Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity
Featured Album
Call him a freedom fighter, a revolutionary, a firebrand, seeking the essence at the core of all music, not just jazz.
There will come a day when Albert Ayler's visage will become as prevalent and defiant an image as that of Che. Call him a freedom fighter, a revolutionary, a firebrand, seeking the essence at the core of all music, not just jazz. Through the '60s, Ayler's fervent breathing and circular huffing through the simplest of children songs and New Orleans marches revealed the ecstatic and cathartic beneath the song's surface, and he brought forth such energy so that each phrase flared like a comet through the cosmos. His fellow spacemen, drummer Sunny Murray and bassist Gary Peacock, provided a foundation that both tethered Ayler's mungo vibrato and launched him further into the stratosphere. On "Spirits" and the two versions of "Ghosts," such ethereal entities can be felt coursing through Ayler's music.
