Overview

Holy Ghost is the first extended study of free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, who is seen today as one of the most important innovators in the history of jazz. Ayler synthesized children's songs, La Marseillaise, American march music, and gospel hymns, turning them into powerful, rambunctious, squalling free-jazz improvisations. Some critics considered him a charlatan, others a heretic for unhinging the traditions of jazz. Some simply considered him insane. However, like most geniuses, Ayler was misunderstood in his time. His divine messages of peace and love, apocalyptic visions of flying saucers, and the strange account of the days leading up to his being found floating in New York's East River are central to his mystique, but, as Koloda points out, they are a distraction, overshadowing his profound impact on the direction of jazz as one of the most visible avant-garde players of the 1960s and a major influence on others, including John Coltrane. A musicologist and friend of Don Ayler, Albert's troubled trumpet-playing brother, Richard Koloda has spent over two decades researching this book. He follows Ayler from his beginnings in his native Cleveland to France, where he received his greatest acclaim, to his untimely death on November 25, 1970, at age thirty-four, and puts to rest speculation concerning his mysterious death. A feat of biography and a major addition to jazz scholarship, Holy Ghost offers a new appreciation of one of the most important and controversial figures in twentieth-century music.

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9781911036937

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Reviews

Albert Ayler's music was so startling that some called it a scandal, the last scandal in a music that had begun in scandal. Others, like Anthony Braxton, said that Albert had pushed the vocabulary of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders as far as they could be pushed, and that everything after him would be post-Ayler. Ayler's brother and band member Donald said that all they were guilty of was breathing. Today, Albert's music and his vision might be called an early form of Afrofuturism, a return to the past to create a new future. The facts of Ayler's life have for years been hard to come by, and stories told about him are mythological, some even ghostly. Koloda's book remarkably reconstructs Ayler's life story and explores the controversy he created. John Szwed

Author Information

Richard Koloda has a master s degree in Musicology from Cleveland State University (having written a thesis on the piano music of Frederic Rzewski). He was a contributor on the critically acclaimed documentary My Name Is Albert Ayler by Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin, and was a consultant on Revenant Records ten-CD retrospective of Ayler, which has been called the Sistine Chapel of box sets. Richard lives in Wayland, Ohio, where he practices law. When he is not in court, he is working on his second book (not about music).

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