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- 50 great moments in jazz: The shortlived cry of Albert Ayler
Appreciation of the saxophonist's work came just a few years after his untimely death in 1970
They called him "Bicycle Horn" for his wild, atonal sound back in his hometown of Cleveland in the 1950s. In an era in which a good deal of jazz was getting quieter and smoother, the other-worldly Albert Ayler was focusing obsessively on a contemporary vision of the long-gone ragged polyphonies, street-marches, gospel songs and spirituals of African-American music's earliest manifestations.
Sharing Thelonious Monk's view of jazz's more uncompromising stances, Ayler once said of his music: "If people don't like it now, they will." He didn't live to see that happen, but history was on his side. The cult Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek was a devoted Ayler disciple in the late 1960s, as was a subsequent acid-jazz star, Pharoah Sanders. The unique sound of British total-improv original Evan Parker still has Ayler inflections, and even Sonny Rollins and the late Michael Brecker, despite far greater acceptance within a more conventional contemporary-jazz world, appreciated the intensity of Ayler's extraordinary sound.
The writer and broadcaster Robert Elms described it as "the soul of jazz as it reaches back across continents and ages". Writer Amiri Baraka, describing hearing the saxophonist in concert, wrote: "That sound was literally devastating. It wailed and it wawed, not a scream, but something nature only sowed the seeds of, like the singing from a black hole." The British writer and photographer Val Wilmer told the Guardian some years back: "I never met anybody like him. He was a very spiritual person, but also very attractive and charming. You could see his real nature though. He was somewhere else."
Bernard Stollman, a New York attorney who didn't even own a stereo at the time, made the decision to start the cottage-industry ESP record label in 1963, with Ayler as his first artist. When he first heard the saxophonist play, Stollman found himself dancing to the music, even though he had no idea where the strange and disturbing melodic trajectory was coming from. Ayler made his first recordings in Denmark in 1962, but the album that brought him to fame was Stollman's 1964 recording of Spiritual Unity, with Keith Jarrett's current bassist Gary Peacock, and the fierce, elemental free-jazz drummer Sunny Murray.
Ayler saw himself as a jazz missionary (the church had been a huge presence in his childhood), going back to the emotional roots of the music, ditching its dependence on Broadway-show song-forms and discovering how to paint intuitively in sound. Sometimes his work reflected the mix of exultation and terror expressed by the possessed in religious rituals. Though his apparent indifference to conventional songs or the tempered scale led some to conclude that he simply couldn't play, he had investigated Charlie Parker's intricate bebop approach much earlier, and was heavily influenced by that approach in the late 1950s. But he took from bebop only what he needed.
Ayler was born in Cleveland in 1936, and was initially taught by a sax and violin-playing father. He toured in r'n'b bands in his teens, served in the army, then moved on to the jazz scenes of Cleveland, Stockholm and New York. He often jammed with Sonny Rollins, and with piano iconoclast Cecil Taylor, and if the wider public was baffled by him, he was revered by those in the loop who understood his art. The saxophonist's mentor John Coltrane asked that Ayler and Ornette Coleman should be the musicians to play at his funeral.
Ayler's music was well-received by some critics, but rejected by the jazz public at large, and he made few attempts to explain it. He continued to perform intermittently through the late 1960s (often with his trumpeter brother Donald, and with the harpsichord player Call Cobbs), and was beginning to explore a typically personal but more accessible kind of free-jazz r'n'b music by the time of his death in 1970.
Albert Ayler's body was found in New York's East River on 25 November 1970. He was 34. Conspiracy stories abounded, from Mafia drug hits, to global plots against radical black musicians, but the saxophonist's companion Mary Parks later insisted that he had jumped from a ferry. Perhaps matching up his tumultuously beautiful inner world with the world around him proved too momentous a task in the end, but acceptance of Albert Ayler's remarkable contribution to jazz was only a few years away.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - Punks, what's your problem? The 100 Club was past its prime
That London could lose another live venue is sad news. But the 100 Club has not been the home of new music for years
Last week saw music fans despairing at the news that London's historic 100 Club venue on Oxford Street was facing closure.
