Frank Wright Quartet
Blues for Albert Ayler
((ESP4068))

He was born in July 1935 in another Grenada — not the eastern Caribbean but Grenada, Mississippi.

Along with millions of other black Southerners, he moved northwards with his family when he was a boy to the city of Cleveland, Ohio, where two of his close boyhood friends were Albert and Donald Ayler, prospective prophets of free jazz and the avant-garde.

He became both a “Reverend” and a bassist in a jump blues band. Inspired by the histrionics of the wailing tenor saxophonist Big Jay McNeely, a stalwart of jump blues, he decided to switch to the tenor sax and, much influenced by the Aylers, he turned towards free jazz and made his first albums for the ESP-DISK (The Frank Wright Trio, 1964 and Your Prayer, 1965).

Finding it impossible to make a living out of his music, he emigrated to France in 1969, where along with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Archie Shepp and Anthony Braxton, he recorded for the BYG Actuel label.

He returned to the US in 1974 and lived with Rashied Ali, John Coltrane’s last drummer.

Later in the same year, Wright was recorded by Ali in a quartet setting with bassist Benny Wilson, Ali and the astonishing guitarist and bluesman James Blood Almer, a devotee of Ornette Colman and his music.

The recording became a six-part homage to Wright’s long-time friend Albert Ayler, who four years earlier had mysteriously drowned in New York’s East River.

The rasping beauty of Ayler’s tenor had been a prime influence for the young Wright, and the Blues for Albert Ayler is the Reverend’s threnody, as well as an unissued annunciation that he was back in the US. As for Ali, he had begun to dedicate his work for the betterment of avant-garde musicians.

He formed his own label, Survival Records, had helped to organise the New York Musicians’ Festival in 1972 and opened his own venue, Ali’s Alley.

His fiery drums are a powerful undertow to Wright’s quartet, and are at the heart of the first part of his Albert Ayler’s blues, his solo having the same burning intensity as in his duo work with Coltrane, Interstellar Space.

Wright’s sound throughout has a strange and haunting ambivalence.

He sounds like sonic breath, as if every note is a desperate, freedom-grasping expiration, a repetition of gasps of deliverance, yet simultaneously they are exhalations committed to such a pace that they seem breathless and irrepressible, as in the apex of a wail that he whines out in Part 3, while Wilson’s fingers search for the deepest notes and Ulmer’s guitar comes clanking and buzzing all around him, letting the blues leap to all corners of Ali’s Alley, where the session was cut.

Ulmer, born in St Matthew’s, South Carolina in 1942, had sung gospel for the Southern Sons, become a guitarist on the Pittsburgh circuit and played funk with organ groups in Detroit.

In the same year as this record was made he was studying with Ornette Coleman, and was to join his group Prime Time in 1976 before making a series of classic albums himself on the Japanese DIW label including Tales of Captain Black (1978) and the caustic Are You Glad to be in America? (1980). The blues sang in his every note as a sound of huge and soulful protest.

In Part 5, Wright turns to his flute, sounding like a frantic, nestless bird looking for a home above Ali’s thrashing skins.

When Ulmer enters, his aching electric sound is like the lonesome wires across thousands of miles of US highways telling their desolate and barren stories and, as Wright’s eternal howl returns, Ulmer’s bluesy riffs point the road backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards to the free language of the blues, a shared language posthumously with the astonishing Ayler.

Wright eventually returned to Europe where he found more appreciation for his drastic and unrelenting sound.

He died in Germany in 1990. But get your ears around the unique Blues for Albert Ayler and its astounding amalgam of free improvisation, the blues and Ali’s storm of drums. It’s once-in-a-lifetime music.