Religious Imperatives, Boogaloo Rhythms: Taking another Listen to Albert Ayler’s New Grass

Abstract

In this article I discuss free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler’s album New Grass, released in 1968. Although Ayler’s early works have entered the jazz canon, this album has been seen as the beginning of his decline and also as a sellout. I argue that by taking Ayler’s messianic religious convictions into account, we cannot only understand New Grass better but can also see how it fits into his career as a whole and widen our understanding of the ways in which religious convictions and experimental music interact.

The Rebirth of Improvisation as a Site for Religious Studies Research

“…Artists such as Alice Coltrane give us a view of improvising musicians working and playing with existent religious structures, a way of viewing religion that, one would think, would be of great interest to modern religious studies scholars. And in fact, these artists and their work have not gone entirely unexamined: Berkman has presented Alice Coltrane's development, while Grimshaw (2011) has done good work in terms of presenting how La Monte Young's Mormon heritage has helped inform a musical understanding that also draws on Hindu traditions as well as avant garde Western art music; Kaler among others have looked at how Albert Ayler's musical radicalism is strongly related to his apocalyptic Christian world view (Kaler, 2013); John Szwed and others have shown how Sun Ra draws on esoteric, African-American religious currents (e.g. Szwed, 1997;Youngquist, 2016).…”

“…Similarly, sometimes the religious language can be used as a means of establishing the music's meaning, or at least suggesting a range of interpretive possibilities or stances to the listener. Some artists, such as Albert Ayler, solidly linked their intended meanings to one religious tradition: Ayler's Christian eschatological vision underlies his music, as his titles and interviews make clear (Kaler, 2013). On the other hand, in many cases, this involves a kind of experiential, esoteric perennialism being advanced, as when (for instance) John Coltrane's song titles invoke Indian religious traditions ("Om"), Christian traditions ("The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost"), specifically African-American Christian traditions ("Spiritual"), and more generic "spirituality" ("Ascension").…”