The Ohio-born tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler probably would have gotten a kick out of Kasper Collin’s documentary about his life, “My Name Is Albert Ayler,” which opens today at the Anthology Film Archives. Named after one of his albums and built around snippets of audio interviews with Mr. Ayler, it attempts and often achieves a fresh, playful style that’s equally informed by jazz traditions and Mr. Ayler’s urge to shatter them.
Mr. Ayler used marchlike structures as the foundation for multiple, chaotic improvisations by himself and his band mates. The solos on his landmark 1964 album “Spiritual Unity” are musical action paintings in which feeling dictates form.
Mr. Ayler’s sound was formed during a rhythm-and-blues-influenced adolescence, a stint as an Army musician and a two-year sojourn in Northern Europe in the early ’60s that included exposure to the music of the free-jazz innovator Cecil Taylor.
The attention-getting final stretch of Mr. Ayler’s life started in 1963 in New York City (where he barged onstage with his sax during a John Coltrane performance and, to everyone’s astonishment, earned himself a fan and a sometime patron) and ended in 1970, when he went missing for two and a half weeks, then turned up floating in the East River.
In his time Mr. Ayler was marginalized as a grandiose, spaced-out eccentric who played like Charlie Parker trapped under something heavy. As the bassist Gary Peacock, one of many former Ayler band mates interviewed by the director, puts it, people either loved or hated Mr. Ayler’s music: “Nobody said, ‘Ah, he has his good points.’” A straightforward, PBS-style documentary about Mr. Ayler would have seemed clueless. Thankfully, Mr. Collin hasn’t made one.
The documentary is far from perfect. It compresses Mr. Ayler’s complex, contradictory, Christianity-derived spirituality into New Age hash. It gives short shrift to the women in Mr. Ayler’s life, especially Mary Parks, his final companion and de facto manager, who has been vilified for building a wall between him and the world. (She spoke to Mr. Collin on the phone but refused to appear on camera.) And it waits too long to reveal that Mr. Ayler’s brother and sometime band mate, the trumpeter Donald Ayler, exhibited obsessive and abrasive behavior because he was psychotic. (He died on Oct. 21.)
Luckily the movie’s missteps are eclipsed by its confident and appropriate style. Mr. Collin and his team of editors treat the sparse physical evidence of Mr. Ayler’s life as the filmic equivalent of a melodic through-line in jazz, staging areas from which to mount improvisations: a montage of newsreel footage of bustling Stockholm thoroughfares, circa 1960; blurry, weirdly poetic details from snapshots and home movies; oft-repeated images of the white-bearded Ayler blowing his sax.
The movie starts and ends with shots of Mr. Ayler’s 89-year-old father searching for his son’s gravesite in an Ohio cemetery, and black-and-white film snippets of the saxophonist standing against a blank wall and somewhat furtively looking into the camera, as if daring us to connect with him.
Throughout, Mr. Collin repeats certain quotations as if they were signature riffs recurring in a tune. The most electrifying is a statement from Mr. Ayler, confidently predicting the staying power of his music: “If people don’t like it now, they will.”
MY NAME IS ALBERT AYLER
Opens today in Manhattan.
Written, produced and directed by Kasper Collin; director of photography, Peter Palm; edited by Eva Hillstrom, Patrick Austen and Mr. Collin. At the Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, at Second Street, East Village. Running time: 79 minutes. This film is not rated.
No comments:
Post a Comment