50 year anniversary edition of Albert Ayler’s peak ’68 salvo clashing nursery rhymes and militant marches with free jazz fire music - essential listening for jazz, noise and psych nuts alike
After setting new high water makes for free jazz beside Don Cherry with ‘Ghosts’ (1965) and unleashing ’Spirits’ in 1964, Albert Ayler cut his most accessible, yet still freaking wild, album with 1968’s ‘Love Cry’. Perhaps best known for its transformative 10 minute finale, ‘Universal Indians’ the album is an end-to-end ravishing and playful masterwork which compromised to some extent on his fire music style with a more concerted bend toward prevailing psychedelic currents.
Propelled by Milton Graves percussive dervish and Alan Silva’s knotted basslines, Albert’s tenor and alto sax scorch are completed by a final recorded performance with his brother, Donald, who would depart the band for Cleveland in following months. The 9-piece record remains a towering example of the gush of energies that converged/diverged in wild style during the late ‘60s, prior to jazz’s fusion era, in step with the freedoms hard won by the civil rights movement and the emergence of new age consciousness that went hand in hand with psychedelia and associated drugs.
The fury of previous Ayler records is exchanged for wild optimism that draws from all corners, riddling popular nursery rhyme melodies and boisterous marches with Afro-Latin grooves and speaking-in-tongues vocals with an acidic flair and vibrancy that must have sounded wild upon original release, and arguably still stokes fires of the imagination with numbers such as the organ-spangled, Ra-esque ‘Zion Hill’ or gyring projections of ‘Love Flower’, not to mention that astonishing closer.
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180-gram reissue.
50 year anniversary edition of Albert Ayler’s peak ’68 salvo clashing nursery rhymes and militant marches with free jazz fire music - essential listening for jazz, noise and psych nuts alike
After setting new high water makes for free jazz beside Don Cherry with ‘Ghosts’ (1965) and unleashing ’Spirits’ in 1964, Albert Ayler cut his most accessible, yet still freaking wild, album with 1968’s ‘Love Cry’. Perhaps best known for its transformative 10 minute finale, ‘Universal Indians’ the album is an end-to-end ravishing and playful masterwork which compromised to some extent on his fire music style with a more concerted bend toward prevailing psychedelic currents.
Propelled by Milton Graves percussive dervish and Alan Silva’s knotted basslines, Albert’s tenor and alto sax scorch are completed by a final recorded performance with his brother, Donald, who would depart the band for Cleveland in following months. The 9-piece record remains a towering example of the gush of energies that converged/diverged in wild style during the late ‘60s, prior to jazz’s fusion era, in step with the freedoms hard won by the civil rights movement and the emergence of new age consciousness that went hand in hand with psychedelia and associated drugs.
The fury of previous Ayler records is exchanged for wild optimism that draws from all corners, riddling popular nursery rhyme melodies and boisterous marches with Afro-Latin grooves and speaking-in-tongues vocals with an acidic flair and vibrancy that must have sounded wild upon original release, and arguably still stokes fires of the imagination with numbers such as the organ-spangled, Ra-esque ‘Zion Hill’ or gyring projections of ‘Love Flower’, not to mention that astonishing closer.