Reprints from Materials

Pleased to finally be able to put back into print a number of out-of-print titles from Materials, among them a re-typeset and re-designed second printing of D.S. Marriott’s Duppies, previously published by Materials in 2017 and in a US edition with Commune the following year, and out of print for a few years now. I’ve wanted to put this back into circulation for some time, especially since the folding of Commune Editions also put the US edition out of print. (I’d also highly recommend D.S. Marriott's subsequent books of poetry, Before Whiteness from City Lights and the forthcoming Letters from the Black Ark from Omnidawn.) Here’s the cover (Clarence Major’s painting At the Turning Point opens up the book inside.)

The full list of books now back in print: 

D.S. Marriott, Duppies (2017)
Lisa Jay Jeschke, The Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women (2018)
Anne Boyer, Money City Sick as Fuck (2019)
Laurel Uziell, T (2020)
Tongo Eisen-Martin, Waiting Behind Tornados For Food (2020)
James Goodwin, Faux Ice (2022)
Candace Hill, Short Leash Kept On (2022)

You can find them all on the Materials website at the links above, or at the main page here: https://material-s.blogspot.com/

~~~

Also:

On newly-available footage of Albert Ayler for The Wire: ‘Eye and Ear Control’.

On Will Rowe for English Studies in Latin America: ‘No More Burial Remedies’.

N.H. Pritchard, Albert Ayler...

An essay I began a few years ago on N.H. Pritchard, II, is out now in African American Review, with thanks to Aileen Keenan and Nathan L. Grant. Here’s the abstract:

In 1967, Wilmer Lucas wrote that N. H. Pritchard’s poems “decompose the reader by sight and sound.” This essay follows Lucas’s prompt in several ways. It examines Pritchard’s early poetry in the context of the New York art scene and the Umbra Poets Workshop, outlining his development of the concept of “transrealism” and the subsequent visual reorganization of his work, before focusing on the sonic dimensions of his poetry, and suggesting that his approach ultimately led him toward silence. The conclusion emphasizes Pritchard’s legacy in the work of new generations of experimental musicians and poets and its continuing relevance today.

And, since I drafted the essay, Pritchard’s previously-unpublished “exploded haiku” The Mundus, versions of which I discuss in a section of the essay, has come out as a book from Primary Information, edited by Paul Stephens. Here’s my blurb. 

Rumours of N.H. Pritchard’s long-lost poem, The Mundus began to surface a few years ago, summoning us to imagine the mystic, Black radical work to transform society. Pritchard’s was always a music of language, a chanting on the page, a sonic visualisation that troubles the edges of both poetry and music alike. He broke apart form at every level—word, letter, sentence, phrase—sounding out mutable mutating beauties and metamorphosing phonic propositions that resound into our present. It is a remarkable work by the standards of any time.

Meanwhile, over on the Jacket 2 website, Charles Bernstein has helpfully posted a funding letter Pritchard wrote in 1967, summarising the project, which expands, corrects and (hopefully) extends some of my guesses in the essay.

~~

Elsewhere...

A sequence published in the winter issue of Almost Island, with thanks to Mantra Mukim.

Reviews of the Donaueschinger Musiktage in the latest issues of The Wire (you can find also find a long versions in an earlier post on this blog) and the new Beam Splitter/Phil Minton album, along with a contribution to the magazine’s year-end reflections and charts. 

And stay tuned for reprints of out-of-print titles from Materials, which should be here in the next couple of weeks (hopefully before the year is out)...

~~

And finally…

A few days ago, astonishing new footage of Albert Ayler was uploaded by Jay Korber to his Youtube channel: one ten-minute piece from Munich and one full set from Berlin, both filmed on a 1966 European tour featuring the three-front line of the Ayler brothers and violinist Michael Samson. What’s perhaps most striking about these, given Ayler’s reputation, is the amount of time spent playing melodies. There are relatively few sections of the ‘free’ improvisations for which Ayler was infamous: instead, medley, melody, the ‘folk’ element of the music are more pronounced, not in the somewhat constrained pop forms into which Ayler’s music attempted to fit on New Grass, but as a continuous stream of cadential, decorated, ornamented, amplified, reiterated, singing declaration.

As Peter Niklaus Wilson notes in the recently-translated biography Spirits Rejoice: Albert Ayler and his Message, the Ayler band had been touring Europe as part of a package tour organised by impresario George Wein, what bassist Bill Folwell called the “B tour” to the star turns of Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Max Roach and Dave Brubeck. It was on this tour that what was for a time thought to be the only footage of Ayler was recorded at the London School of Economics for the BBC’s Jazz 625, tapes subsequently destroyed in a cull of old recordings (so does Britain value art). Samson recalls ecstatic response to the group’s music on some of the gigs from the tour, comparing their reception in the Netherlands and France to the Beatles, though this doesn’t seem to have applied to the West German gigs: the audience in the footage, respectable and be-suited, appear indifferent, if not hostile. Yet the music Ayler was making had been designed precisely to reach out, to create a collective experience whose call the audience seem on this occasion to have been unable to hear.

Wilson labels the period 1965 to 1968 as the transition from ‘free jazz’ to ‘universal music’, with melodic material less a “catapult theme” for improvisation than something which “take[s] on an unprecedented weight in the playing process - firstly, through their length (for they are now often relatively extended, multi-joint structures), secondly, through the chorus-like recurrence of thematic passages between the solos, thirdly, through the clear shortening of the improvisations”. Wilson sees this as “a populist quality Ayler consciously worked towards”—what Ayler described to Nat Hentoff in 1966 as “trying to get more form in the free form […] something […] that people can hum. […] I want to play songs like I used to sing when I was really small. Folk melodies that all the people would understand.”

Wilson also quotes Samson, who suggests that those melodies drew from Ayler’s past in the Baptist church, where communal participation through singing had a pride of place. Ayler’s extended songs were an attempt to create participation, ‘spiritual unity’ , to bridge a real or perceived gap with the audience in a collective experience (in the next stage in his music, he’d go further, adding words and singing himself, alongside musical-romantic partner Mary Maria Parks).

