10. “Bells (Live),” Albert Ayler, lone track for Bells (1965)

As a teenager, for two consecutive summers, saxophonist Albert Ayler toured with legendary blues harmonica player Little Walter. Walter straddled the line between musical tradition and cutting-edge modernity: In the 1940s, he began cupping a bullet microphone to his harp, running it through a guitar amp, and creating an unearthly wail that could cut through any band—making him one of the first musicians to deliberately employ electronic distortion.
 
Two decades later, Ayler was similarly fusing past and future, creating music that referenced his juke joint R&B training yet skewed toward improvisatory noise, amateurism, and spiritual exultation. Bells offers a peek at a time when Ayler’s band was in flux; this live performance includes his brother Don Ayler, an unschooled trumpeter with a flat, affectless playing style and a history of mental illness.
 
The track is actually three conjoined compositions: “Holy Ghost,” an unnamed piece, and the titular “Bells.” Bursts of speed and collective improvised noise in the first five minutes give way to a second section consisting of searching melodic phrases ending with long single notes, delivered with a quavering, exaggerated vibrato. The rest of the ensemble returns at the end for rounds of repetitive childlike sing-song punctuated by more ecstatic noise. The concert thus moves between confrontational altissimo abstraction, cartoonish lyricism, and simple melodies redolent of military marches, gospel hymns, and traditional New Orleans jazz.
 
John Coltrane adored Albert Ayler; his own late playing owes an unmistakable debt to Ayler’s mix of hymn-like simplicity and expressive excess. He eventually persuaded Impulse records to give Ayler a contract, but the signing may have ultimately doomed his hero: With his album New Grass (1968), Ayler tried to reinvent himself as a crossover R&B or commercial rock artist, playing songs that featured female vocals and undercooked peace-and-love lyrics courtesy of his girlfriend Mary Parks, yet that were still incongruously punctuated by long squealing bursts of atonal sax.
 
The music on this record and its follow-up, Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe (1969), looks different in retrospect, and has been subject to critical reappraisal over the years, but at the time, most saw it as a betrayal—one from which Ayler and his career never really recovered. On November 25, 1970, his body was found in New York’s East River, a presumed suicide.