| | The first time I met Albert Ayler was when we were both listening to music of some sort at Club Nalen in Stockholm in 1962, and with a not very harmonious attitude to what we were hearing.
I didn’t know him at all, but he was very interested in music and appeared in the audience almost everywhere that music was being played after I’d seen him that first time.
And we chanced to make a few remarks, which made it clear that at least we two had the same opinion of the band that was playing in the jam session at Nalen then.
He told me later that he’d tried to take part but he’d been thrown out.
Some time passed then and the Golden Circle got started. By a few weeks after the opening, I had established excellent relations with Bengt “Frippe” Nordström and we were always sitting at the same table. We saw each other on our free time too and he told me that he had had an incredible experience. He was quite dizzy and hardly knew how to describe a new phenomenon, a tenorist he’d heard who was quite remarkable and amazingly different from almost everything else. Frippe was quite lyrical, almost to an extent of having difficulties in trying to make people listen because he made it sound like it was merely some kind of fantasy. Because this new tenorist had revelations to offer that history had no record of. Suddenly it wasn’t about either Coltrane or Ornette Coleman, but it was this new tenorist who occupied his whole thinking and attention.
There was a certain interest for this new tenorist he had heard, because everybody knew Frippe as an original loner. Frippe has something in his way of listening that makes him very quick and prone to notice details that others perhaps miss. Evidently he has a special capacity for that which is out of the ordinary because he has often been right in his judgement long before everybody else; correct about what would become new and valuable, and also lasting as well.
He attracted caustic comments and jealousy, of course, and derogatory comments about his person and that kind of shit, but he took it all very lightly. He started to carry his saxophone around with him more and more all the same reported that he’d played together with this tenorist because it had been such an inspiration to do so.
And then the moment arrived when, with his instrument, this tenorist appeared at the Golden Circle and it turned out to be the same guy I had met and got into conversation with at Club Nalen.
That had in fact been Albert Ayler and I hadn’t even known his name from Frippe’s description when he spoke to me about Ayler. I didn’t know that he was the guy in the fine grebe leather suit with that white streak in his beard who I’d bumped into at Nalen and who was so humble, and dragged with what had been going on onstage at that time.
But then he started to unpack his saxophone to take part one evening when Gunnar “Silja-Bloo” Nilsson was playing and when Sune Spångberg was supposed to be the drummer, although Sune hadn’t shown up yet and somebody else was playing Sune’s drums.
Well, Frippe had persuaded Albert that he absolutely had to bring his saxophone to the Golden Circle and had, furthermore, to sit in there. You see, Frippe was a great admirer of Sune Spångberg’s so-called integrity playing and, apart from that, he got a lot out of Gunnar “Silja-Bloo” Nilsson’s clarinet playing and singing. So Frippe thought that this was probably the right occasion.
Well. Ayler unpacked his sax and gave me my first impression of where he stood musically. And it has to be said that there is probably a lack of words in the terminology to be able to express something that is closely related with the word shock that describes what was permeating through the club. And I have to say it straight, that with the references one had then, and I had been able to listen my way through jazz history by then and assimilated the experiences from ….. yes, you can say the Ornette Coleman’s endeavours were the latest fashion and also Coltrane had been here the previous autumn with Dolphy, and all that one had assimilated and enjoyed. There were also American recordings with Cecil Taylor as far as he had taken it then, and that felt new and fresh. But this with Ayler was exactly what Frippe had described. It was precisely so that you had to be present, to be placed in front of, be confronted with, and try to realize that it was something totally strange, without earlier references, because of his presence.
Firstly, he appeared visually as no one else had done earlier. Some people complained about his way of dressing. But first of all he had a character to his movement, which seemed choreographed. He moved very intensely, not in Dexter Gordon’s tramping, somewhat unsteady way. Ayler he more or less shot out of his saxophone. Not only sideways like this famous Lester young position, but he would turn it upwards and at the same time, I’m not going to say he twisted and turned, fawning and bowing, that would be nasty. But he saw to it that the sound roared out in all directions, from the acoustic apertures outlets of the saxophone as well as from the sides and the bell itself, and the mouthpiece too. I asked him about it and hand that was one of his aims. Because with the microphone, you just stand there and let out a sound stream in a very concentrated way, but he wanted everybody to be reached by the substance and body of the sound. It could be described as such. There was nothing really that identifiable.
Of course, he played on the harmonic sequences, common identifiable tunes and so on, and even Ornette Coleman had themes that he used as starting points. Also Rollins, Dolphy and Coltrane were bound to tunes and melodies an the traditional sense. But Ayler, as it was experienced then, did not give any consideration at all to that. But his sound, it was regarded as a raw blast coming from nothingness via the primeval backwoods and forests. And that has to do with that people simply became so shocked by his physical tone, the actual sound intensity he used, that is. If you were to transport yourself to that time, without today’s perspective of the development of various saxophone sounds and the experiences of various performers, these would have simply become side-effects, side-effects within the music. And I think it can be correct to describe it that way, because whatever is new, even if you go back to history, is formed in this way.
This was the first time and it certainly was a sound level that was unimaginable. I had for instance heard when Coltrane and Dolphy were practicing behind the stage at the House of Concert and been impressed when Coltrane, sitting in an armchair, could achieve a sound intensity that I didn’t think was possible.
No, this was something above and beyond. It couldn’t be compared. He worked with all his falsetto register, pedal tones and dirty effects, as they said in those days. And at no time did he demonstrate any wish at all in the direction for …. they were in fact playing a standard tune when he came up on stage.
It continued like this for the reminder of the time and eventually he was alone on stage with Frippe hooting and shouting encouragement. And I was just simple-mindedly astounded and thought, “This is not the way it should be, because it’s actually a meeting of two totally systems. I’ve more or less got to give myself a bit of time to look more closely at what it’s about”.