This was not an about-face, a betrayal of the abstract freedoms of Ghosts and Ayler’s earlier music—an accusation Ayler would face in response to the more overtly R&B-oriented New Grass—and nor does it invalidate or represent a progressive maturation from that earlier music. Rather, Ayler’s ‘free’ playing represents one dialectical outgrowth of the syncretic traditions of song his melodies reference: marching band music, church songs, the nursery rhymes or folk songs he’d heard as a child. The multiple overlapping lines of counterpoint or call and response concentrated to occur all at once, at the same time, in multiphonics and atonality, not so much tonality’s absence as its saturation, its density, all the keys at once. Likewise, the restatement of those formative elements, with the Ayler brothers playing counterpoint lines while Samson vigorously bows along in rough-toned obbligato, manifests an element that was latent in the free improvisations, just as those improvisations manifest an element that was latent in the kinds of melodies on which Ayler drew. As Wilson notes, Ayler is not improvising less than in the more abstract earlier phase, where those improvisations were clearly separated from brief opening melodies. Rather, his various decorative figures offer a nearly-continuous micro-improvised commentary on the melodic figures that, in more conventional jazz frames, would be understood as the ‘heads’ preceding the main business—the virtuosic improvised solo.

Noise is an extension of melody; melody contains within itself the sound of noise.

In his contemporaneous reception by the French press, Ayler was often positioned as either a kind of racialized musical primitive or a dadaist in the anarchic vein of European avant-gardists: either atavist revenant or European modernist, the actual, dialectic quality of his music was often not fully grasped. (Greg Pierrot gave a good paper on this at the International Surrealism conference in Paris last month.) This was, though, the changing same, the radical tradition: continuity and rupture, old-time religion and present-day revolution (spiritual, musical, or otherwise), the tiger’s leap into the past. So, while I refer to ‘folk’ qualities of this music—a term Ayler himself used—‘folk’ here, I think, stands as much for vernacular traditions outside or to the side of the developing pop vocabularies of the culture industry, enmeshed as those were with Cold War economic developments. It does so, not in the sense of the revivalism of the US folk movement, or indeed the European folk songs on which Ayler drew, for instance, for the melody of ‘Ghosts’, based as it is on the Swedish ‘Torparvisan (Little Farmer’s Song)’ (Gunde Johansson’s version is here), as a kind of musical romantic anti-capitalism. Rather, it’s shaped by the experience of modernity, as opposed to evoking a static, idealised image of a real or imagined past. It stands at once for particularity, for the personal memories of the songs first heard and sung that Ayler evokes in the Hentoff interview, that maternal transmission (recall W.E.B. Du Bois and his great-grandmother’s lullaby, his infant’s initiation into the sorrow songs), and for the collective dimension that—as Du Bois’ account of the sorrow songs reveals—those songs open onto. Like ‘jazz’ itself, it is syncretic, drawing in all the ear can hear: folk music not as backwater, tradition to the side, but as part of a relation to modernity, to the problems of the world, away from those labels that would limit, ‘folk’ as much as ‘jazz’. As Wilson writes: “From baroque to country music to the European avant-garde: in the abundance of these allusions Ayler’s music [of this period] really transcends every jazz idiom, no matter how broadly conceived, and makes one understand why Ayler shied away from the jazz label at the time, preferring to speak of the vision of a ‘universal music’”.

‘Ghosts’, said Don Cherry, “should become mankind’s National Anthem!” Nation within a nation, nation without a nation, internationale, outernationale. Spirits rejoice.

(Peter Niklaus Wilson’s book is available through wolke verlag, joining their impressive cast of recent titles including a first English-language publication of materials relating to the singer William Pearson, Timo Müller’s German-language biography of Anthony Braxton, Phil Freeman’s Cecil Taylor biography, the anthology Composing While Black…)

Vibes & Time: The Elasticity of Bobby Hutcherson, &c.

Above: Walt Dickerson erasing the drivenness of be-bop, its relentless forward momentum, slowing things down to a floating meditation in which it can seem that every note is surrounded by a wavering, blurred, vibrato’d halo, haze round streetlamp, fogg’d, exquisitely taking its time & erasing time as it goes, so that, rather than remaining within the compact confines of a tune, with its set order & order within the overall set of album or gig, the playing hangs loose, occasionally bursting into plosive, explosive runs, but more often than not just hanging there, tracing the permutations of a simple phrase, as if whispering it diminuendo to oneself alone, sometimes barely audible over the whispered, tremulous harmonics of Richard Davis’ absolutely exquisite arco bass playing. The result is far from merely ambient wash – rhythmic pull & release, ebb & flow is always in evidence; this is serious & inventive playing indeed, but is not jazz in the speed-freak boppery sense. That’s not to say that Dickerson can’t fly up & down those mallets with the best of them, that he can, in the words of John Fordham, “improvise such fast melodies that his mallets seem barely to be making contact” – indeed, there are some scintillatingly fast runs on this very track – but the overall impression is nonetheless far from omni-directional drive, is something far more considered, spacious, even at higher tempi.

This results in part from Dickerson’s own judicious use of vibrato – taking us somewhere close to the “soft-lights glow” that Fordham sees him as rejecting (tho’ Clifford Allen’s paradoxical descriptor “warm-ice sheen” is perhaps more apt) – but also to the accompaniment of such superbly subtle drummers as Andrew Cyrille, who, on a recording like ‘Tell us Only the Beautiful Things', the logical extension to Dickerson’s earlier ‘To My Queen’, sometimes sounds as if he’s barely even there, or else in another room, the swish of his brushes or the tap of stick on stick merging with the hiss of room tone as a kind of gently rhythmic white noise over which Dickerson can stop-start rhapsodize in tandem with bassist Wilbur Ware, here melodic equal rather than mere sideman. Dickerson’s preferred contexts would seem to be in small groups, with players who are more interested in the changes in texture and temporal flow necessitated by improvisational contingency than in maintaining a constant bed to anchor solo playing: Bill Evans taken further out – much further out! – let’s say. Thus, rather than establishing clear sections for particular players to do their thang, there might be sections in which only Dickerson and Cyrille, or only Ware and Cyrille, or only Dickerson and Ware, or only Dickerson, are playing, yet the transitions are so subtle that they don’t really feel like transitions at all. Further, Dickerson has a trait of returning every so often to the initial theme, caught in the same stream as the improvisation; not in the way that Monk would improvise close to the melody over changes, nor as ensemble refreshment between individual solos, but as part of improvisatory thinking and overall mood. Faster passages might stop and return to rumination; or a sustained vibraphone swell might be followed by a breathless run of fast-struck notes; but again, these are not so much sharp contrasts, gestural or timbral blocks in the Albert Ayler manner, as extensions of and in time that evince a beautifully intuitive sense of form’s unfolding as the unforeseen.



