Psychedelic Jazz: What Separates a Success from a Failure
The difference between a mind-bending psychedelic experience and one where you find yourself hiding in the closet counting the minutes until the terror ends usually boils down to one thing: purity of intention. The same holds for psychedelic jazz. Two records, one from 1969, one from 1974, make the case for a single variable separating a genuine trip from a bad one: are the musicians actually present? In mind, spirit, focus, and emotional honesty?
New Grass and Sorcery: Two Attempts at Psychedelic Jazz
Albert Ayler’s New Grass arrived in 1969 on Impulse, produced by Bob Thiele, a legendary producer whose credits include John Coltrane’s headiest explorations: A Love Supreme, Om, and Ascension.
Ayler was, by the late 1960s, one of the most radical voices in free jazz, a saxophonist whose playing reached for something genuinely spiritual through passionate sonic abrasion.
Thiele, in another zeitgeist jazz-crossover attempt similar to Gábor Szabó’s Jazz Raga, placed avant-weirdo Ayler in front of a soul and R&B backing band better suited to Laugh-In’s day-glo and white go-go boots than the Muscle Shoals.
The results are complicated.
Jack DeJohnette’s Sorcery was recorded in two sessions in 1974: Side 1 at Grog Kill Studio in Willow, New York in March (engineered by Dennis Leopard), Side 2 at Bearsville Studios in May, with a small ensemble of genuinely serious musicians: John Abercrombie and Mick Goodrick on guitars, Dave Holland and Bennie Maupin (both, like DeJohnette, veterans of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew sessions five years earlier) on upright bass and bass clarinet respectively, Michael Fellerman on Metaphone. DeJohnette produced it himself, with Orrin Keepnews as executive producer.
The two rooms leave their mark on the tape. Side 1 is comparatively thin, less present in the mix. Side 2, tracked at the storied Bearsville Studios, is noticeably beefier, more weight behind the drums and horns.
Why Sorcery Succeeds Where New Grass Falls Short
New Grass opens with Ayler speaking directly to the listener, describing the music as coming from a different dimension in his life: “I hope you will like this record.” This is the universal bat signal of records that know they’re in trouble before the needle drops. What follows is a genuinely talented artist trying to work his vocabulary (the stratospheric alternate harmonics, the bends into pure overtone territory, the spiritual urgency) into a context that has no interest in following him there.
The backing band choogles in place like Sha Na Na at a farm near Saugerties while Ayler attempts to leave the atmosphere and burst into a completely different, unrelated sonic dimension. Bernard Purdie’s drumming is locked and authoritative, which is precisely the problem: Purdie plays exactly what the session requires.
What Ayler needed was someone willing to dissolve, melt, spool and pool, then reconstitute on the other side of the unknown. Instead, the band plows forth, singing about a new generation urged to sock it to them, all hearts, love, and bumper-sticker psychedelia.
Some of Ayler’s playing is genuinely inventive; he’s threading avant-garde instincts through a big commercial square, occasionally finding the gap. “Heart Love” is era-specific pandering that doesn’t serve anyone, and the tent revival energy of Side 2 plays like a sermon set to “Yakety Sax.”
One of New Grass‘ pleasant surprises is the appearance of the uber-quirky Vox Continental keyboard, holder of a long-term avant pop situationship with the brilliant and mighty Stereolab, whose Tim Gane once said a chord on the Vox Continental “can bring a tear to your eye.”
The tragedy underneath it all is real: Ayler died fourteen months after this record was released, found in the East River in November 1970. The circumstances were never explained.
Sorcery is the straight dope. DeJohnette assembled musicians who listen horizontally rather than execute vertically. “Sorcery #1,” at nearly fourteen minutes, opens the record with Abercrombie zooming through Garcia-esque psychedelic space, Holland’s upright bass anchoring the exploration, and Maupin’s bass clarinet sneaking in slightly sinister, sine-wave, synth-like textures, lyrically traversing the swooping Echoplex sonic comets that adorn this psych-swing.
