Scorcher. Ska at the threshold of rocksteady. Mittoo and Dizzy Moore do it to it.

Prince Buster rumpus.

‘Verve By Request.’

Truly a bridge from the sixties into a new age, these are landmark, militantly spiritual recordings, with Ron Carter and co, including Andy Bey tearing up the mic, in New York, 1970-1. It’s a must.

Red hot NTU Troop; recorded by Radio Bremen.
Firing versions of Ju Ju Man… Celestial Blues… an unmissable twenty-five minutes of I’ve Known Rivers…

‘I want to play songs like I used to sing when I was real small.’

This fiftieth anniversary CD includes as a bonus the track briefly substituted for Spirits on an early vinyl edition. It is the same tune known as Vibrations on the album of that title on Arista/Freedom (aka Ghosts when issued on Debut) and as ‘[tune Q]2’ on the Revenant box set Holy Ghost.

Bells is rough, revelatory, key. Albert and his brawling new group — brother Donald, Charles Tyler (making his recording debut), Louis Worrell and Sonny Murray — rocking New York Town Hall to the ground on May Day 1965. Prophecy was captured on tape by the poet Paul Haines the year before at the Cellar Cafe in NYC: the Spiritual Unity lineup, Ayler with Sonny Murray and Gary Peacock; with four performances from the same concert added to the original LP release.

Slammed at the time as a sell-out, and what a joke that is. Brimming with raw physical emotion, but reaching out — in the revolutionary year of 1968 —  to soul, rock and gospel.

Also the blues. When he was still at Cleveland High School, Albert spent two summers touring with none other than Little Walter. “The manner of living was quite different for me — drinking real heavy and playing real hard. We’d travel all day, finally arrive, take out our horns and play.”

Gale-force masterpiece.

Recorded live with Sonny Murray and Gary Peacock in 1964 — just a month before the Spiritual Unity session — already veering so intensely and steeply way outwards from core, morphemic scraps of tunes like Ghosts and Spirits.

Two stone classic LPs from 1964: Witches And Devils aka Spirits — with terrific playing by Sunny Murray and Henry Grimes, plus Norman Howard and Earle Henderson — and Vibrations aka Ghosts, with Murray and Gary Peacock from the Spiritual Unity session the same year, plus Don Cherry hard-wired straight into the mains.
Surrealists go on about ‘convulsive beauty’. Surely this is it, no frills.
Way too spiritual and too jazz to pass for Spiritual Jazz.
Smartly presented, with re-mastered sound, excellent notes, and royalties going to the Ayler estate.