The clip at the start of the post is one of a number of exquisite duets that Dickerson recorded with Richard Davis, something of a master of the form (recall the extended treatments of e.g. 'Come Sunday' with Eric Dolphy); & indeed, it's through both Davis & Dolphy that I want to make a connection, or, more accurately, comparison, to another vibes player, Bobby Hutcherson, who, with Davis & Tony Williams, formed one of the great rhythmic set-ups on Dolphy's 'Out to Lunch', ten or so years earlier. Perhaps it's an indication of changing sensibility that these collaborations are so different - certainly, the absence of a drummer affects things, the intimacy of the duo format versus the asymmetrical push of Dolphy's full-group compositions. But it's nonetheless instructive to compare Dickerson's free-float with Hutcherson's much more overtly percussive style.

For Hutcherson, the vibes are jagged edge, each note struck pinging out, the vibraphone's resonant afterglow only serving to round out the sharp attack of that sound still further: listen to the extended section towards the end of his solo on Jackie McLean’s ‘Action’, in which his temporal extensions and tightenings of one phrase move like a stretched and then relaxed elastic band over the steadier, tho' always driving & toe-jiggling momentum of Cecil McBee & Billy Higgins' bass-drum team. Charles Tolliver does something similar in his trumpet solo on the same tune, something about the pauses which might for a moment make you think he's lost his way, phrase out-blown but the smoother repetition which could naturally follow & draw applause in its smooth generation of 'excitement' as be-bop fluency mixed gutbucket edge REFUSED! instead for a repetition that sounds as if it's missed its cue and has to cram the phrase into the remaining time allocated by the changes played underneath with sudden burst of breath, askew & gasping burr. I guess Monk would be the temporal & off-centre phraseological model – tho' Monk's status as piano player often gave the impression that his solos consisted of the spare material that would usually make up another piano player's comping beneath a horn player's solo (while, conversely, his comping, with its clanging lower-register thump & thud, sometimes serves to distract attention from the soloist if they or you aren't careful). Certainly, Tolliver & Hutcherson would desire to fill up the total space more so (plus the tempo itself licks out at a generally higher rate than Monk himself had settled into by this point, with the Charlie Rouse group of his, anyhow).

Hutcherson's own comping, meanwhile, as perfected on Eric Dolphy’s ‘Out to Lunch’, has a kind of floating quality to it that piano players are less able to sustain, by virtue of their instrument's capacities – by this, I don't mean to contradict my earlier comments on his isolation of single notes, but rather to suggest that this kind of ‘floating’ or ‘hanging’ quality is like the suspension of a phrase that is suppressed or skipped, so that the sequence is always implied but never totally filled out: the interval between one phrase and another, either sustained by a silence or a reverberating after-glow of struck notes, is felt as tension, delay, break, rupture, a rupture that can't be entirely filled by bass & drums' maintenance of tempo throughout. (Here one might recall A.B. Spellman’s comments in the ‘Out to Lunch’ liner notes: “For one thing, [Hutcherson] avoids the tight pedalled, piano-like effect of long and lucid arpeggios that most vibists try for. His is a more ringing, chime sound. His chords, once struck, hang in the air.”)



That said, Tony Williams and Richard Davis, on ‘Out to Lunch’, are just as much about breaking things up in this way as is Hutcherson: Davis, insisting on muscling his way into the front row with odd harmonic extensions of the walking bass line, Williams, with his splash-crash-suspend attack, working on similar principles to Hutcherson. (This is also the case, for Williams, in his work with the Miles Davis quintet at this same mid-60s period, where, for example, the usual roles by which horns can break up & vary the temporal & harmonic line over a steady rhythm section backdrop are reversed, so that it is Williams who solos with rhythmic freedom over the steady, obsessive-repeated melodic iterations of Davis and Wayne Shorter – on ‘Black Comedy’ and ‘Nefertiti’ most notably. It's worth noting here that this was a period when Coltrane, tho' buoyed along by the much more steady, on-the beat clang of McCoy Tyner’s left-hand, was starting to blur the edges with the addition of extra percussionists, bassists, horns – even if, ultimately, the direction into which Coltrane would move, in the last phase of his career (the Sanders / Alice Coltrane / Garrison / Ali group) was much more an ecstatic continual thicket of texture, high-energy plateau rather than constantly broken-up, jagged momentum. Albert Ayler’s work proves a further contrast, in which the jagged nature of the music occurs not so much in the collective improvisations – which are experienced, again, as ecstatic thickets (Ayler’s own term) or blocks – but in the compositional or organisational contrast between the simple marching themes & the passages of wild & free atonality).

Returning to the trio of Hutcherson, Davis and Williams: their extension of be-bop's sharpness, its swift & exciting laying down of contour at a speed almost too fast to follow, is primarily a rhythmic extension, in which time itself becomes more elastic, but in which the play between that elasticity & the maintenance of generally consistent and swinging beat creates a constant frisson – the same too, true of the harmonic & timbral permutations of McLean's higher-register work (first deployed as far back as some of his late ’50s-work with Charles Mingus: check ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’). And of course this is not an attack on two fronts, separated into two categories marked 'temporal-rhythmic' & 'harmonic-timbral', because it is the combination of these two elements which gives this music its tense & tensile drive: check also the work of Sonny Rollins from, say, '63-'66, 'Sonny Meets Hawk' & 'East Broadway Rundown', as voice in broken monologue, as an actor forgetting lines, stumbling & stammering thru hesitancies, blank spaces - or, rather, as something much more calculatedly off-centre, the development of a melodic fragment or askew interpretation of a scale that runs deliberately counter to the changes being laid out competently underneath as the horn pursues a different path at a different pace.