DeJohnette’s drumming is restrained and tasteful, full of bounce, dance, and, when needed, a little fury. Still, DeJohnette’s masterful playing is a hierarchy of touch and intelligence over force… oh, and what force it is.
“The Right Time” layers overdubbed voices chanting that the moment has arrived, with voices breaking off at different tempos before recombining: an A Love Supreme (1965) sensibility filtered through Steve Reich’s tape-phasing technique on Come Out (1966), by way of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place (recorded 1972, released 1973).
“The Rock Thing” veers almost close to New Grass territory: a straight funk ostinato with additive orchestration, a ripping, overdriven mixing-board guitar solo (or is it keyboard?), klangy percussion, wakachika rhythm chops, and a honking sax solo, until it all breaks down into a smear of colors splattered across the disintegrating soundstage.
Side 2 is where DeJohnette reveals the full scope of his ambition. The Reverend King Suite runs fourteen minutes across six movements (Reverend King, Obstructions, The Fatal Shot, Mourning, Unrest, New Spirits on the Horizon), structured as an avant-fugue: a serious compositional choice, dedicating that kind of formal architecture to King’s memory rather than something more conventionally elegiac. The fugue form carries its own meaning here, multiple voices entering separately, each pursuing the same subject, building toward counterpoint rather than unison. A democratic compositional form for a democratic ideal.
The suite opens by quoting John Coltrane explicitly (Jowcol Music is credited on the sleeve), linking King’s assassination to Coltrane’s death deliberately: two losses from the same two-year window, 1967 and 1968, held simultaneously. DeJohnette plays keyboard, C-melody sax, and drums throughout, and the organ work in particular sounds live, almost improvised in real time rather than overdubbed. The production choices push the piece somewhere genuinely strange: a snare drum run through a slap-back delay and a Mutron filter, the end result landing somewhere that precedes record scratching by years. It’s a complete musical mind building a complete architectural statement.
“Four Levels of Joy,” in 7/4, is genuinely beautiful: layered keyboards (a Vox Continental!) with a Latin inflection, the asymmetric meter giving the groove a slight, productive wobble. It precedes a lot of ’70s fusion compositionally while sounding like nobody else making it at the time. Dare I say it sounds like Stereolab, minus the French socialist vocalisms?
What Presence Really Means in Psychedelic Jazz
Ayler wasn’t absent from New Grass. If anything, he’s the only one fully present on it, straining against a band that was singing about a new generation and sock-it-to-em VW microbus bumper-sticker uplift. The great avant-garde jazz visionary Albert Ayler was left standing alone, horn in hand, in Bob Thiele’s crossover fantasy, reaching for something that was never going to be there: reality.
Sorcery doesn’t have that problem, because it doesn’t have anyone in the room who isn’t already there. Holland and Maupin walked into the DeJohnette sessions with five years of trust built by making one of the most legendary psychedelic jazz albums ever made with one of the true visionaries of the sport, Miles Davis. The result is collaboration, experimentation, communication, and exploration of the sounds between the notes, the space between the rhythm, and the sights beyond the seeable.
Sorcery isn’t a corrective to New Grass, and it isn’t reaching for anything New Grass missed. It’s simply what happens when every musician in the room is present in mind, spirit, focus, and emotional honesty at the same time. New Grass had one musician doing that alone. Ayler’s backing band wasn’t. DeJohnette’s was.
The Records
- Albert Ayler — New Grass (Impulse, 1969; reissued by Third Man Records, catalog TMR-638). Produced by Bob Thiele.
- Jack DeJohnette — Sorcery (Prestige, 1974; reissued by Jazz Dispensary for Record Store Day, catalog CR00524). Produced by DeJohnette, executive produced by Orrin Keepnews.
Recommended
“Canonical Phase” — from the album COQ
Stream:
Bandcamp
Apple Music
Spotify
Tidal
Explore the full Spacefuzz discography.
The System
All listening sessions on a Fisher 400 stereo receiver (1963) into Klipsch Heresy IV speakers via a Rega Planar 6 turntable fitted with a Rega Nd5 MM cartridge. Records cleaned in a Humminguru ultrasonic record cleaner before critical listening sessions.