Holy Ghost: The Life and Death of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler
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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"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 of So What: The Life Of Miles Davis
"Albert Ayler remains one of the great visionaries of American music. He arrived by way of jazz and the Sorrow Songs, entering public awareness through a movement inspired by calls for Black Liberation, and playing music that frequently found its deepest resonance with listeners whose tastes were more down-to-earth than bebop. Anyone who has gone to the crossroads with Robert Johnson or thrilled to the Wicked Pickett's cross-grained scream can recognise and identify the vernacular voices inhabiting Ayler's vision. Richard Koloda draws on archive material and fresh oral history to document aspects of an American family and the passage of an uncompromising artist who took no prisoners." - Val Wilmer, author of As Serious As Your Life: Black Music And The Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977
"Reading like an action-packed novel, Koloda's biography is definitive, colorful, and a major addition to the literature of American music and jazz." - Scott Yanow, author of Jazz On Record 1917-1976
"An engaging biography worthy of the fascinating musician at its heart." - Kevin Canfield, New York City Jazz Record
"Koloda's deeply perceptive, revelatory, and vibrant biography confirms beyond a doubt Albert Ayler's standing as a visionary in the jazz pantheon." - Donna Seaman, Booklist
"An important book that comes at a time when many listeners and critics are rediscovering Ayler's work. It combines analysis of the recordings and descriptions of Ayler's short life very effectively, and makes one keen to return to listen to his music." - Tony Dudley-Evans, London Jazz News
"This book traces everything jazz folks need to know about Ayler and a bit more besides." - Derek Ansell, Jazz Journal UK