{{Another horn to consider, by way of contrast: Archie Shepp, whose work at this point, most notably on ‘New Thing at Newport’, where his group consists of Hutcherson, Barre Phillips & Joe Chambers, provides a fairly steady, ominous set of atmospheres over which Shepp's tenor dives in & out, slurring & blaring with sudden, almost vulgar emphasis or soft-breathed amour straight outta Ben Webster & Coleman Hawkins: exemplified for me, at least, on 'Rufus'. The tone would remain, but the temporal attack would become much more regularized, once Shepp became, to all intents and purposes, a straightforward be-bop/blues heritage player at some point in the mid-to-late-’70s. The repeated & relentless ostinati of Grachan Moncur tunes on which Shepp often draws at this time do share territory with Moncur’s frequent collaborator McLean (or with, say, McLean's version of Tolliver’s ‘On the Nile’, which, on the Tolliver big band recordings (see below), is fast & punchy in a fairly straightforward manner, but on Mclean's sludges out (at least in the opening melodic exposition) at grinding clip-clop pace, drags you into its orbit as dark-toned procession, paradoxically that much more urgent for the slower tempo). Yet this happens several years after the fact, as it were (and several years, indeed, after Moncur himself had been a part of Shepp’s group), so that these tunes are now vehicles for 20 or 30 minute saxophone solos in which seemingly endless exposition of particular scalar patterns or licks replaces packed-in tension & uncertainty with declamatory pontification. (That’s not to say that said pontification doesn’t possess a certain sense of granite purposiveness which can, if you're in the right mood, act as a slow-burning kind of exhilaration. This is the 'hip' in 'Hipnosis', perhaps - i.e. check the 25-minute-plus version of McLean’s tune of that name on ‘A Sea of Faces’, in which that aforementioned relentlessness of repetition becomes both literal hypnosis, a kind of trance state of the sort Shepp explored thru the quasi-african drumming on 'The Magic of Juju' (tho' without the harmonic freedom provided by the keyboard-less, percussion-heavy set-up of that piece). & check also the mega-version of ‘New Africa’ on a 1977 bootleg recording from Alassio, Italy.)}}



Yet all this nonetheless has little of the jiggly nerve-fry that makes you feel really so urgently alive in the McLean-Hutcherson-Williams nexus of the woods. Wrapping these rather rambling notes up, one final comparison might be between the McLean band's take on a number of Tolliver's tunes - 'Right Now!', ‘On the Nile,’ ‘Jacknife’ – to Tolliver's own 1970s takes on them with his band Music Inc., where they're much more straightforward blowing vehicles, the compositional material (these are good, memorable tunes) actually overshadowing the sometimes rather by-rote soloing: well, e.g. on ‘Music Inc. & Big Band’, an album I love, the big-band riffs & so on that come in under the solo rather distract attention from whatever the front-line instrument (normally Tolliver's trumpet or Stanley Cowell's piano) is playing, the soloist sometimes seeming to fill a particular time & space that has been allotted within the format of the tune without that particular urgency or tension or sense of playing with he form that you get in the McLean records. This is not to say that Tolliver’s big band music is not intensely joyous & colourful & punchy, tho' its tone colours are a lot less adventurous than say, those of Gil Evans, or, indeed, the subtle & complex work of the great jazz composer-arrangers of the big band heyday (the effect, by contrast, is something like McCoy Tyner’s piano style translated in stark & unfussy fashion to a bevy of brass instruments, with occasional flutes for the rather rarer delicate moments; indeed, Tyner's own big-band record ‘Fly with the Wind’ is somewhat similar in effect). Certainly, tho’, in terms of form, it's much easier to coast along to in one's listening than McLean and Hutcherson’s constant engagement – or, for that matter, Dickerson’s more meandering elasticity, form as rumination and reverie as against form as inexorable repetition (Shepp) or form as something from which one departs and to which one returns in swift break-outs (McLean, Hutcherson et al)).

One Step Beyond: Complete List of Shows (Part One)

Over the last three years I presented the show 'One Step Beyond' on CUR1350, the Cambridge University student radio station. When I was starting out I tended to mix tracks by different artists, with no particularly rhyme or reason other than that I felt they were worth playing, but I soon started to use the 2-hour slot for a more in-depth focus on particular artists or genres or movements, mixing biography, music, analysis and (as time went on) polemic. The presentation is a little duff at times, though it gets smoother later on - which means that the rants get longer! In any case, there's quite a bit of rare stuff on here, mainly jazz and free jazz.

During the show's second year, I was joined by fellow student Noa Corcoran-Tadd, who also had his own solo shows, including a very interesting soundscape project called 'Seventy Loud Years', mixing music and spoken word (political speeches, film clips, etc) in an alternative history of the twentieth century. It was a nice surprise to find genuinely experimental stuff on student radio, which too often seems to be a training ground for the mediocrity of local radio, with all its Alan Partridge-esque trite awfulness, or the equally trite environs of BBC airtime fillers. It's a far cry from 'the finest emerging minds of the new generation', blah blah - a space for radicalism and experimentation and so on - it seems that's not the way things run anymore. It's also a far cry from the college radio scene in the U.S., where covering jazz and experimental musics has been part of the schedules for years, where playing something other than the latest chart pap/pop is regarded with respect rather than with bemusement or contempt. In any case, I stuck with it, and if the quality of the spoken word segments varies, the music stays good.

Individual shows are posted in two parts, as 128kbps MP3s: they're all posted on multiply (http://fatgut.multiply.com), which seems to be the best web-host for this sort of thing (i.e. it has the largest capacity and is the easiest to navigate), though it does require (free) registration before you can listen to and download the tracks. The chronological list of shows begins below (to be continued in subsequent posts). For me, the best 2007 shows were the Alice Coltrane and Andrew Hill tributes, the John Coltrane and Archie Shepp shows, the Jazz/Classical Music survey, and the brief history of Electronic Music.

