because it had something to it.
I'm very broad-minded and Albert was so sincere in what he was doing. The rest of the people were in another bag and I didn't understand. They would talk flip-talk and I said "what is this?" but Albert was very sincere and it was like a Bible to him (Wilmer 1971).
When he speaks of "the rest of the people" being "in another bag," Cobbs is likely referring to Steve Tintweiss and Allan Blairman, the drummer and bassist of the group. Like Few, James, and Ali on the August 1969 sessions, their styles do not fit with Cobbs and Ayler's work. On most of the released material from this concert, Albert has cast himself as a gospel tenor soloist and Call Cobbs excels in this idiom. Tintweiss refuses to collaborate, adding only irrelevant ornamentation and forcing Cobbs to play the funky bass lines he wants to hear himself, as on "Spirits". Blairman seems enthralled with the drumming of Tony Williams and emulates his hero as much as he can. While he is a good player, displaying nice conventional technique and some interesting ideas in his solos, he is not the right drummer for Albert Ayler. His playing is too open, when it should be grooving, as on the gospel and march numbers, and too straight in the free improvisations, when his cymbal chatter is cold, removed from the interaction of Ayler and Cobbs, insisting on a meter that he wants to stretch but they would rather ignore.
Cobbs and Ayler have never sounded better together. The gospel feels groove hard, and their work is telepathic on the ballads, such as "Spiritual Reunion" and "Universal Message." Ayler's saxophone mastery is at its apex, as he plays in every register of the horn with incredibly flexible tone, articulation, beautiful melodic ideas, and solo structure. He still uses the hysteria he had developed on his 1965-66 recordings, but it takes its place alongside blues, tragic ballad, diatonic (march/hoedown), and Coltrane-like styles in his palette. Albert's achievement here is to unite the entire history of the saxophone, and make it serve his improvisational whim.
The real surprise of this concert is the performance of "Music is the Healing Force of the Universe." It is the only live recording of a vocal tune with lyrics and it is spectacular. Albert and Mary's interaction is so deep it is uncanny, as his horn answers each of her chanted lines sounding like a Islamic version of Delta blues. Hearing this piece makes one deeply regret that Call Cobbs did not play on the August 1969 sessions, since he gives this song a breathtakingly beautiful setting. More vocal pieces were recorded at the July 25 show, and this sample makes one long for their release (Hames 28) As Albert's final recording, it demonstrates what he had been hoping to achieve in collaboration with Mary Parks, and suggests, of course, the incredible potential of his music that was never realized.