Could it really be true that the birthplace of British punk rock and a home to British jazz might be no longer? Yes, basically. The Evening Standard reported that the venue is under the threat of closure due to spiralling overheads – its rates bill has hit £4,000 a month while landlord Lazari Investments now charges rent, with VAT, of £166,000 a year. Owner Jeff Horton is now looking for a buyer or major sponsor to step forward to keep the club open.
Cue people on Facebook getting themselves all in a tizz, furiously stabbing the "create group" button with their pitchforks, and writing things like: "We have to stop this, otherwise the venues that have shaped the greats and will shape the future of music will be gone." It's the sort of sentiment that could feature within the paraphernalia of the vile O2 British Music Experience at the old Millennium Dome – if those words had been run through a spellchecker and had an O2 logo stamped atop.
There's been an uprising of British punks, too, the sort you see mugging for the camera on the back of London postcards, spouting statements like their "heritage" is at risk.
Me? I'm not too sure about all the fuss.
It's been a good decade, probably two, since the 100 Club served any sort of function in shaping popular music's future. The venue has become akin to a British take on New York's CBGB club, which itself closed in 2006 – the sort of place where record labels sporadically place their edgier new acts to garner a bit of reflected punk cool from the fact the Sex Pistols once trod its rickety red boards. Said acts don't even have to be new; I saw Towers of London there in 2007, after Donny Tourette had escaped from Big Brother. Well, I say saw; I watched two songs, thought "life's too short" and went to hang out in the video game shop next door.
And I was also part of the press throng that saw the Horrors play in 2006 and every night of Gallows' four-night stand in 2008. Both bands' appearances were exciting, but don't tell me those bands' live agents didn't know the significance of booking their shows there. Unlike Brixton's Windmill venue, Shoreditch's Old Blue Last, Elephant and Castle's Coronet Theatre or Stoke Newington's late, great Bardens Boudoir – venues that really can hold a claim to being the cradle of British music's future – I've never just walked in, seen something brilliant and unexpected and skipped home thrilled. Far from being a home of new music, the 100 Club merely serves an important marketing purpose for a modern music scene obsessed with authenticity.
As for the punks' claims of their heritage being destroyed, that's the most galling claim I've heard. I've got Black Flag bars inked on my skin, I've got a favourite Crass B-side, and the 100 Club says as much about my heritage as my local Greggs does. I never thought punk rock was supposed to be about heritage, or monuments, or even bricks and mortar. It's a transcendent spirit, it works in your head, in your bedroom or in a music venue. I thought punk was about ideas, anger, being disconcerting about who and what you respect, about questioning the status quo (especially Status Quo). But if you are looking for the home of modern punk rock in the capital then The Fighting Cocks in Kingston upon Thames has much more of a claim to that title than the 100 Club does.
The sad part of this story is that London might just lose another inner-city venue, which, looking at the gaping void left by the Astoria every time I walk down Charing Cross Road, is depressing, especially when it's one that isn't branded with corporate sponsorship like so many other venues in the city.
It would be nice if people's ire was fuelled with that sort of honesty, and not with making claims for the venue's significance and purpose that are as dead and as stupid as that other punk relic Sid Vicious.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Prinzhorn Dance School – Seed, Crop, Harvest
The band who baffled one Guardian reviewer are back. And this time they've got tunes (er, kind of)
Brighton-based duo Prinzhorn Dance School don't do easy. Their self-titled debut album (released via James Murphy's DFA imprint) was delayed after the two decided all the packaging should be sourced from recycled materials, while the album itself was so relentlessly sparse and minimal some didn't know what to make of it. Well, the good news is they've had an electropop makeover ... No, they haven't of course, but this first taster for their forthcoming second album is a brilliantly skeletal slice of dry-as-a-bone art rock, complete with off-kilter drums, shredded guitars and – shock horror – a melody and chorus! Sell-outs!You can download it for free here
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - 50 Cent's Twitter feed | Sam Leith
When the exciting new thing called social media first came along, it promised to do what years of reality television, forests' worth of glossy magazines and countless fish-suppers' worth of paparazzi shots failed quite to manage: it would allow celebrities to show us The Real Them.