FIRST YEAR: 2007

(1) BROADCAST DATE: 1st December 2006
SHOW TITLE: Pilot Show
SHOW DESCRIPTION: A one-hour try-out broadcast; my first time on air.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Gil Evans Orchestra, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, John Zorn, Sun Ra, Peter Brotzman
DOWNLOAD LINK: None: see explanation in description of next show

(2) BROADCAST DATE: 17th January 2007
SHOW TITLE: Alice Coltrane Tribute
SHOW DESCRIPTION: I think this is the first proper show I did (after a rather shaky pilot which I'm not going to post - despite the fact that it has a decent selection of tracks, the presentation is pretty awful!). Alice Coltrane had just died, so I decided to do a tribute programme, which included tracks from the albums 'Universal Consciousness', 'Journey in Satchidanda', 'Ptah the El Daoud', 'Lord of Lords', 'World Galaxy', & 'Cosmic Music'. The first MP3 is only half-an-hour, rather than an hour long, because I forgot to flick an on-air switch and so the programme introduction (and one track) was lost!
ARTISTS PLAYED: John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/73/One_Step_Beyond_1712007_-_Alice_Coltrane

(3) BROADCAST DATE: 31st January 2007
SHOW TITLE: Michael Brecker Tribute
SHOW DESCRIPTION: For the second show, I again paid tribute to a recently deceased musician: this time, someone else very much connected with John Coltrane (in terms of stylistic influence, if not direct contact) - saxophonist Michael Brecker. A hugely prolific recording artist, both as sideman and leader, I tried to encompass some of the range of his career: from Mel Lewis to Joni Mitchell and Funkadelic to Pat Metheny. Again, the first hour was cut short somewhat by me forgetting to press the 'on air' switch!
ARTISTS PLAYED: Brecker Brothers, Mel Lewis, Funkadelic, Joni Mitchell, Pat Metheny, Steps, Jaco Pastorius, Sarah Jane Cion, Michael Brecker
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/76/One_Step_Beyond_31-1-2007_-_Michael_Brecker

(4) BROADCAST DATE: 7th February 2007
SHOW TITLE: Misc
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Things from the easier side of jazz/soul.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Miles Davis, Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, Herbie Hancock, Eddie Palmieri, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Sam and Dave, Dudu Pukwana, Hugh Masekela, Gary Bartz, Jimmy Smith, Quincy Jones, Freddie Hubbard, Amon Tobin, Roy Ayers, Bobby Hutcherson, Medeski Martin and Wood.
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/79/One_Step_Beyond_7022007

(5) BROADCAST DATE: 14th February 2007
SHOW TITLE: Misc
SHOW DESCRIPTION: This show saw a focus on extended, high-energy tracks, with some rare and beautiful interludes. The music played included the frenetic free jazz of the Cecil Taylor group, in a rare recording with tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler; the big band splash of the Gil Evans orchestra; a rarely-played track from Wayne Shorter's experimental album 'Motto Grosso Feio'; a straightahead workout by Freddie Hubbard; a moody slab of Ellingtonia from Charles Mingus; a dark and exciting piece from the David S. Ware Quartet; and, to conclude, more free jazz, this time from Ayler's work as leader rather than sideman.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Cecil Taylor, Wayne Shorter, Bennie Maupin, Alice Coltrane, Gil Evans, Freddie Hubbard, Charles Mingus, David S. Ware, Albert Ayler
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/82/One_Step_Beyond_14022007

(6) BROADCAST DATE: 21st February 2007
SHOW TITLE: Misc
SHOW DESCRIPTION: A focus on music from the 60s and 70s in this show, leaning towards the avant-garde side of things but with plenty of room for the blues (in a rare Jimi Hendrix recording and a track from vocalist Leon Thomas) and some elegant-stripped down jazz, as Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy play Billy Strayhorn. Elsewhere, the Beatles’ only ever instrumental track, a bitesize chunk of Miles Davis’ Bitches’ Brew Sessions, some mighty thunder from Larry Young’s White House-levitating Love Cry Want, and, to end it all, a sizeable chunk of Keith Jarrett’s legendary ‘Koln Concert.’ (Incidentally, you'll have to wait about 3 minutes for the 1st track - I was late into the studio!)
ARTISTS PLAYED: Music Inc., Mal Waldron/Steve Lacy, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society, Brotherhood of Breath, Art Ensemble of Chicago (with Fontella Bass), The Beatles, Herbie Mann, Leon Thomas, Jimi Hendrix, Larry Young, Keith Jarrett
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/85/One_Step_Beyond_21022007

(7) BROADCAST DATE: 28th February 2007
SHOW TITLE: Misc (incl. Leroy Jenkins Tribute)
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Leroy Jenkins died of lung cancer the weekend before this programme went out, and the show opens with a brief tribute. Elsewhere, a mixture of different things, including a couple of tracks from David Murray, as well as different versions of the standard ‘My Foolish Heart’, from the Bill Evans trio and from John McLaughlin on solo guitar (in a performance that shows his debt to jazz guitarists like Tal Farlow, a side of him you don’t see too much of). Also, Wayne Shorter’s brilliant quartet, live at the Barbican Hall, and something from the world’s best-known jazz bag-pipe player!
ARTISTS PLAYED: The Revolutionary Ensemble, David Murray, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, John McLaughlin, Frank Zappa, Aphex Twin, Rufus Harley, Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter Quartet
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/88/One_Step_Beyond_28023007

(8) BROADCAST DATE: 7th March 2007
SHOW TITLE: Misc
SHOW DESCRIPTION: From what I can remember, this one had tracks from: the Mingus’ Big Band’s Latin take on Mingus’ compositions, ‘Que Viva Mingus!’, Danilo Perez’ album ‘Motherland’, a musical portrait of his native Panama, some solo violin and viola tracks from Leroy Jenkins, ‘Anthem of the Trinity’ from Terry Riley’s overdubbed solo keyboard album ‘Shri Camel’, part of Gavin Bryars’ ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’, a live 1980s track from Art Pepper, something from a Jean-Luc Ponty plays Zappa album, and a live Seamus Blake track. Shame I can’t find the MP3 of the show.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Mingus Big Band, Danilo Perez, Leroy Jenkins, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, Herbie Hancock, Art Pepper, Jean-Luc Ponty, Eric Dolphy, Seamus Blake, Keith Tippett
DOWNLOAD LINK: None: this one seems to have got lost in the archives.

