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It may
seem strange (maybe not), to turn this brief citation of Albert Ayler into an epigraph.
Albert was a great man, born in Cleveland, Ohio, July 13th in 1936, and found
dead in New York, in the freezing East River waters, on November 25th, 1970.
This small gimmick may seem strange, we were saying, but to us it is not strange at all,
for Aylers artistic-existentialist parable is the perfect representation of the
painful- tragic- desperate- breathless transition from the Sixties Dream of Love to
the exasperated Rawness of the Seventies.
It is not necessary to be an African- American art specialist to
understand what Carles and Comolli write in their "Dizionario Jazz"
(Dictionary of Jazz), that Ayler’s music is "an expression of
unresolved contradictions and paradoxes." On one hand there is
sound. The sound of a tenor sax, which had John Coltrane dreaming.
The sound which in itself gathers power, violence, harshness (due to
the use of the toughest reeds sold at the time), fullness, and
immediateness; all characteristics present in this unique period. On
the other hand (better, straight from the soul) surfaces the
sincerity (and also the agony, in its fullest and most noble sense),
of the word of peace, love, and spirituality. This "word" is often
screamed with (expressionistic) rage, as was in jazz music, which
literally explodes from the archaic forms of spiritual music,
military marches played by brass bands, psalmodized litanies, and
even from church songs. Exactly for these reasons the "New Ghost" of
1968 (September 5th and 6th, for the lovers of statistics) is more
interesting than the, also unforgettable, "Ghost" of 1965. Before
there only (sorry) was the dismantling and destruction of the
harmonic-melodic material, passed down from the jazz tradition which
proceeded the epic of free, now there appears a "supreme synthesis."
The message (of peace, love, liberty, and fraternity) which
sedimented for a decade is echoed in the title (ex. "Message from
Albert", "New Generation", "Heart Love", and "Free at Last") and
uses Ayler’s incomparable voice to manifest itself to the world. It
is as if it once again it desperately declares its right to exist,
and to survive.
Yes,
survive, you read well. It seems we all can agree with what Andrea Barbato wrote in his
essay published in 1981, in a collective volume called "Il sogno degli anni
60" (The dream of the sixties, published by Savelli, and now by Feltrinelli).
In his essay he states, "I remember it as if it happened yesterday, those tears on
Frank Manikewicz face, at two oclock the morning of the fifty of June, 1968, in the
auditorium of the Good Samaritan hospital. He moved closer to a small stage, the reporters
were quiet, everyone had understood already, but they listened in silence. I would
like to make a brief announcement. Senator Robert Kennedy died at 1:44 this morning: He
was 42 years old. He did not say anything else, no one said anything else. The
people waiting outside, with the agents and guards left in silence, as well."
"For
me the sixties had died a few hours earlier on that June night, in a both luxurious and
vulgar hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. Not because Bob Kennedy, whom had been killed in that
hotel, was the trustee of the meanings of that decade, after all in those same years John
Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X had died a violent death, but
because it all seemed meaningless. The fervor, hopes, disapproval, and passion seemed
useless. The idea that the magma of a generations revolts, political and racial
uproar could become a project seemed meaningless. It had not ended before, with the rifle
shots in Dallas, but after the gun shots at the hotel Ambassador it was really over."
That
feeling of uselessness, which Barbato mentions, is an important category (which can not be
traced back to the United States alone). It is probably the same feeling against which
Ayler, with paroxysm and frenetic fervor, casts his utopian message: "And night and
day will pass away but love will always be. And night and day will pass away but love will
always win." It is the same feeling against which Jimi Hendrix hurls his guitarist
cacophonies in "Star Spangled Banner". Little does it matter that the metaphor
of death is incumbent, becoming visible in the movie "Woodstock" (filmed between
the 21st and 23rd of August in 1969, and shown in Hollywood on April
1st of the following year or in the New Era) through piles of garbage and
flying papers which counterpoint Jimis vital splendor. What mattered to two
unyielding like them, is to send a message of hope and resistance to the world. What
mattered is not to loose a cultural richness gained in those years in which all seemed at
hand, all possible and easy to achieve. What mattered was not to allow "Young
Music", be it rock or jazz, to become immediately something consolatory, alienated,
aseptic, and estranged. This last concept is better stated in Thomas Pynchons book
"Vineland", "
One of the many ways to chain our attention, since that
certainty we had acquired starts to fade, and soon they will again be able to convince us
that we all must die. They will fuck us over again." (Meanwhile, outside, America
sees its near youth transforming to become "a State of blacklegs and cops.")
Be it
that as it may, there is something extremely emblematic and unequivocally evocative in
those "famous deaths" which quickly follow in the dawn of the New Era. One is
only to think of, Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson, leader of the Canned Heat, September
3rd, 1970; Jimi Hendrix in London September 18th, 1970; Janis Joplin
in Hollywood, on October 4th of the same year; Albert Ayler in New York on
November 25th; Jim Morrison in Paris, on July 3rd, 1971. It is as if
some of the best voices created by the decade of Utopia, would have rather died than give
up to the destruction of their ideals. It is as if the "Season of Love", seeing
as useless all its attempts to impose to the world its reasons and passions, had decided
to part with something similar to a swans song, desperate but conscious of not
having lived in vain.
