Live Greenwich Village Sessions [2 CD] [Best of, Live]

There really was no one like Albert Ayler in jazz during the 1960s. Sure, John Coltrane could play monumentally complex sax, only to jettison the learned architecture for a complete reversal of virtuosity in his last works. And Pharoah Sanders could haunt and beguile with mournful cries and yawps. But Ayler was altogether different: he took the scarcest of melodies--folk and church tunes, really--and elevated them to spiritual zeniths. These live cuts were once super hard to find, on a scattering of LPs released in the 1970s. Collected as a whole on two CDs, they are a thing of pristine, if boundary-testing, beauty. Ayler takes barely any time at all before wailing into his stratospheric cries on tenor sax, and his brother Donald follows suit on trumpet with nearly the same quick leaps. The extended band includes, at its largest, the Ayler brothers with a full string quartet (Michael Sampson, violin; Joel Freedman, cello; Bill Folwell and Alan Silva, basses) and drummer Beaver Harris. They play numerous, almost easily-recognizable melodies from their oeuvre, including "Truth Is Marching In," "Spirits Rejoice," and "Omega Is the Alpha." They also offer "For John Coltrane," recorded in early 1967 after Trane's untimely demise. Spectacular would be a simple way to describe Ayler's ensemble and his compositions. But it wouldn't be out of proportion to the music. There's a reason, after all, that new jazz scion Anthony Braxton refers to avant-garde jazz of the late-1960s and after as the "post-Ayler continuum." Ayler pushed and pushed. And succeeded. --Andrew Bartlett