Swedish Director Kasper Collin’s film follows Aylers from his early college and Army days, to his trips to Europe, periods of absolute poverty and hunger, ESP, John Coltrane, Impulse!, the troubles with his trumpet-playing brother Donald and the band and his last girlfriend, singer and manager, Mary Parks.

Full of classic quotes and moments, it features band members Sunny Murray, Gary Peacock, Donald Ayler and (by telephone only) Mary Parks and takes us through from his first album recorded in Sweden to his untimely death in New York’s East River in 1970. Ultimately, it is a very sad film as it finishes as it starts with Ayler’s dad looking for his son’s gravestone in a cemetery. But more than that, it’s Albert’s (stubborn) self belief this his music will be popular one day that is so sad as he didn’t get to see his prophecy fulfilled.

He says in the film, “I am a prophet” in his sixties hip speak as he truly believed in the “new blues” of free jazz. “People must listen to this music,” he said. Peacock says, “‘Trane loved him, but thought he was crazy”. Ayler played at Coltrane’s funeral at the end of the service playing ‘Truth Goes Marching In’ and ‘Love Cry’ (Ornette Coleman played at the start). While there’s no film of his performance here, from the stills of him playing in the church, you can almost sense that the congregation wasn’t feeling his playing. As someone says in the film, you can’t like just some of his playing; it’s either love or hate.

With his Army marching band training and R&B roots playing free-modal jazz, he was always going to be of the outer limits of jazz along with the likes of Sun Ra. As Steve Harris said in the introduction to the film, other significant jazz musicians at the time that were experimenting with ‘free’ jazz (like Coltrane, Coleman, Cecil Taylor) still had a base of song and rhythm; Ayler abandoned popular song in a convulsive beauty of pulse. So even if Ayler is one of the greatest sax players of the sixties (if not of all time), musicologists often overlook him. This film helps to redress the balance along with the 2004 release of the 9CD set Holy Ghost (rare and unissued recordings (1962-70) on Revenant Records.

There’s something for everyone in his playing from the spiritual to the rock’n’roll but my stand out track is ‘Thank God Created Woman’ with vocals by the Soul Singers, Mary Parks and Vivien Bostick. Albert’s playing is not the dominant feature here although it’s as raw and bold as ever. The lyrics get you:

“If it wasn’t for woman, we wouldn’t be here today,
You must watch that woman, no matter what you do,
If woman can give life, she surely can give death.
She can fly away on a broom, straight over the moon”

Mary Parks gets some bad press in the film as she was blamed for isolating Albert from his brother and the band. Mary Parks was the last person to see Albert alive (5th November) when he left his apartment, 20 days later he was found drowned. There are lots of rumours as to how he died but Parks denies that he was losing his mind staring at the sun (although he was mesmerised by the midnight sun when he was taken to see it in Sweden many years before).

It was a shame the documentary wasn’t followed with any extended live gig footage, like the Newport Jazz festival European tour with Donald (trumpet) and Michel Sampson (violin) in the band that we saw a bit of in the film or the psychedelic looking gig where they filmed “Thank God For Women”. Thankfully, fans like Marc Ribot keeps the spirit alive with his Spiritual Unity project (see the interview in Jazzwise this month) and while we will never know how he did die; his music will always be alive.

As well as Peterson being a fan of Impulse! (see Pure Fire!, he often started his show with the title track ‘Music Is The Healing Force Of The Universe’ which is a most fitting epitaph; but if not, Sunny Murray says late on in the film as he starts to cry, “Albert played it with love.”

Albert Ayler (13.7.36 - 23.11.70) RIP

Note: The London Jazz Festival showing will be only the fifth time the film has been shown in the UK so far (previously London, Glasgow, Leeds, Poole) but there will be an extended run of screenings at the ICA early next year.

Also as soon as I’d written Rufus Harley (1936 — 2006), I was reminded that the most missed of all original freestyles, Albert Ayler had also dabbled with the pipes (see ‘Masonic Inborn’ on the classic album Music Is The Healing Force Of The Universe).

My Name is Albert Ayler — (Dir. Kasper Collin, 2005)

Links:
The Official film site www.mynameisalbertayler.com
www.myspace.com/albertayler
www.ayler.org
London Jazz Festival 2006, Saturday 11 November 2006, 2:00 pm, RFH Purcell Room
“Kasper Collin’s documentary film about saxophonist and iconoclast Albert Ayler,”
www.jazzwise.com November 2006 “Spirit Of Ayler”
Albert Ayler — Holy Ghost (Revenant Records) “Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son, I was the holy ghost” www.revenantrecords.com
Poole Lighthouse — Friday 10 November 8pm £5/£3 ‘My Name is Albert Ayler’ — FILM (dir. Kasper Collins) — EXCLUSIVE showing outside London “One of the most starkly beautiful and moving documentaries ever made about a jazz musician” Thomas Conrad, Jazz Times USA followed by free LIVE performance featuring: TORQUE (Geoff Hearn — saxophones, Steve Harris — drums, Jim Black- guitar): Unsafe2 — The second Safehouse festival of improvised and experimental music.