If you ever wondered what really went on in the heads of the people you are used to goggling at on telly, you needed wonder no longer: now, thanks to the wonder of Twitter, we would be able to SEE DIRECTLY INTO THEIR BRAINS.
It seems to work; at least for celebrities who write their own tweets. You discover that Simon Pegg is funny and nice, Graham Linehan intelligent and politically conscious, William Gibson geeky and sociable, Amy Winehouse a bit erratic, and 50 Cent . . . well, you discover that 50 Cent is an absolutely epic plonker.
He is rapidly becoming a reason in himself to go on Twitter. It's grammatically haphazard – as he says: "Any sucker can press spell check" – but you tend to get the gist. "A yal be on twitter meeting each other. Then yal be fucking this shit is crazy. I wanta find me a bad bitch on twitter. Lol" is pretty much average.
In the last week or so alone he has told us about having "shaved the poodle", encouraged female followers to tweet him pictures of themselves in their bras and pants, speculated ungallantly on the private parts of other artistes (Erykah Badu's, he says cryptically, "make a nigga colour blind"), and announced the formation of a three million-strong cult led by, er, him, with sketchy proposals for a eugenic breeding programme.
A very useful supplementary feed – @English50Cent – interprets his sayings for those less with it. For instance, when Fiddy found himself having an online scrap with some pre-teen Justin Bieber fans, he tweeted: "I'm a take my belt off and beat one of you little motherfuckers were your mama and daddy at anyway bad ass kids." @English50Cent translated: "I am going to remove my trousers and attack some children."
This is all glorious in a horrifying sort of way. But is this 50 Cent making his own myth or undermining it? From time to time you can tell – or imagine you can – that a member of Fiddy's entourage has risked life and limb to physically wrest the iPhone from the boss's grip and started tweeting on his behalf.
He spells better and becomes more philosophical. "To hate me is to hate success," he says. He adds that university degrees are a better test of short-term memory than underlying intelligence. And he warns: "I do believe that a wise man who plays the part of a fool will learn faster."
Some years ago, Giles Foden was banished to Pseud's Corner when he used these pages to compare Eminem to Robert Browning. But he was on to something, really. He argued, quite reasonably, that the songs should be understood as dramatic monologues: Slim Shady's antisocial tendencies are no more reflective of Marshall Mathers's true feelings than the wife-murdering narrator of My Last Duchess reflected those of Browning, in real life uxorious to a fault.
Pop music has always been about projecting a persona as much as about putting over a song, and this goes double for rap. My theory is that you need to look further back than the Victorians, though: gangsta rap is basically Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry, only with phat beatz instead of fat Geats.
In gangster rap, as in Anglo-Saxon verse, you've got a poem or song – semi-improvisational, sound-patterned with rhyme or alliteration – designed to inflate an already preposterous reputation. The archetypal hero is a boastful fellow, distinguished by three things: being able to drink more mead (or smoke more weed) than everyone else, amass more gold (bling) than everyone else, and kill more enemies in fights than everyone else.
The Anglo-Saxon poet, arguably, was a little more respectful of women and less likely to insert the disclaimer "no homo" into an account of male companionship than his modern-day heirs, but the point basically holds.
What effect does social media have on the process? Deflationary, I think. The Beowulf poet wrote in the third person, but 50 Cent does so in the first. Beowulf had a scop (poet) to mediate his great deeds to posterity; Twitter goes out direct.
