It’s OK if you’ve never heard of Albert Ayler, one of the most controversial, ground-breaking, jazz innovators of all time. I mean, after all, we’re the home of rock and roll, not jazz.
Despite his short lifespan, Albert Ayler (1936–70) had a major hand in the changing jazz landscape in the early 1960s. Born into a middle-class and deeply religious Shaker Heights family, Albert’s musician father Edward introduced him and his younger brother Donald to the saxophone. Early on, Albert demonstrated prodigious talent, and so his father enrolled him at the Cleveland Academy of Music when Albert was 10.
According to “Magnet” magazine, the young Ayler indulged a “voracious musical appetite,” sneaking into jazz clubs around Cleveland. While in high school at John Adams, Ayler came to the attention of “Little” Walter Jacobs, a harmonica legend in Muddy Waters’ band. They toured together for two summers. After graduating from high school in 1954, Ayler set out from Cleveland, spreading his talent to many corners in the U.S.
“Spirituals, rhythm and blues, jazz, and military brass band music were all elements in Ayler’s eventual distinctive style, and they came together at a time when jazz was changing due to the ‘free jazz’ experiments of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane.” 1 In many respects, Ayler’s musical stylings mirrored the changing social and political landscape during the 1960s often expressing a newfound sense of freedom, expression, and spirituality.
At the time, the response to Ayler’s new style was, in many ways, an early manifestation of the cultural wars between the more traditional perspectives of jazz and the emerging, and often chaotic, Avant Garde musical expressions in the early 1960s. According to Pitchfork, for Ayler, “music was about tapping into universal vibrations that existed at a level outside of human consciousness, and he saw his art as a way to access something higher.
He never fit the mold of the cool, laconic New York jazz musician; his style was more open and more excitable. As the decade wore on, Ayler’s far-out musings would intersect with the mainstream in unusual ways, even as his music always existed well outside of it.” No wonder Dan Morgenstern of “DownBeat” magazine described Ayler’s music as “A Salvation Army band on LSD.”
Buried in Highland Park Cemetery after an untimely and mysterious (his body was found in the East River) death at the age of 34, Ayler is considered a musical revolutionary. Just as Cleveland is deservedly known as the home of rock and roll, it turns out it is also the home – or at least the early influences of – an incredibly distinctive jazz musician. A recently published book by Richard Koloda (M.A. in Musicology from Cleveland State University) entitled Holy Ghost: The Life and Death of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler, has been described by “All About Jazz” as “An engaging and long-overdue biography of one of jazz’s most divisive innovators.”
