Albert Ayler - My Name Is Albert Ayler (1975 Japanese Freedom/Trio Vinyl LP)

Albert Ayler - My Name Is Albert Ayler | Vinyl LP - 1975 Japanese Freedom/Trio Records (PA-9709, Trio Electronics)

Ayler had left the US Army and settled in Scandinavia in 1962, finding audiences and radio stations in Sweden and Denmark more receptive to his radical approach than anything he had encountered at home. He had just spent the winter of 1962-63 jamming as an unofficial member of Cecil Taylor's band, an experience he described as finally finding musicians he could play with. He had hoped to record this album with Taylor's group, but the pianist returned to New York before the session, so Ayler played instead with a pickup band of Danish musicians: Niels Brønsted on piano, the teenage prodigy Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass (later one of Europe's greatest bassists, here only 16 years old), and Ronnie Gardiner on drums. The mismatch is part of the album's character. The rhythm section plays straight-ahead bebop, seemingly unsure what to make of Ayler, while Ayler soars over and against them, following his own imagination. Critics have noted the tension: the backing band never quite meets him. But when Ayler plays "Summertime," none of that matters. His tenor sound (huge, vibrato-heavy, drawing on the sanctified church, R&B, and early New Orleans jazz) transforms Gershwin's lullaby into something overwhelming. Val Wilmer compared his glissandi to Johnny Hodges. The performance has become legendary, the track that sends listeners down the Ayler rabbit hole.

The album opens with Ayler speaking, a gentle spoken introduction giving a brief biographical sketch with disarming directness and honesty. To hear him talk about feeling free in Scandinavia, and to assert that "one day, everything will be as it should be," is genuinely touching, and it makes clear how much derision he must have faced at home, for his music and his skin colour both. "Bye Bye Blackbird" is one of Ayler's rare recordings on soprano saxophone. "Billie's Bounce" and "On Green Dolphin Street" complete the standards. "C.T.," the one Ayler original, is a free improvisation for tenor, bass and drums dedicated to Cecil Taylor. Within a year Ayler would return to New York and record Spiritual Unity (1964), the trio album that stands as his masterpiece, and by 1965 Bells. John Coltrane, after recording Ascension, called Ayler and said "I recorded an album and found that I was playing just like you," to which Ayler replied, "No man, don't you see, you were playing like yourself."

This is the 1975 Japanese pressing on Freedom/Trio PA-9709, from the Trio Jazz Mania / Freedom Discover the '60's series, made by Trio Electronics, Inc.