Nobody was remotely prepared for that physical mass of sound which burrowed its way in physically, and consequently also mentally, without anybody being aware of it. rather like a snowplough forcing a way through and pushing everything in its way aside, including the personal prejudices one adopts when one listens to a lot of music.
This occasion was particularly criticised and many people who hadn’t even been there talked about what kind of a mess Ayler had made of it. I suppose it was some kind of ignominy to have been involved in it all. But that was the first time I was able to hear Ayler play and I’m only sorry that Sune Spångberg wasn’t there that night because he would have been able to have had this experienced at an earlier stage.
Then Ayler bumped into the same reactions elsewhere because he had acquired the taste. You’ll understand that the Golden Circle had achieved a high status and people went there to listen, so he wanted at least to make some mark that he’d been present.
As a total contrast to his instrumental sound, he was soft spoken and extremely convincing, very well versed and filled with a humble admiration for the history which had gone before him. It was necessary to have heard him to be in a position to know, or have any idea, about where he had his musical identity.
People shook their heads and claimed that he couldn’t play. That was most people’s opinions, even people who eventually adapted and more or less began to follow in his footsteps and pay homage to him.
Ayler worked with the cycle of fifths in another way, but he was received with contempt and demonstrations, verbal as well as written, and he was most likely called insane or crazy, or something like that.
Ayler didn’t refer to anything, absolutely not. The closest thing before him, I suppose, had probably been the Coltrane concerts. Certain sounds …. Coltrane was trying to split up tones then, so that he played two or three simultaneously.
Frippe knew it was high time to record Albert so he simply arranged that first recording immediately.
And then Frippe came up to my work one Tuesday morning a state of great excitement. Had brought Ayler with him then and Ayler had his saxophone. This was the first time Ayler visited me for any reason, but he was pushed into it by Frippe who wanted me to take a picture of Ayler for the front cover of the record he was going to make. This was a grey, rainy morning and I did have some negative film, I think it was 16 DIN, a very weak colour film. And I brought a flash to help because it was such a grey, rainy day. So, we had to do it outdoors, there was no studio available.
We went out until we found a rather open area and there we went up the hill a bit and Frippe almost with main force pushed Albert into that hedge, where he is standing in the photo. I asked Frippe to hold the flash and direct it from the side so I could have a little additional light, or it wouldn’t have come out at all. And then I took some black & white pictures that were reasonably acceptable.
The sleeve seemed to turn out all right anyhow because even the Japanese have bought it, you know, and even kept that lousy sleeve. I certainly would have liked to have it in a different kind of way. And Frippe behaved especially generously towards me, because I got as much credit as he himself. He’s indicated as the producer and me, Nils Edström, as the photographer on the sleeve. And that was very flattering and a great honour in that special connection. Not least in a historical perspective …
Ayler came to my working place many times and once by peculiar chance he started to show me things with the tenor saxophone, how Charlie Parker, to simplify it a bit, used two different types of vibrato. You know, Parker had a rather remarkable vibrato that is different from most other saxophone players. I haven’t come across it anywhere else, but Ayler regarded himself a shaving cracked this method. And then he played solos that were directly as he had learned them, Parker solos, and how it appeared in the register of the alto sax. And Albert Ayler could control his sound to perfection like that, but it wasn’t anything that in his intensive way he brought forth at the gigs. He played a lot of classic Parker solos from records. He went through a couple of breaks but he started with …. I don’t know why he did it, but to show how Parker used two different vibratos. And I’m no saxophone player and I stood there questioningly. I could hear what he was doing, of course, and I got quite a new insight into how incredibly competent he was.
The next evening he came over he had brought some literature. I think it was called “The Method of Classical Saxophone”. And that was a piece of literature that had an impressionistic section. Insofar as Debussy’s “Saxophone Rhapsody” was notated, and there I think there were a couple of other French composers too. Followers to what they call classical impressionists and who expressed some resistance in their time. But then he is standing there singing and says that this is written for alto, so “I have to sing it so that I know it first before I transcribe it. Because I’m actually not that good in singing straight off the sheet”. And then he gets going and plays that piece on tenor, and still he is simulating the alto saxophone in a low, or mellow way, when it came to volume.
He really had all that knowledge as well and there are people who don’t believe that.
Frippe took Albert to Simon Brehm’s office, the owner of the Karussell’s Konserbyrå, and asked to be let in because he wanted to talk to John Coltrane.
He pushes Coltrane into a corner and says, “Her you are” and gives him two LP records, his production of Albert Ayler. Albert is also there in another corner and Frippe points at Albert, saying, “It’s him that’s playing on the records” and Coltrane says, “Sure I’ll listen to it.”
This was really Coltrane’s first knowledge of Albert Ayler’s existence, and this was the seed that Frippe planted by giving him material to listen to. Which Coltrane did do too, because he has himself said in the literature when he heard Ayler for the first time on record.
Then I remember how happy Albert Ayler became when Cecil Taylor visited the Golden Circle in Stockholm. Every evening, Ayler was a constant visitor. And he and I were sitting at the same table and Cecil Taylor came over to us in the breaks. He was quite delighted with a couple of photo’s that I’d taken. One of them was where I’d gone behind the grand piano, and this showed a part of the audience where Bernt Rosengren was sitting and his mouth was simply one enormous grin.
And so Ayler did play there with Cecil Taylor in fact although I didn’t hear it. But Frippe has told me that there was an extra dimension when Ayler picked up his saxophone on that particular occasion and played with Jimmy Lyons, who was the regular saxophonist, and there was a quite extraordinary lift to it.
| |
