“He described Hemingway pacing up and down in his den, saying: ‘There is another dimension. I am fully aware of it, but I can’t get to it. So he was trapped in his reporting of externals, his faithfulness to the surface, to words actually said.” — Literary hearsay, James Boyd quoting Ernest Hemingway, as written by Anais Nin
“I can’t be confined to an earthly plane even though I was, like, born here and everything.” — Albert Ayler
Funny things, words. Hemingway, forever awaiting his apotheosis, stabbed at reality with all he had—taut sentences and good ol’ American vernacular—and came up short. Human sentiment echoes forever and seventy years later, I press on writing about music. And somewhere between me and Hemingway, free jazz leviathan Albert Ayler threw off convention and reached for that next dimension. The baptismal font, Live in Greenwich Village, compiles two separate performances from ’66 and ’67, punctuating the wild arc of Ayler’s career as his finest moment. Comparisons to New Orleans brass abound, Ayler takes his transcendent jazz and puts it on parade in “Truth Is Marching In.”
The dynamic tilt, which I guess might be shaped like a parabola, starts off unassuming enough and falls off into the very depths of expression. The ensemble shudders awake in unison—the last time they will all be seen together. Saxophone and trumpet wander and, every now and then, find themselves in the same rut for a few moments. Michael Sampson’s violin repents with lonely buzzsaw scrapes and somewhere around there, the entire production around him just sort of takes off. Brother/Trumpeter Donald Ayler’s Pentecostal wails are briefly tied down to firm Dixieland melodies and then swept up again by a squall of Sunny Murray’s cymbals and drums—taking his tremulous swoons and squawks out of the march and into the crowd. Sampson too jumps in and bleeds everywhere. And then, when it seems everything’s flying a little close to the sun, then Ayler funnels in the tempo, is rebuffed once, until it all gives way: Murray grinds his sticks into the ground, the Aylers squeeze out their last notes, and the trombone stumbles into a ditch.
“Truth Is Marching In”s enormous, gasping production lies somewhere between a requiem and a hallelujah (it served as the former at John Coltrane’s funeral). The notes are sprawling and tap into all the crevices and—suffice to say, whatever it is he does should just be listened to.
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