(9) BROADCAST DATE: 25th April 2007
SHOW TITLE: Andrew Hill Tribute
SHOW DESCRIPTION: This show was a 2 hour tribute to pianist Andrew Hill, who had died just 5 days before. Music played is from the albums 'Point of Departure', 'Black Fire', 'Andrew!!', 'Compulsion!!!', 'Lift Every Voice', 'But Not Farewell' and 'A Beautiful Day.'
ARTISTS PLAYED: Andrew Hill
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/117/One_Step_Beyond_25-4-2007_-_Andrew_Hill

(10) BROADCAST DATE: 2nd May 2007
SHOW TITLE: Sonny Sharrock
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Two hours of guitarist Sonny Sharrock, prompting one person to call up the studio (in the midst of the Sharrock-feature 'Satan', from Byard Lancaster's 'It's Not Up to Us') and ask "what is this weird music?" I don't think he was amused. The programme covers Sharrock's career, from Herbie Mann to Don Cherry, Linda Sharrock, Last Exit and 'Ask the Ages.' "I go out on stage, and my intention is to make the first four rows bleed from their ears." Indeed.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Marzette Watts, Byard Lancaster, Pharaoh Sanders, Herbie Mann, Don Cherry, Linda Sharrock, Last Exit, Sonny Sharrock
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/120/One_Step_Beyond_02-05--2007_-_Sonny_Sharrock

(11) BROADCAST DATE: 9th May 2007
SHOW TITLE: Freedom of the City 2007
SHOW DESCRIPTION: One day at the 2007 Freedom of the City Festival, held at the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, London. Performances by the trio of Alan Wilkinson, Joe Williamson and Eddie Prevost (more in a free jazz mode); Unit (a Vietnamese-English rock group dipping their toe into free improv); and another trio - Matt Davis, Matt Milton and Bechir Saade (quiet, minimal electro-acoustic improvisation - 'the new London silence'). To fill out the programme, additional (studio) recordings by Milton and Saade.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Alan Wilkinson, Joe Williamson, Eddie Prevost, Unit, Matt Davis, Matt Milton, Bechir Saade
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/123/One_Step_Beyond_09-05-2007_-_Freedom_of_the_City_2007

(12) BROADCAST DATE: 16th May 2007
SHOW TITLE: John Coltrane (1965)
SHOW DESCRIPTION: A focus on what, for me, is perhaps the most crucial year in the musical life of John Coltrane - 1965. The year Malcolm X was killed, this was also the year when Coltrane really started to move over towards the free jazz that his conservative former fans so decried; the year that saw the break-up of the 'Classic Quartet' of Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garison and Elvin Jones, giving the music a tension that ensured, paradoxically, that these were some of the richest performances they ever gave; the year that saw Coltrane collaborating with avant-garde musicians such as Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali and Donald Rafael Garrett; and, most notably, the year that he recorded his most controversial album, the free-jazz big-band masterpiece 'Ascension'. The first hour of the programme sees one take of 'Ascension' played in full, followed by excerpts from other 1965 recordings in the second hour ('Om' and 'Live in Seattle'), and lengthy discussions of the motivations behind, and the implications of, Coltrane's music at this time.
ARTISTS PLAYED: John Coltrane
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/126/One_Step_Beyond_16-05-2007_-_John_Coltrane_1965

(13) BROADCAST DATE: 23rd May 2007
SHOW TITLE: Albert Ayler
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Classic Ayler material including 'Spiritual Unity' (what a record) and 'Live at Greenwich Village' (listen to Don and Albert launch off after half-solemn flamenco-tinged strains of melody) with a few traces of the less-classic later work ('New Grass'), and a stonking blues track from 'Music is the Healing Force of the Universe', featuring Bobby Few on piano and Canned Heat guitarist Henry Vestine.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Albert Ayler
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/129/One_Step_Beyond_23-05-2007_-_Albert_Ayler

(14) BROADCAST DATE: June 2007
SHOW TITLE: McCoy Tyner
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Two complete albums by the influential pianist most famous for playing in John Coltrane's 'Classic Quartet', made after Coltrane's death. The first is 'The Real McCoy', from 1967, released on Blue Note Records, the 2nd 'Sahara', from 1972, on Milestone Records. Also heard is a brief extract from 'Extensions' (1970, also Blue Note).
ARTISTS PLAYED: McCoy Tyner
DOWNLOAD LINK: None: somehow this show got lost in the archives.

(15) BROADCAST DATE: 7th October 2007.
SHOW TITLE: New Releases/ Tributes
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Music from recent jazz releases & re-issues, including 'River: The Joni Letters' by Herbie Hancock, 'Night of the Purple Moon' by Sun Ra, and 'The Hilversum Session' by Albert Ayler. The 2nd hour of the programme features tributes to alto saxophonist Mike Osborne and free improvising trombonist Paul Rutherford.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Albert Ayler, Herbie Hancock, Sun Ra, Trio of Doom, Ric Collbeck (feat. Mike Osborne), Iskra 1903 (feat. Paul Rutherford)
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/1/One_Step_Beyond_1_-_7th_October_2007.

With Noa Corcoran-Tadd

(16) BROADCAST DATE: 14th October 2007
SHOW TITLE: Misc
SHOW DESCRIPTION: An eclectic selection of tracks, with some loose underlying themes guiding the listener through, as they journey from Japanese nu-jazz to 1970s space-fusion to the Kronos Quartet's encounter with world music to new releases from Evan Parker and Terence Blanchard.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Soil and ‘Pimp’ sessions, Quasimode, Sleepwalker, DJ Spooky, Julian Priester Pepo Mtoto, Don Cherry, Collin Wallcott, Kronos Quartet, Dewey Redman, Evan Parker/Matthew Shipp, Terence Blanchard
DOWNLOAD LINK:
http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/4/One_Step_Beyond_2_-_14102007.

