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October 1 2026

Coltrane at 100

Tangential mentions of Albert Ayler occur in various articles devoted to the centenary of the birth of John Coltrane (23rd September, 1926). The Free Jazz Collective has ‘John Coltrane 100: Exploring the Archives’ by Lee Rice Epstein which includes the following:

‘Offering has been alternately reviled and lauded, cited by some as a polished but unnecessary bootleg for completists only. But, if one just takes a step back and considers Offering happening the same season as Albert Ayler’s seminal European tour—with the quintet of Ayler, Donald Ayler, Michel Samson, Bill Folwell, and Beaver Harris—and if one wants to get really interested in sympathetic wavelengths, you hear Coltrane singing reportedly for the first time ever during “Leo” on November 11, 1966, while Ayler was recorded doing the same on a performance of Sanders’s “Japan” the previous night, November 10, 1966. That Ayler later screamed during his memorial performance for Coltrane would be too on the nose if someone manufactured it. The two shared both intellectual and spiritual bonds, a beautiful thing we’re scarcely able to know of or understand even partly.’

And The Brooklyn Rail has ‘Coltrane: The Final Years’ by Phil Freeman, which includes this:

‘Coltrane was also a strong champion of Albert Ayler, sharing bills with the younger man at the Village Vanguard, bringing him onstage to sit in with his quartet, and helping Thiele sign him to Impulse! after multiple albums for the ESP-Disk’ label. Ayler’s first Impulse! appearance was on The New Wave In Jazz, a 1965 compilation of live recordings from a Village Gate concert that also featured Coltrane’s and Shepp’s groups. That was followed by In Greenwich Village, a collection of recordings with two different bands. During the three years that separated Coltrane’s death and Ayler’s passing in 1970, he made four studio albums for Impulse!, on which he gradually (and sometimes awkwardly) transitioned from the raucous, old-time-religion free jazz with which he’d made his name to a more modern gospel- and R&B-infused style. Live recordings (not released by Impulse!) from the last few months of his life reveal that even at the end, he was breaking through into thrilling new realms; who knows where he might have ended up had he lived longer.’

Coltrane’s even coming back to Stoke. On Tuesday, 6th October, at the New Vic Theatre, “Gary Crosby and Denys Baptiste present John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’. Although I have to admit, I’m in two minds about this kind of stuff, having watched the Miles Davis centenary concert at the Proms this year, and found it wanting.

The miserable sod gives way

To Dirk Goedeking, who found the following to delight us:

- a shirt (reminding me of hathut's never released cover, accompanying their unfortunate Maeght negotiations.)

- a well known DVD. Kasper Collin's film in bad quality is still on sale in Argentina. Still no sign of ...

I can add a bit to that - ebay currently has the film’s poster for sale - for $150!

- another compilation, this one with "Summertime", caught my eye. The Pollock-style cover made me get out Ornette's "Free Jazz" again and listen.

Spiritual Jazz Volume IV - Americans In Europe (Modal, Esoteric And Progressive Jazz From The European Underground 1963-1979).

Leaves are falling, sadly the course "Free Jazz For The Fall" took place last year.

Another aside. September has been a very fraught month, but I have managed to do some work on the Ayler Timeline I want to add to the site before the end of the year. It’s based on the ‘Sightings’ chapter in the Holy Ghost book (used, for once, with permission) and, apart from a couple of updates, I haven’t changed anything from that source, except the use of the American ‘Fall’ for ‘Autumn’. Sorry, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I suspect it has something to do with having to memorise Keats’ ‘Ode to Autumn’ at school - ‘Ode to Fall’ would not make any sense:

‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun’

Didn’t have to look that up. Although I wonder whether, considering when I memorised it, the mention of ‘bosom’ made it stick in my memory.

Back to Dirk:

Much longer ago is “The October Revolution In Jazz”.

There’s a lot more information on wikipedia, but here’s the line-up. Notice the absence of Albert Ayler - according to my Timeline (oo get him), he was touring Scandinavia at the time with his quartet (featuring Don Cherry, Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray).

A last mention of the Timeline - the material from the Holy Ghost book is confined to Albert’s musical life, with details of concerts and gigs and bands, but I thought I should add the other stuff of life. I’ll leave out the obvious - I mean, a lot did happen between 1936 and 1970 - but I did think it worth mentioning as Richard Koloda did in his biography of Albert, that his first album, Something Different!!!!! was recorded on 25th October, 1962 - during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I also checked some of the places mentioned in Richard’s book and came across this story from 2022 about the fate of the Hawthorne Valley Country Club, where Albert caddied while he was at High School.

Jazzfestival Saalfelden: Unplugged Surround Sound in the Austrian Alps

A review of the Saalfelden Jazz Festival by Kevin le Gendre from 17th September, which includes the following:

"This is part of the 'Mountain Tracks' series of gigs that artistic director Mario Steidl astutely programmes in the beautiful woodland areas around the charming Austrian town of Saalfelden, though the majestic sight of the Alps is an inspiration to artists and audience when they are out in the open air. The Burgermusik and Eisenbahner Stadtkapelle brass bands playing Albert Ayler's 'Truth Is Marching In' through the streets is a fine way to kick off Austrian septet Shake Stew's storming alt-groove gig at the Stadtpark, a lovely green space that gives the large crowd room to dance."

