What's going on on Ayler's Spiritual Unity?
October 16, 2015 6:19 AM   Subscribe

I've been listening to Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity. I like it, or substantial parts of it. However, I do not understand why it's an "important" record, as most people seem to agree that it is. I do not know anything technical about music at all, although I listen to a lot of it, and to a lot of "noise" records. Can anyone explain what this album is doing and why it is important?

My assumption here is that it's not just that it's got multiple rhythms happening at the same time, or that it is anarchic in the solos. But perhaps I am wrong. I also assume that it doesn't have anything to do with the composed sections.
posted by OmieWise to Media & Arts (4 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Here's a good article about it.
posted by Huck500 at 6:49 AM on October 16, 2015


Best answer: the "noise" was new, back then. so it's a combination of being decent music and ground breaking (the anarchism, the range of sounds).

also, because he died not long after, and covered a smaller range of styles than coltrane, say (ascension is from a similar time), he's a useful "landmark" in jazz history.
posted by andrewcooke at 6:52 AM on October 16, 2015


Best answer: Ayler divides jazz fans, and even fans of out/free jazz. Like a lot of players with a very singular voice, he doesn't tend to put listeners on the fence. For me, first hearing Spiritual Unity and Witches and Devils when I was younger was deeply moving - what I perceived as the raw anger and anguish in his playing wasn't something I had heard before, and I think it's safe to say that he was among the first to use the saxophone to express these feelings in such an overt, uncompromising way.

The fact that the entire trio is improvising together simultaneously, turning away from the big band and bop focus on the soloist-as-improviser, is a return to jazz's earliest forms - a move that Ayler made even more explicit in incorporating New Orleans-like brass band elements on later LPs like In Greenwich Village. Spiritual Unity is rooted in a specific and transitional time politically and culturally, and in jazz history - in the nascent mid-60s Black Arts and Black Power movements, in the counterculture's emerging focus on ecstatic, non-Western spirituality, and, maybe most importantly, in its emphasis on the importance of collective effort and folk cultures. Ayler wedded the folk/collective roots of jazz with the art music that jazz was starting to become as its many of its most forward-thinking players (maybe most importantly for Ayler, Coltrane) began to incorporate both non-Western influences and the European classical avant garde into their music, and to try to use it to more openly articulate spiritual and political concerns. The mid-60s represented the definitive end of jazz as a popular music, and the beginning of the end of it as a clearly definable genre, as it splintered into sub-genres, some of them abrasive, uncompromising, and heavily influenced by music not before associated with the jazz lineage. I think Spiritual Unity is one of the earliest and most unmistakable markers of that sea change.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:39 AM on October 16, 2015 [10 favorites]


TLDR: It represents a crux in jazz history, with Ayler looking both many years into the past and into the future, incorporating elements from both eras, neither of which were associated with jazz's time as an American popular music. It's one of the first LPs that unmistakably announces jazz's return to being a marginal, subcultural form of folk/art music, and an opening shot in its splintering into subgenres, many of which incorporate musical influences and political and spiritual concerns that were not previously associated with it.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:59 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


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