Albert Ayler - 1965 - Ghosts

Albert Ayler

1965

Ghosts

01. Ghosts 2:05
02. Children 6:20
03. Holy Spirit 8:15
04. Ghosts 7:25
05. Vibrations 4:55
06. Mothers 7:00

Bass – Gary Peacock
Drums – Sonny Murray
Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone – Albert Ayler
Trumpet – Don Cherry

Recorded in Copenhagen on September 14th, 1964.

Albert Ayler made two great contributions to improvised music. Both were connected, but one was more strictly musical, the other aesthetic. Musically, Ayler was the first to take the theoretical implications of Ornette Coleman’s work a practical step further. His music was at once more collective than Coleman’s and similarly more “open” in its non-specific rhythmic, harmonic, and tonal sense. Aesthetically, Ayler was the music’s only real existentialist. He best transcended the particular “point of view” and most understood and expressed the depth of ambiguity of existence. Further, while others had touched on such feelings as pain, hurt, and sorrow, in Ayler’s work there frequently crops up a sense of genuine human despair. It is not that this despair overwhelms Ayler, but he alone dares to recognize it and – more importantly – accept it as an (inherent) part of the human condition. His music, in many ways, might be said to be about how to live with it.