Spiritual Unity

Artist: Albert Ayler
Label: Esp Disk Ltd.
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 825481010023
EAN: 0825481010023
ASIN: B0007Z9RAC

Release Date: 2005-03-15

Related Categories:

Avant Garde & Free Jazz

| Jazz | Styles | Music

General

| Jazz | Styles | Music

General

| Pop | Styles | Music

Listmania:

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Really modern Jazz
Music That Is A Bit More Challenging (incomplete)
The All Time Top Albums (526-550)
Moving avant-garde and free jazz
if you like one of this things you might like this
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The Rentboy Guide to Essential Jazz

Tracks:

Ghosts: First Variation
The Wizard
Spirits
Ghosts: Second Variation

Similar Items:

Live In Greenwich Village: The Complete Impulse Recordings
Out to Lunch
Unit Structures
For Alto
Interstellar Space

Customer Reviews:

A correction to even further validate this recording.......2007-01-30

The reviewer "El Lagarto" may want to note that the release date of John Coltrane's "Ascension," his first proper free jazz album and first major foray into the avant-garde, is June 28, 1965. "Spiritual Unity" precedes that album by approximately a year, and if I am not mistaken, Coltrane cited Ayler as an influence which helped vault him into his late period recordings.

This recording is a masterpiece and must have been a revelation at the time to all with open ears. For an even more complete and brilliant document of Ayler's influential sound and immense presence, check out the Complete Greenwich Village recordings on Impulse! That is all for now.

Even an Olympic swimmer might not like the Ocean.......2006-07-29

This album skipped a few (hundred?) decades and took jazz straight to its logical conclusion. Fast forward several million years, far past our own epoch in this particular cosmic cycle, and you will hear this album playing as the universe dissipates back into its perfectly entropic state.

Don't get me wrong, this is not an album I listen to often. You wouldn't really play it in the car or at a party (unless it's a REALLY good party). This one takes some acclimation...like astronaut camp.

Yeah it's noisy and chaotic, but make no mistake: there is DEFINITELY music here. It's amazing that you can even hear it, let alone that someone actually wrote it, but it's here. Use with caution. This album will liberate your mind and incite a riot in your head, if you let it.

As The Spirit Moves.......2006-07-21

Certain albums seemed destined to capture the public's imagination and win widespread, unequivocal acceptance almost instantaneously. One thinks, for example, of Tapestry by Carole King, Rumors from Fleetwood Mac, and the Johnny Cash landmark effort, At Folsom Prison.

Others, like Brilliant Corners (Thelonious Monk) and Sail Away (Randy Newman) required time, tireless advocacy on the part of convinced music critics, and risk-taking listeners before assuming the iconic status they enjoy today.

Spiritual Unity, which may be Albert Ayler's Guernica, falls into neither category. It was born in obscurity where it has lived ever since, like a prisoner whose slim hopes are sustained only by infrequent visits from family members.

Jazz listeners are a small subset of all music listeners, but jazz itself is a big tent covering various splinter groups. There are those who believe that the sun set on real jazz when Sidney Bechet died. The majority of jazz lovers consider the WWII big band years of Basie and Ellington to be the halcyon era. Hipsters and flipsters latched onto Bop, but many, including Cab Calloway, rejected Bird and Diz. Cab Calloway called Bop "Chinese music."

The herd of jazz enthusiasts was culled even further by the arrival of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and others who expressed a wanton disregard for melodic traditions. For many, Coltrane's squawks, squeals, and rapid fire scales were indistinguishable from underwater parachuting - an idea whose time hasn't come. However, Coltrane's disciples followed him and followed the horn players he influenced, like Roland Kirk. By now the herd, though fiercely loyal, was tiny. Then came Ayler.

Ayler blew with maniacal intensity, passion, delirious joy, and complete disrespect for the past. He played as though he'd never heard anyone else play, as if he'd discovered a horn in the desert and was single-handedly inventing music. Ayler did not play from his head or even his heart but directly from his soul. In jazz clubs around Manhattan cries of, "Check please," and, "I think I hear my mommy calling me," and, "Oops, this is my stop," rang out like chimes, followed soon thereafter by hasty retreats.

In a sense, Ayler took abstract jazz to its absolute breaking point; it really can't get much further out than this without sounding like jets warming up on a runway. His music defies evaluation, it even defies judgment. Almost everyone hates it and would pay to not have to hear it. Those who love it, as I do, respond to a spiritual awakening and freedom transcending the bars and dots on sheet music, pointing straight to the next world. For me, this is astonishing, glorious music, but then, I'm in a small herd.

Amazing.......2006-05-13

This album changed the way I hear music. Absolutely amazing. Every time I listen I hear something new.

Ignore the one star review by Blaster Death.......2005-12-19

Blaster Death should stick to reviewing Kenny G albums if he can't hear music on this recording. Not only should Spiritual Unity be placed in the top 100 jazz albums of all time I would go as far as to place it in the top 10. Then again, if real art scares you perhaps you should stick with Kenny G.

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