In fact
due to these principles (the Dadaists add yet another, that regarding Inter de
Milans double loss of the championship and "Coppa Campioni", unmistakable
forewarning sign that 68 was dead even before its birth) the New Era develops along
much more cautious and respectful guiding principles, than expected. It is thanks to the
unsuspected and sublime power of that swans song, that for all the 1970 the
"Season of Love" seemed to react, being able to ward off all the old and new
deaths (for example that of the four Kent students, shot on May 4th by the
police). This is also why the papers of the time talk about a Festival, the one on Wight
Island, celebrated between August 26th and 28th, still rooted in the
binomial "Peace & Love". There is also mention of an anti- nuclear concert
celebrated at the Shea Stadium in New York on August 6th, on the 25th
anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, and the idea that the "cult movies"
of the time as "Love Story", "M.A.S.H.", "Great Small Man",
"Woodstock", and "Zabriskie Point" are all distressfully humanistic
and romantically hippie.
It all
changed in 1971. The lovers of symbolism had had a premonition of this during the last
scene of "Zabriskie Point", when the luxurious mansion explodes in the middle of
the desert, for to them it did not represent the annihilation of the materialism of the
"American Way of Life" but the cultural and physical disaster of those whom
according to Walter Benjamin, were responsible for "making the continuity of history
jump." As predicted by the gloomy forewarning (as Murphys law states, "if
something can go wrong it will go wrong"), 1971 starts with the symbolic, but
strongly emotional death of the Beatles, legally prepared by Paul McCartney. The years
follow with feelings against the hippies mocking attitude towards a
"normal" society, against the Weltanschauung of Woodstocks population,
against the unaccomplished dream of a planetary and hegemonic counter- culture. Only the
"worst" is taken from the preceding years, that "worst" which in an
optimistic historical vision is interpreted as a mere deviation, painful but irrelevant,
from the road leading to the affirmation of "Universal Harmony."
All this
"worst" is represented , here grossly synthesized, by the murder of a young
African American by the Hells Angels at the Stones free concert in Altamont
(CA.) in December 1969. Even more representative was the massacre done a year later by
Charles Manson and his "family". They penetrated a mansion in the southern
Californian desert and sloughtered Sharon Tate and her friends with a knife. According to
Ian Chambers, an English sociologist, it is this last heinous crime to strike the deadly
blow to the precarious and carefree aspirations of the "alternative society." In
fact "the trip through drugs, music, commuity life, and other exotic experiments
foreshadowed a new type of subjectivity, which was turning into an ugly parody, an
apocalyptic dream, and a terryfing trip." ("ritmi urbani", Costa &
Nolan)
All this
"worst" is represented , here grossly synthesized, by the murder of a young
African American by the Hells Angels at the Stones free concert in Altamont
(CA.) in December 1969. Even more representative was the massacre done a year later by
Charles Manson and his "family". They penetrated a mansion in the southern
Californian desert and sloughtered Sharon Tate and her friends with a knife. According to
Ian Chambers, an English sociologist, it is this last heinous crime to strike the deadly
blow to the precarious and carefree aspirations of the "alternative society." In
fact "the trip through drugs, music, commuity life, and other exotic experiments
foreshadowed a new type of subjectivity, which was turning into an ugly parody, an
apocalyptic dream, and a terryfing trip." ("ritmi urbani", Costa &
Nolan)
This
"terryfing trip" has a few moment of resistance, as bold as symbolic. They are
represented by the begining of the transmisions of Radio Hanoi ( Which opened on March 4th
with Hendrixs "Star Spangled Banner") which played "Power to the
People" by John Lennon, recorded at the "Concerts for Bangladesh" (Madison
Square Garden, New York, August 1st).One
started the process could not be stopped. The movies seen that year were a radical
antithesis of those seen the year before, the most popular being, "Clockwork
Orange", "Duel", Straw Dogs, and "Shaft". This was sadly
reflected in the social sphere where a new subculture of skinheads makes itself known,
reaffirming a rooted proletarian mythology which favored white ethnocentrism, by fighting
those considered enemies, such as minorities, gays, and hippies as well.In the
music field the disaster was completed rather than imminent. As H.S. Thompson stated in
his "The great shark hunt," "many figures of the counter-culture started
signing compromizes merely to survive personally, contributing to melt the link which tied
"progressive" rock to a rich and heterogeneus cultural moment, and restricting
the concept of progressive to a manifestation of increasingly limited musical and formal
horizons."Regardless
Aylers dreperate move the end inevitable. It is not a coincidence that one of the
protagonists of Pynchons previously stated novel, before the devastating brutality
of the "redde Rationem" sighs "We had a great time, until it lasted."
Agreed, but, Alas, how long did it last?
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