(17) BROADCAST DATE: 21st October 2007
SHOW TITLE: Archie Shepp
SHOW DESCRIPTION: A look through the career of fiery free jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp, whose music has always been poised between tradition and innovation, the old and the modern, the challenging and the accessible, and draws on a diverse range of influences and idioms, from African music to free jazz, funk, soul, and the blues.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Cecil Taylor, New York Contemporary Five, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/7/One_Step_Beyond_3_-_21st_October_2007.

(18) BROADCAST DATE: 28th October 2007
SHOW TITLE: ‘Jazz’ Guitar
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Another eclectic selection of tracks, this time centred around the idea of jazz guitar, while acknowledging the fact that it is pretty hard to define what 'jazz guitar' actually is! From the jazz-rock fusion side of things to the more blues-based approach of James Blood Ulmer to the 'post-modern' approach of Bill Frissell, what all these artists share is a sense of adventure and innovation, and a refusal to be boxed in by generic conventions.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Jimi Hendrix/Larry Young, Tony Williams’ Lifetime, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Carlos Santana/John McLaughlin, Jaco Pastorius, Music Revelation Ensemble, James Blood Ulmer, Jeff Beck/ Jan Hammer Group, John Zorn & Naked City, Cuong Vu
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/10/One_Step_Beyond_4_-_28th_October_2007.

(19) BROADCAST DATE: 4th November 2007
SHOW TITLE: Jazz/Classical Music (Part 1)
SHOW DESCRIPTION: The first of two programmes looking at attempts, from musicians and composers working in both genres, to fuse jazz and classical music. Today's show features works by classical composers who incorporated jazz elements into their music: Milhaud, Gerswhin, Antheil, Stravinsky, and Leonard Bernstein. And we finish with pieces by jazz composers: Duke Ellington, and the 'Third Stream' compositions of John Lewis and Charles Mingus.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Jacques Loussier Trio, Darius Milhaud, George Gershwin, George Antheil, Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, John Lewis/MJQ, Charles Mingus
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/13/One_Step_Beyond_5_-_4th_November_2007.

(20) BROADCAST DATE: 11th November 2007
SHOW TITLE: Jazz/Classical Music (Part 2)
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Following last week's look at classical composers' attempts to incorporate jazz elements into their works, and similar experiments from the jazz side with the 1950s 'Third Stream' movement, this show will focus on encounters between the two genres in a more avant-garde context in the second half of the 20th century. Artists include AMM, Anthony Braxton and Ornette Coleman.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Krzystof Penderecki, Alfred Schnittke, Jimmy Giuffre, AMM, Anthony Braxton
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/19/One_Step_Beyond_6_-_11th_November_2007

(21) BROADCAST DATE: 18th November 2007
SHOW TITLE: Electronic Music: From Stockhausen to Squarepusher
SHOW DESCRIPTION: A look at electronic music, from the early experiments of avant-garde classical composers, to 1960s, 70s, and 80s rock, pop, and ambient, and finally the 'I.D.M' of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. Lots of fascinating oddities and some pretty compelling stuff along the way.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Clara Rockmore, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaffer, Edgard Varese, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Louis and Bebe Barron, Raymond Scott, The Beatles, Frank Zappa, Kraftwerk, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/22/One_Step_Beyond_7_-_18th_November_2007.

The following two shows were presented solo by Noa Corcoran-Tadd

(22) BROADCAST DATE: 25th November 2007
SHOW TITLE: Fragmentation: Jazz in the ‘90s
SHOW DESCRIPTION: A consideration of the musical area in between the emerging canons of the 70s and 80s and the releases of today. Rather than attempting to establish a new canon, this week's programme considers the multiplicity of ways in which 'jazz' ideas have been approached.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Steve Coleman, Clusone 3, Masada, Uri Caine, Cassandra Wilson, Carla Bley, Squarepusher, Wayne Shorter/Herbie Hancock, St Germain, Ornette Coleman, Django Bates, Dave Douglas
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/25/One_Step_Beyond_8_-_25th_November_2007

(23) BROADCAST DATE: 2nd December 2007
SHOW TITLE: Solo
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Two hours devoted to soloists of differing persuasions – from the concentrated live improvisations of Evan Parker and Keith Jarrett to the complex compositions of Luciano Berio and Charles Dodge. Plus some leavening from bassists Pastorius and Weber and others.
ARTISTS PLAYED: Anthony Braxton, Jaco Pastorius, Charles Ives, Evan Parker, Cecil Taylor, Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charles Dodge, Eberhard Weber, Steve Reich
DOWNLOAD LINK: http://fatgut.multiply.com/music/item/30/One_Step_Beyond_9_-_2nd_December_2007

Donald Ayler and Burma

Donald Ayler has passed away.
He died of a heart attack on 24th October.

Best known for his appearances with brother Albert on some of his classic 1960s free jazz albums, he was fired from the band after an alcohol-related(?) breakdown; the emotional effects of this may in turn have contributed to Albert's suicide. He went on to record one album as a leader, a 3-LP set called 'In Florence', in 1981, and also did a session for Amiri Baraka's Jihad Label, which was never released.

His technique was never prodigious (reminiscent perhaps of Ornette Coleman's attempts at trumpet playing, at times), but he made an important colouristic contribution to Albert's work, and his mixture of a strange Spanish tone with blistering free-form freakout was oddly compelling.

By no means a major voice, but he was there, actively participating, when some of the great, unsurpassed music of the twentieth century was being created, and that's more than many can say.

You can find a description of his funeral here: http://www.ayler.org/albert/html/what_s_new.html
More details about the 1981 recording under his leadership here:
http://www.ayler.org/albert/html/donayler.html
A blog post which includes an MP3, 'The Bebop Tune', from that 3-LP set:
http://justforaday.blogspot.com/2006/02/ghosts-alive.html
And a message board thread touching on, among other issues, his breakdown and how it relates to Albert's death:
http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=36919&st=15&start=15

Remco Takken, in a review of Albert's 'Bells': "What the critics missed, was what Albert’s brother, Donald, was contributing to that record. Although it wasn’t the debut of trumpeter Donald Ayler- he made his first appearance on disc with Albert on The New Wave in Jazz earlier that year- Bells shows for the first time what Donald was capable of in terms of humoristic and spiritual musical communication.