ESP Booklet

Or, as ebay describes it: ‘Rare 1967 ESP-Disk Promo Catalog Booklet Free Jazz Sun Ra Albert Ayler Vintage’. The asking price is $330 and there are several photos of the item, which I was thinking of adding here, but I settled on the cover and a couple of pages.

Albert Ayler Flying Through The Sky

A track from Identifiable by Doug Yokoyama.

And finally . . .

Back to Dirk:

And for all those friends and relatives suffering near the loudspeakers here's

September 1 2026

Fire Music

The 2021 documentary about Free Jazz, directed by Tom Surgal, is now available on youtube.

The section about Albert Ayler starts at 55:15. The clip of Albert playing is taken from the Munich video. Thanks to Dirk Goedeking for letting me know about this. I’ve been looking round for it since it first came out.

Back to the Books

This was remiss of me, I mentioned a couple of books back in January, one of which was to be published in March, but I never returned to see how it was received. The other had been published but has now turned up on the Internet Archive. So, an update:

I Hear Freedom: The Great Migration, Free Jazz, and Black Power (Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future) by Cisco Bradley is published by Columbia University Press. The Introduction by Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn is available at Amazon along with extracts from the book, and here’s the Contents page (Albert Ayler gets a chapter):

The other book is Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop by J. Hoberman, which, when I mentioned it back in January, I thought it might be a bit light on Albert Ayler’s doings since there was so much else going on at the time, but he does get quite a few mentions, alongside LeRoi Jones, Michael Snow and the usual suspects. It’s now available at the Internet Archive.

And in the spirit of that bygone era, a couple of things from ClevelandMemory.org via Richard Koloda. First, a page from The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle (No. 6, August, 1967) containing an advert for ESP and an article suggesting that the flowers in the hippies’ hair were beginning to wither.

And second, a poem from 465: An anthology of Cleveland poets ed. D. A. Levy, (Cleveland: 7 Flowers Press, 1966).

Other Stuff

Mainly from Dirk:

A review of New Grass by Joseph Neff.

Two paintings: One by Dan Melchior. The other presented by "der_abschied"

A strange page on facebook. Dirk writes:

‘"The-Albert-Ayler-Tree" is a new facebook page. No entries so far, but might get interesting. In your "What's new " entry from March 2004, I learned that recordings were released under that name.’

I emailed Dirk to let him know about the ‘Ayler Tree’, which was a collection of unreleased Ayler recordings, privately circulated, which I seem to think led on to Revenant’s release of the Holy Ghost box set, since most of the recordings were contained there. Which doesn’t explain the facebook page.

A Calendar Page for Albert’s birthday:

This, we assume is a mock-up by PassionForTheBluesAndJazz using an Elliott Landy photo to mark Albert’s birthday in their July calendar, but Dirk wondered:

“Somehow unimportant, but besides shirts and shower curtains I can't remember an Ayler calendar, do you?”

Not exclusively, but he did get the January page in Pomegranate’s Classic Jazz Calendar of 2008.

"Live in New York City" by the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra was released on cassette in 2023. Overlooked, but found [click below].

Marshall Allen celebrated his 102nd birthday on stage.

Checking ebay I came across this item:

Lot 32 Orig 1960s Jazz Photo Slides Miles Davis Pharoah Sanders Albert Ayler NY

which had an asking price of $600. There seems to be only one photo of Albert Ayler - this one:

No indication of when or where it was taken.

Ebay still has that poster for the Karole Armitage ballet, “The Elizabethan Phrasing Of The Late Albert Ayler’ - which regular readers will know I can never pass up a chance to mention - but here’s a rather dismissive review by Marcia B. Siegel from April 6th, 1988 in the oxymoronically-titled Christian Science Monitor, And here’s a clip from the real thing.

There’s a new article about Marc Ribot by Mathew Ingate in the Far Out Magazine which includes the following:

‘He wasn’t doing what Eric Clapton did when he was ripping off BB King on all his terminally boring output, or what Jimmy Page did a little later when ripping off a whole load of bluesmen older than that. He wasn’t didn’t set out with a similar mission to Michael Bloomfield, in dedicating himself to honouring the guitar players that had gone before him, or doing what a lot of the other young punks who started out in the 1970s were doing in regurgitating all the old music of the 1950s, only with less skill and more reverb.

No, he had quite a different source of inspiration than a lot of his fellow travellers. In a 2022 conversation with Neil Kirk, Ribot revealed that he had found his sound in trying to play like the great masters of another instrument entirely.

“Actually, I’ve gotten most of my inspiration from saxophone players like John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy”, he said, “But Albert Ayler in particular. He was definitely an enraged punk rocker of the saxophone. More than that, he brought it to a religious intensity. What he was doing was common to the best rock show I’ve ever been at, in that, he was trying to create a ritual, an event right there for the people, a ritual that would bring them to create a deep emotional response, or a visceral response.”

And though you can also hear the years of hard work that Ribot dedicated to mastering his instrument under the tutelage of the Haitian classical guitarist Frantz Casseus in almost everything that he plays, you hear it all warped, distorted, filtered through and exploded in exactly the ways that he described Albert Ayler’s saxophone playing.’

And finally . . .

I’ll leave this one for Dirk.

‘And absolutely no connection to the Ayler brothers, but entering "Don, Albert & Jazz" led me to Don Albert. His orchestra, "America’s greatest swing band".’

What’s New June to August 2026 has been sent to the vaults.

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