Albert Ayler – Heart Love 1968

Albert Ayler was the posterboy of free Jazz. He had the right beard, he wore black rollnecks, he was down with the Black Power movement, he was unmelodic to the point of R2D2 and he sure as hell wasn’t a sellout.
In 1968 he “sold out” and made an R&B record. Or at least that’s what his fans and Jazz historians will tell you. The idea that the masses would want to hear a funk record with avant-garde jazz solos all over it is bloody ridiculous. Anyway sellout he was and as wikipedia says, the album “New Grass” “is reviled by his fans and generally considered to be the worst of his work”.

The fact that the album features Albert screaming some soul down a saxophone over beats from funk legend Bernard Purdie doesn’t matter to them. It mixes with other forms of black music and is therefore worthless to the Jazz fundamentalists. They blame his girlfriend. They blamed Miles’ girlfriend for “Bitches Brew” a couple of years later. Jazz is for men of course and Jazz does not go down on its girlfriend.

The album features Ayler alternating between a somewhat avant-garde take on the R&B sax he played in bars as a teenager, the wild soloing he was known for in the 60s and his singing, which is somewhere between amateur soul and the sound of a saxophone. His phrasing is accordingly odd. Helping him with the vocals are “The Soul Singers”, a small girl group (3 voices I think) in a very pop vein. Under that you have his regular bassist Bill Follwell doing a decent, if a little rigid, impression of walking funk bass, there’s some extra R&B brass and even some organ but most of all there is that “Pretty” Purdie beat.

Every track after the spoken/solo Ayler intro incorporates a mean funk beat but where 70s Jazz-Funk has the (by then) established James Brown version of funk and the strung-out post-riots Soul, this fusion is very much a 60s thing. The rhythm is from the funky soul of Aretha Franklin’s pop numbers, of Stax and Atlantic Records. The girl-group vocals are straight-up 60s pop soul. The Jazz on display (which is only really Ayler’s soloing) is very much the Jazz of the 60s as well, while mixing with R&B here it is still a man striving to get new sounds out of his instrument. Purdie was integral to the Joel Dorn helmed Jazz and Soul fusions at Atlantic Records over the following years. Ayler experimented with bagpipes a bit backtracked towards free Jazz on his next LP.

Maybe he did want more people to hear his record, he killed himself two years later after all, but I can’t really believe he ever thought Impulse! Records was going to make a pop hit out of “New Grass”. I can’t even believe it ever got a radio spin. I think it’s more likely a man trying to speak to new people instead of recording another album preaching to the choir.
Regardless, it’s an overlooked, even scorned album that, assuming you’re not goosestepping to the tune of intellectual Jazz zealots, I’d highly recommend.

If you buy a US vinyl copy it will have a gorgeous Impulse! spine. Bonis!