Albert wanted a trumpet player in his expanding group. So by the end of 1964 Donald took up the trumpet studying nine hours a day for a few months. While being able to follow the breathtakingly sharp improvisations of his brother almost immediately, he never perfected the technique of his trumpetplaying than up to the degree that he needed to accompany Albert’s saxophone.

Donald contributed enthusiastic arranging in turn-of-the-century style, and a Louis Armstrong-era swing to Albert’s writing. The sixties statement that free jazz was in a way a recuperation of early Dixieland music, with all musicians soloing at the same time, is commonly associated with Ornette Coleman’s music. But the music of the Aylers is far more directly connected with New Orleans style jazz than Ornette’s abstract art music. What the Ayler brothers added to furious free soloing, were recognisable hymns and songs. True, those lovely little tunes were set up mainly to be completely deconstructed, and sometimes virtually raped…"



And has anyone else noticed the way that these guys have been forgotten?

...has anyone noticed the way the Burmese crisis just slipped out of the news once the censorship kicked in and no images could get out? Oh well, at least there's Pakistan now - some juicy images for people to look at so that they have something to focus their attention on. And the news teams can get some proper product-shifting in. (Since when has news become a product? And why?)

But just because it's slipped out of the mainstream headlines, and just because hte politicians aren't that bothered (well, I mean, can you imagine that the Americans care that much? I don't see the words "oil" and "Burma" banded around together much, do you?) - just because of this, doesn't mean we should just forget about it. In fact, it makes it doubly important that we keep updated - one way of doing so is this wikipedia entry on the crisis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Burmese_anti-government_protests

Oppression is just a fact of life for much of the world, or so it seems. But that does't mean we should accept it, or be complacent in its face.

Freedom in music and freedom in the world.

Albert Ayler - a sell-out?

ALBERT AYLER: MUSIC IS THE HEALING FORCE OF THE UNIVERSE
Impulse, 1969

Albert Ayler (tenor sax, bagpipes, vocals)
Mary Maria (Mary Parks) (vocals)
Bobby Few (piano)
Henry Vestine (guitar on ‘Drudgery’)
Bill Folwell (bass and Fender bass)
Stafford James (bass)
Muhammad Ali (drums)

Free jazz legend Ayler’s last record, apart from the posthumously released ‘Last Album’, which still awaits a re-issue. Along with ‘New Grass’, which saw him performing with backing singers and funk drumming, this saw him move into a more commercial (though still deeply weird) context, and many Ayler fans feel that he was selling out in order to reach a wider audience. Sure, in comparison to, say, ‘New York Eye and Ear Control’, this is practically easy listening, and it isn’t a particularly good record overall – unfocussed, a bit of an uneasy mix of styles, and with some truly embarrassing hippie lyrics from Ayler’s girlfriend/collaborator Mary Maria. But there are plus points – the title track, which sees Ayler’s playing of a yearning figure on tenor sax juxtaposed with Maria’s swelling vocals, is surprisingly effective, and the lyrics aren’t too bad either (though some may disagree – “music is the healing force of the universe. It calls all bad vibrations to fade…sometimes we are in need of spiritual renewal”). You can’t really call this free jazz, though Ayler’s tenor is a bit rougher sounding than on the version recorded in 1970 that came out on ‘Nuits de La Foundation Maeght, Vol. 1’, but it’s still got an utterly unique feel to it, and Ayler’s massive, soulful vibrato is immensely attractive whether he’s moving into the realms of pure sound or sticking to conventional melodic lines.

‘Masonic Inborn (Part 1)’ COULD be called free jazz, but it’s nowhere near as convincing as Ayler’s classic performances in this vein – for one thing, he chooses to play on bagpipes (overdubbed), and, like Ornette Coleman on violin or trumpet, doesn’t really seem to know how to PLAY the damn things! He’s not Rufus Harley, that’s for sure. That said, Bobby Few does get in some nice piano work, and the moment, about half-way through the track, when someone, or something starts making weird high-pitched sounds between a whistle and a vocal and a flute, is worth hearing just for the sheer weirdness of it all.

The remaining tracks (what was the second side of the record) are three more Maria songs and a blues jam to conclude. ‘A Man is a Like a Tree’ picks up the lyricism of the title track, but with a more serene feel to it. It’s pleasant enough, but the lyrics are pretty meaningless (“a man is like a tree. A tree is like a man. They both die and then are born again” – what?), and it’s fairly forgettable stuff, not like the best Ayler moments, where his playing seems to tap into something incredibly raw, and the emotion comes through his horn in such an extraordinarily direct way that it sends a shiver up your spine. The vocals on ‘Oh! Love of Life’ are actually by Ayler – he sings in a high-pitched, quavering voice which, to be honest, doesn’t sound very good, but the intensity he conveys is quite frightening – you can understand the sort of psychology that lead him to kill himself (if that’s what happened). A tormented individual, it seems, turning out something too eccentric and bizarre to reach the wider audience he was presumably seeking. ‘Island Harvest’ is pretty abysmal, to be honest – Maria puts on some embarrassing fake accent and sings some more meandering lyrics, while Ayler flits around behind her.

So far, it’s not looking too good, but the final track saves the record – called ‘Drudgery’, it harks back to Ayler’s earlier blues/R’n’B days, as he blasts away over some mean guitar from Canned Heat guitarist Henry Vestine: not the most obvious choice of collaborator, to be sure – did the label heads force that one on him, or was it his own decision? – but it works. Ayler seems to be enjoying getting right down into some gritty, earthy honking and blowing, as well as nodding to the free jazz elements with some marvellous high-register semi-screaming towards the end of his solo. Bobby Few’s piano work is excellent, Vestine is on top form, and overall it’s actually a really successful track. A tantalising taster perhaps, of what would have happened if there’d been an ‘Ayler plays the Blues’ album, which might have been a better idea than the mish-mash that this record turned out to be. Still, though my critical judgement tells me that I should discard this one (I only really LIKE two of the six tracks, and some of the others are just inept), there’s something about it that still appeals – perhaps just the sheer weirdness of it all. Not really a good introduction to Ayler, nor representative of his output, nor very successful – but an intriguing listen nonetheless.