Ghosts

I’ve been listening to a ton of free jazz recently, and having just read Amiri Baraka’s Black Music, I checked out Albert Ayler, about whom I’d heard for years. I was floored.

I knew that John Fahey was a fanatic, and thought I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Fahey’s music, I appreciate his taste enormously. Baraka pointed out that of all the free players, Ayler was the most grounded in the Black vernacular musical traditions, both spiritual and secular. You can certainly hear it in his playing, and given my own interests I’m kicking myself I didn’t get into his stuff 20 years ago or so when I first got into Ornette Coleman.

I’ve lived my whole life in a period of reaction, politically and economically. I was born in 1969, a few months after Nixon took office, to contextualize it. Free jazz has been all but written out of what we might call mainstream histories of 20th century music, much like Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and John Cage are more or less caricatured in the popular imagination, if they are imagined at all, as easily dismissed freaks. This is a sign of cultural reaction. What free jazz, more than any other form of which I know, did was put into sound the free, conscious relationships of people. I know of no more human music, human, as both Marx and the Buddha understood it.

What passes for avant-garde generally today is technological newness rather than social newness: new things rather than new relationships. We will not as musicians or as people find freedom in things, but in our relationships with each other. This implies no particular musical form. One can be free playing traditional tunes. What counts is the relationship of people to sound, and to each other.

Very obviously, my version of this is very different than Aylers, concretely. Hopefully, I capture some of his joy and freedom in my recording. I know that when I was mixing it I danced and clapped, which is the best result for which I could hope for myself and anyone else hearing it. When sound makes one spontaneously move, it’s the sound of freedom.

I write tunes, and write well I am confident, but doing so over the past 25 years has made it clear that a musician sells oneself short if one does not work through other people’s music. The best example is Billie Holiday, who made a career of interpretation as composition. A personal ideal of musical interpretation is Thelonious Monk, who, we find out from Prof. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, painstakingly dismantled and rebuilt the harmonic structures under the melodies of various jazz standards. In my case, I took only part of Ayler’s melody for the tune and repeated it, changing the song’s form as well as clarifying the underlying chord structure. I made it, in a nutshell, more conventional, but did so not by adding to Ayler but by distilling what was there already, implicitly.

The recording is short. I have become convinced that digital technology, beginning with the CD, encourages length thoughtlessly. It’s better to make things as short as possible to communicate the idea at hand. I’ve also used a 4-track cassette recorder, not out of nostalgia (though I’m enjoying using it for old times’ sake) but because I have been using a computer that doesn’t have digital recording software. The benefit to a 4-track is that it encourages one to use as few tracks as possible and to maximize what those tracks do, musically. Digital technology is great, and I’ll go back to it when I’m through with this phase–when I have about 40-45 minutes of music, an LP’s worth, of music I want to keep–but it encourages one to add tracks carelessly. Better to work well with fewer.