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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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This site went online in June 2000. All the previous ‘What’s New’ pages are available below: