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Listen to “Ghosts” from Spiritual Unity, with Albert Ayler (tenor saxophone);  Gary Peacock (double bass); and Sonny Murray (percussion).  [Naxos of America]

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Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity: A Classic of Our Time, and for All Time

by Peter Valente

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…..On the back cover of Albert Ayler’s 1964 album Spiritual Unity, there is an image of the letter “Y”  with a note below it that reads: “The symbol ‘Y’ predates recorded history and represents the rising spirit of man.” And central to Ayler – and many jazz musicians of the time – is this idea of reaching higher states of consciousness through sound. The reason, as Joachim-Ernst Berendt points out in his 1983 book, The World is Sound is because “God created the world from Sound.”

…..Spiritual Unity evokes a deep mythological past as well as the present time of 1964 The record feels timeless. With song titles like “Ghosts,” “The Wizard” and “Spirits” (alternately known as “Witches and Devils”), we are in world that reminds listeners of African American spirituals, the African American churches of the south, and the sounds Ayler heard in his youth when attending services in Ohio that were created in worship of God. It is an album  recorded on the ESP Disk label and the brainchild of Bernard Stollman, a lawyer who despite knowing nothing about free jazz felt something in the air, and chose to record Ayler and other musicians who, like Ayler, couldn’t find a label who understood their music. After hearing Ayler play for a short while, Stollman heard something astonishing and chose to record him. While he sat on the steps outside the recording studio, the recording engineer inside started the tape rolling,  and when Stollman  heard the sounds Ayler, bassist Gary Peacock, and drummer Sonny Murray were making, he ran out of the room. When the tape ran out, recorded on it was one of the most important, groundbreaking albums of all time.

…..   There is an urgency with which Spiritual Unity opens. Ayler’s hauntingly beautiful and familiar melody posseses the sound and elegance of New Orleans that suddenly, as if the sound could not be caged, explodes out of the tenor saxophone.  Ayler’s sound was incredibly loud –  his wide vibrato, the sheer strength of his playing, and the rage among other emotions in the open sound of freedom. But is it freedom that Ayler was expressing? What did this sound mean in the context of a melody that evoked old African American spirituals and the contemporary world of 1964? I am reminded of the race riots in the 1960s and the violence in the streets as African Americans were beaten by the cops.   This is the sound of anger directed at the era of discrimination.

…..The album’s first track, “Ghosts,” refer to the  “ghosts” of the forefathers – who, like his own father, migrated from the south to different parts of the country seeking work and to escape oppression. Ayler evokes an older, more mythological past; the tales told by grandmothers, the supernatural world of the old “haunted” America that, in a different genre, Harry Smith gave voice to in his Anthology of American Folk Music. It is a past where ghosts and spirits inhabited one’s world. One is reminded of Ayler’s father attempting to contact Albert following his mysterious death using spiritual means.  This whole strange, supernatural world – the old America – is present in the sound of “Ghosts.”

…..The next track, “The Wizard,” opens with a short three note phrase that is rapidly repeated three times before Ayler launches into a wild, free, and open solo, finding almost infinite worlds of sound in only a few notes. Albert’s brother Donald, who played trumpet in one of Ayler’s later groups, gave instructions on how to listen to this music: “Don’t focus on the notes. Follow the sound, the pitches, the colors, you have to watch them move. And from there it is just a short leap of the imagination to understanding how this music…know of the potential for revelation through noise.”  Ayler’s invention on the tenor is incredible, as is the speed with which he shapes his sounds. Peacock, with his heavy bags of sound, playing free and Murray with his free time on the cymbals are with him all the way. And Ayler is the “Wizard,” the prophet who has arrived to change the sound of jazz. His alchemical work on the sounds of tenor saxophone  weaves a sonic spell in the atmosphere. A phrase is like a fixed address, change it again and again. Ayler strikes a sound, repeats it for an interval, cuts into discrete units of sound, then shatters it before quickly moving  on to another sound.  He examines the polarities in sound – each of them has a different value in Ayler’s soundscape. His music opens up a network of passages into other sonic space stations. There are connection points, and explosions of intense and revelatory noise. There are halts, and a sense of weightlessness in the surge. This is not about an explanation. It’s about feeling and emotion.  He acts as a witness to the world around him.

…..In “Spirits” (also known as “Witches and Devils”), Ayler creates a sound on the saxophone that evokes a preacher talking to his congregation. It almost feels classical, as if Ayler is playing the cello or violin. The sound Ayler gets is otherworldly, a realm that’s dangerous to dwell in – a world of spirits and demons and that old magic that grandmothers and grandfathers in the past believed in as a part of their faith. “Repent,” Ayler appears to be saying in this music, “for the Judgement Day is coming.”  Ayler’s profound assimilation of the blues is also behind his music. When listening to “Spirits,” one can visualize a world of demons and wizards, the archaic sounds of spirituals, and the rising voices in the churches that Ayler was exposed to as a young man. As Richard Koloda notes in his biography of Ayler, Holy Ghost: The Life & Death of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler, the poet Ted Joans “was a sensitive enough listener to hear how Ayler was about rearticulating the spiritual in a music that, even today, often gets marketed as merely sexy and cool. Ayler asserted the terrifying but tender force that jazz was emphatically not ‘devil’s music,’ that the cry of the blues was the same shriek he heard in the sanctified church.”

