Now, Dirk has contacted Jazz Podium and they’ve agreed to allowing the articles to be added to this site. I have placed them in the ‘Articles’ section (a few too many pages to duplicate here). They comprise:
Gone by John Corbett Jazz Podium, February 2020, pp. 9 - 12 - Germany
Ist er das? (Is it him?) by Ben Young Jazz Podium, February 2020, pp.13-14 - Germany
The Unanswered Question by Peter Brötzmann
The first item, by John Corbett, is a four page pre-release of his upcoming book The Last Days of Albert Ayler. Still upcoming apparently. It is mentioned in a 2019 interview in The Rumpus as follows:
‘... I’ve been working on a small, poetic book on Albert Ayler’s death. There are three weeks in which his whereabouts are officially unaccounted for before his body was discovered. That unaccounted time is, for me, tragic and very suggestive.’
In another interview, this time with Jazz Weekly, there’s the following intriguing exchange:
FJ: Being a Down Beat critic, give me your five favs?
JOHN CORBETT: Numero uno, Spiritual Unity by Albert Ayler Trio. Number two, Conquistador by Cecil Taylor. Number three, Derek Bailey's Notes. Number four, Peter Brotzmann's Nipples. Number five, Alex Schlippenbach Trio's Elf Bagetellen.
FJ: I'm curious why you would pick Ayler's Spiritual Unity number one.
JOHN CORBETT: It's my favorite record.
FJ: How many times have you spun it?
JOHN CORBETT: Hundreds. I've noticed something about it that I have never heard anyone else mention, which is that in the middle of one of the tracks, this is to brag that I think I know it better than anybody else (laughing). In the middle of one of the tracks, there is a myth about that record. It is an interesting myth. It claimed that the engineer ran screaming from the room in fear. In fact, it seems that the engineer didn't even know that they had already started performing. So there was some misunderstanding between the engineer and the artists, who were already playing and in the middle of one of the tracks, you can hear, there is about six seconds of test tone. Nobody has ever heard it, in part because it blends in a little bit with the music because Albert kind of wailing on it.
FJ: Right after we hang up I am pulling the recording and listening for it.
JOHN CORBETT: Yeah, check it out.
The second item is the one relating to the music fragments by Ben Young, and the third is a poem by Peter Brötzmann.
Thanks to Dirk Goedeking, and thanks to Jazz Podium.
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