Related Recs

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Albert Ayler

My dad is one of the biggest jazz heads in the world. He used to pick me up from the mall in eighth grade blasting Pharaoh Sanders or Maynard Ferguson, and when I got in, instead of turning it down, he would turn it up and say, “LISTEN TO THIS, MOUSE!!! JEEZ!!” Anyways: I first fell in love with Albert Ayler when I saw the 2013 Whitney exhibition Blues for Smoke, and on the ground floor--this is when the museum was still in the Breuer--they were playing this beautiful film of Ayler performing “Spirits Rejoice”--I think on French television. It’s very bizarre, very classic Ayler--it starts and stops multiple times, it mocks its source material, it discharges it into ecstasy. He’s like...the Herodotus of jazz. You can hear Louis Armstrong as much as you can hear Pharaoh Sanders. Ayler had one of the most fascinating lives. It was far too short: he died at 34, and there were rumors for decades that the mafia murdered him by tying him to a jukebox and throwing it into the East River. Where to start? Well, his version of “On Green Dolphin Street” is one of the craziest things you’ll ever hear. Same goes with “Summertime.” And his live recordings are W-I-L-D: try “Live At Greenwich Village.” You can practically hear the paint peeling off the walls during “Truth Is Marching In.”I think there’s this idea that free jazz was somehow inevitable, the same way that Abstract Expressionism was--that it was simply the logical endpoint of the art form. I don’t think that’s quite right. There’s an album called The Albert Ayler Story, which is like an audio documentary and which I also recommend a lot, in which there are lots of interviews with Ayler and friends, plus formative recordings. And his drummer Milford Graves talks how there was a movement in the 1960s to stop jazz music--specifically Pharaoh and Sun-Ra and Ayler--because the musicians were too involved in political activism. Critics said it had nothing to do with the music. But to Graves, this free or avant-garde jazz was always about political progress, because it allows you to have “abstract thoughts” that you later “condense” into something “more logical.” He says of the work he was making and would have continued to make with Ayler, who died in 1970: “I think the music was going to direct people into another area of consciousness.” That’s what was lost when Ayler died. Whereas in something like pop music, “you’re constantly moving around in a circle, where there’s no kind of opening out. You’re caught.” Isn’t that fascinating?

@rachel-seville

Mar 30, 2021

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Jazz and electronicA

Any Bill Evans Trio album, particularly LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD. Floating Points albums including his remarkable collaboration of Pharaoh Sanders. Dawn of MIDI if you want something a little more angular and abstract.

@marts

Feb 1, 2025

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Brilliant corners - thelonious monk

Thelonious monk is good i think this album is a little abstract but he is a good listen

@catzoo222

Feb 14, 2025

Top Recs from @babyboybrida

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the scene from girls where marnie covers stronger by kanye west

this was the epitome of the Obama administration

@babyboybrida

Feb 19, 2024

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Sex positive Accelerationism

Not a rec but a trend I noticed in music. In Hayes Code Hollywood (puritanical production mandates against things like sex, violence, swearing in movies), there were musical numbers that took otherwise innocuous songs and added eroti./BDSM undertones. we had “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The big dance sequence in Minnelli’s The Pirate, where a woman is transformed into a donkey/bunny(? I forget) on all fours (I think?) while Gene Kelly gyrates around her in tight, low cut leather (this is crystal clear). Fast forward (I’m skipping many steps - an amateur at this sort of thing) to the late 2000s/early 2010s. The latent BDSM becomes more explicitly lyrical in songs Like “Bad Romance” and (obviously) “SM.” However, these songs have erotic purchase - they chart desire ( “ I want your revenge” “Chains and whips excite me”) without the context of the body. The instrument and the lyrics let the listener construct titillation/lust. Then, in the latter 2010s, we get total assaults of the physical experience of pleasure in Songs like “WAP” artists like Cupcakke, etc. so explicit that they undermine eroticism. At the same time, there’s also artists like Carly Rae Jepsen, who wax about yearning in a mystical, spiritual fashion (that im sure Jia Tolentino wrote about somewhere). still working out why, but I think this change speaks to how rabidly we want sensation (not contemplation) from art but also (bc we get most of our art electronicall) technology and (still Working this one out) religion? i told my friend about this and he said, “Sex Positive Accelerationism.”

@babyboybrida

Feb 26, 2024

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accidental divinities of man and nature

The following photos are examples. another instance which belongs only to memory: I was teaching kindergarten on the UES at a point in my life which seemed to have no point but one morning I was walking from 86th street where they have enormous lavish dogs who look like they have a 401k and the sun was coruscating like entire streets were orange and I strolled past this Platonic piece of dog shit that was sculpted like a soft serve and the shit had this gleaming halo from the sun and stopped and stared at it for like 5 minutes This song from the legend of Zelda always plays when I see these: https://youtu.be/qtCWgWUhA8s?si=f13382M560HRzX6B

@babyboybrida

Feb 4, 2024