…..Coltrane would popularize the spiritual in free jazz in his great recordings  Ascension, Om, Selflessness, A Love Supreme and the later duets with the drummer Rashied Ali. But there it was a matter of ascending to God through negation of the ego and the influence of Eastern spiritual practice. Ayler was also concerned with “spiritual unity,” of man ascending to a higher state of consciousness, but his spiritual world is much darker – it is a world of witches and demons, of spirits under the bed in early childhood. Of the supernaturalism of the church.  Of fear of judgement. But Ayler is also evoking an archaic, pagan past, a time even before Christianity. A time of African mythology. I am reminded of the Ekwensu, of the Igbo people of Nigeria, a demonic source of evil in the world. Ayler’s cry is for the African people, but it is also a cry against all the evil in the world that man is helpless to defeat. It is a cry of hope but also of helplessness. This is what gives Ayler’s music a power that is poignant; it is a lament older than time.

In the film My Name is Albert Ayler, the director Kasper Collin finds images for Ayler’s music. In one powerful sequence, we hear Ayler’s later quintet – including brother Donald on trumpet –  playing a haunting melody in unison that suggests a yearning towards God, and a fear of  God. It is a beautiful, poignant sound  while on the screen African Americans are filmed in church with their arms raised, praising God. But when Ayler changes the intensity and power of his sound – as if in a rage – the scene quickly shifts to images of African Americans being beaten by the police during a riot in protest of racism. The sound/image is intense and effective on the viewer, resulting in a response of sadness and anger. Ayler saw that old mythology operating in his own time – evil victorious over good. To him, that magic was real. Ayler stayed away from commenting on politics, but in his sound his rage against the world was clear. That old mythology can no longer hold up the foundation of the world. Ayler is as much evoking a lost, archaic past as well as lamenting the passage of these long-held beliefs to the new gods of materialism and consumerism, and hate. In his analysis of Ayler, the jazz critic and historian John Litweiler writes in his 1984 book The Freedom Principle: “Here are the conflicts of a Hamlet, more fantastic because Ayler lived amid the incomprehensible chaos of an age more betrayed than the ancient prince’s, asserting his lonely nobility despite the certainty of its denial.”

…..When Ayler recorded Spiritual Unity, jazz was on the lookout for an avant-garde tenor player voice in the realm of Coltrane.   Believing that his music was being ignored in America, Ayler left for Europe in 1964, and Pharoah Sanders stepped up to assume the role. And because Ayler spent several years in Europe, when he returned it was as though he was forgotten.  In response, he began considering  a new direction for his music. That’s when he met Bob Thiele at Impulse Records, where he recorded albums that were critically panned at the time – some critics believed that Ayler was catering to the current fashion for R&B and rock and roll. He became a victim of corporate greed, where the priority is to sell records. These later records –  Love Cry, New Grass, and Music is the Healing Force of the Universe – were panned at the time but have gone through a well-deserved reevaluation.  The hardcore free jazz community hears those records different today than they did when they were first released.

…..On November 5^th, 1970, Ayler disappeared.  Twenty days later, he was found dead in New York City’s East River. He was only 33 years old. Litweiler wrote: “His strange death prematurely deprived American music of one of its outstanding vital forces. If we are to become a civilization, Ayler’s kind of humanist understanding, his depth and complexity, even his kind of contrasting simplicities and innocences, must become part of our character. We cannot all be heroes, but it may be that we can someday be the more sensitive individuals that Albert Ayler thought we might be.”

…..Spiritual Unity” is a signpost album. Even if Albert Ayler never recorded anything else, it would remain one of the most important records in jazz. Litwieiler again: “Everything about Albert Ayler’s music was astonishing. With him, the new music broke its last lingering ties with not just bop but the entire jazz tradition. Every one of the noisy horrors the first Free wave was accused of, he gladly embraced…Indeed, he bypassed the entire history of jazz to go back to attitudes and ideas about music that predated the art’s inception: he then built up his own art out of primitive discoveries.”

…….Ayler was trying to give voice to our deepest fears, our hopes, and our anxieties about a world gone wrong.  His music is a call for the oppressed, all those who feel they have no voice in the political climate.  It is a cry of hope for spiritual unity –  that love is the answer, not hate. It is also a lament for those who have left this world. It evokes the old, weird America of demons and spirits. It is the blues.  It’s about us – our love, our anger, our fear.  It is not naïve; rather, it is a sharp and clear musical message about what matters most in our lives. It is an art learned through suffering. It is about those lessons most difficult to learn. It the sound of our deepest soul –  a sound as old as recorded time that feels as new and contemporary each time we listen to it. Spiritual Unity is a classic for our times, and for all time.

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Peter Valente has been writing about jazz for many years, and is the author of several books, including a translation of Gérard de Nerval,  The Illuminated  (Wakefield Press, 2022),  The  New  Revelations  of  Being  &  Other  Mystical  Writings  by  Antonin  Artaud  (Infinity Land Press, 2023),  his translation of  Nicolas  Pages  by Guillaume Dustan  (Semiotext(e), 2023)),  and The Occult Harry Smith: The Magical & Alchemical Work of an Artist of the Extremes  (Inner Traditions, 2025).  Forthcoming is his Selected Essays (2019-2023)  (Punctum books, 2026)  and  The  Instant  Music  (Local Knowledge Press, 2026)  a collection of his essays on free improvisation.  He is also an experimental filmmaker whose work has been shown at Anthology Film archives in New York City.

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Click for:

A 2023  Jerry Jazz Musician interview with Richard Koloda, author of Holy Ghost:  The Life & Death of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler 

“The Sound of Becoming,” J.C. Michaels’ winning story in the 70th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest

Information about how to submit your essay, poetry or short fiction

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