Does a Twitter feed ironise the image created by artist and record company, then? Is Fiddy the philosopher-king, Fiddy the Bieber-basher or Fiddy the poodle-shaver the real one? Far from allowing us to see directly into his brain, we may be no closer to knowing the real 50 Cent after all. But we feel we are, and that's somehow diminishing.
"Hwaet!" is what Beowulf would have tweeted to his adversary. "@grendelsmom I'm a beat you lol." Lol perhaps, but on balance the original has more oomph.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Witch house and the musicians taking us back to the future
A new generation of artists are messing with pop's past to conjure haunting new sounds
If pop really did eat itself some 20-odd years ago, then recent months have seen it spew up the contents of its stomach in lurid fashion. Rifle through buzzed-about tracks gracing tastemaker blogs and you'll hear a range of underground artists regurgitating the work of everyone from Michael Jackson to Lindsay Lohan via the Brat Pack films of the 80s.
How to Dress Well's "Ecstasy With Jojo" is a perfect example – a track that spins a hazy drug-comedown of a song from a wisp of Michael Jackson's "Baby Me Mine", some ghostly vocals and not a lot else. On first listen I was inclined to agree with one blog commentator who asked: "Gosh, is that all?" But repeated plays suggest that How to Dress Well (aka Tom Krell) is tapping into something intrinsically emotional here, blurring our memories of past pop culture (in this case the King of Pop and acid house) to create a heady brew of nostalgia (from hearing Jacko) and anxiety (the dreaded post-club return to reality).
The music of Kindness plays similar tricks with your mind. Check myspace.com/kindnesses and you'll find other-worldly covers of the Byrds, Neil Young and the Replacements, as well as a dislocated version of West Side Story's "Somewhere". The listening experience becomes rather like looking at a sun-bleached photo of the Mona Lisa. You recognise what it is – just about – but you're relying on memory, and all the emotions triggered by these memories, to piece together your own version of it.
Such behaviour isn't restricted to artists who deal solely in cover versions. Young English indie duo Summer Camp cite the influence of John Hughes movies such as Sixteen Candles on their aesthetic, sampling Molly Ringwald and populating their MySpace site with vintage images. "We're nostalgic for something we never actually experienced," they say. "The America we get homesick for is kind of all in our minds, pieced together from films, photos, and music."
It's confusing that footage appropriated for their video for recent single "Round the Moon" actually comes from a soft-toned Swedish film from 1970 (A Swedish Love Story). But this highlights one of the interesting contradictions at play here – the fact that the web has helped archive pop while simultaneously allowing it to wriggle free from historical and geographical moorings. It's not a simple case of rehashing the past – it's about picking and choosing things from across the decades that stir emotion and feeling in the listener or viewer.
The group Salem make a strange, sinister music that others have labelled "witch house", grouping them with acts including Balam Acab, Stalker and oOoOO (whose "Hearts" is surely one of the tracks of the year). Inspired by early rave and dream-pop, witch house also takes its cue from the "chopped and screwed" remix technique so prevalent in early 90s hip-hop. Listen to Salem's version of country classic "The End of the World" to hear them bring the song's sad message to the fore.
The ultra-hip Tri Angle label, which sprang from the blog 20 Jazz Funk Greats, is home to several of these acts. A recent EP (available for free download) saw their roster let loose on the back catalogue of troubled ex-pop performer Lindsay Lohan and was perhaps the ultimate example of these mainstream mutations.
"A lot of people are kind of laughing when they mention the Lindsay mix to me," says oOoOO (aka Christopher Dexter Greenspan). "It's like they want me to know they're in on the joke or something – but it wasn't my intention to poke fun at her or be ironic. For me, Lindsay's career is an expression of how really intense sensitivity, emotion, and imperfection have a way of pushing through even the most heavily managed media personas."
Maybe, in essence, this is what this current generation of artists is doing – digging beneath pop's shiny facade to unleash the damaged beauty within.
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