Holy ghost music. The real deal. The sound of four men tearing a hole in the fabric of what jazz was supposed to be and letting something else pour through - something ancient and raw and utterly new. In their short time together, Albert Ayler and Don Cherry created a body of music that genuinely exists in the moment. Oblivious to rules and aesthetic boundaries, they played what they felt on their nerve-ends, embracing mistakes and wrong turns as part of the experience of making art in the moment. Now over sixty years old, these recordings breathe as strongly and sound as vividly as they did when they were made.
Fall 1964. Ayler had just recorded Spiritual Unity back in New York - the album that would become the Rosetta Stone of free jazz. Now he's in Europe with his trio: Gary Peacock on double bass, Sunny Murray on drums. They join Cherry, already on European soil, and together this quartet tears through Copenhagen and the Netherlands like men possessed.
The trip was the usual kind of adventure for fearless mavericks like them: no food, no bucks, a light luggage made of a white shirt and a shoeshine brush, a heavy load of hopes to play as much as they can. Poet Ted Joans was there at the Jazzhus Montmartre. His description has become part of the myth: "Their sound was so different, so unique and raw. Some Danish answered with bad whistling, others screamed to the musicians to shut up. I sat shocked, intoxicated and surprised to what I experienced. Their music didn't sound like anything I've heard before."
Asked by Danish journalists about their music, the musicians said little. For Ayler: "My music is spiritual music." Gary Peacock provided the ultimate, unsurpassed claim: "This isn't music for a specific purpose, for instance to listen or dance to. It just IS."
This 4xLP box set contains four sets of recordings from that incandescent autumn - live sets at Copenhagen's Jazzhus Montmartre and a VARA Radio session in the Netherlands. The audio has been remastered and compiled together for the first time on vinyl. "Ghosts," "Spirits," "Vibrations," "Holy Spirit," "Saints," "Children," "Mothers" - Ayler's timeless themes that he reinvented nightly, daily, moment by moment. Plus Cherry's beautiful "Infant Happiness" - the icing on an already transcendent cake.
Cherry - who had already revolutionized jazz alongside Ornette Coleman - sounds different here. Rawer. More exposed. His cornet weaves around Ayler's tenor like two birds in flight, neither leading, neither following. Peacock's bass tones are dark and deep, anchoring the chaos without constraining it. Murray - one of the true pioneers of free drumming - doesn't keep time so much as explode it from within.
Anthony Braxton said it best: "When I first heard the music of Albert Ayler, I found myself thinking 'hubba-hubba-mac-hubba!' His music went straight through my heart. Albert Ayler's music confirmed that the sixth restructural cycle of American creative music had moved into a sound mass evolution."
These are not collector's fetishes. These are fresh documents of a music mind working, day by day. A short life adds value to every moment and every creative act - and Ayler's life would be tragically short, his body found floating in New York's East River in 1970, just six years after these recordings were made. Everything here carries that weight, that urgency, that need to get it down NOW because tomorrow is promised to no one.
The release includes a fold-out insert with extensive liner notes from Brian Morton.
