Albert Ayler and the death of Coltrane

In 1967, Albert Ayler plays saxophone at the funeral of his close friend and frequent collaborator John Coltrane.  In the midst of this performance (a recording was made though it is impossibly difficult to get hold of) Ayler’s saxophone drops from his mouth, yet he in ‘some’ sense (what this ‘some’ means is what will be in question) continues playing.  The instrument absent from his mouth, Ayler screams his funeral oration for an unspecified amount of time (time will also be in question) with ostensibly no awareness of what surrounds him.  Eventually, reverie concluded, Ayler picks up the saxophone and continues to play.  The terms within which music is generally thought are insufficient to consider this event.

Ayler’s scream inscribes itself as the transcendence of music; a caesura marking the crossing of the threshold of music in music; from within music to what always exceeds it (music defined as the lack of an excess).  The music (the screams) would be impure echoes and distortions of a realm beyond it.  Ayler’s screams would at once be the transgression of music and the recognition of the impossibility of such a rupture (the dream of a poem before which the page tears and shatters opening unto its truth); it would be the gesture touching the limit of its instrument and the limit of the language of music itself.  By its nature a limit touches both its inside and its outside, their difference indeterminable…  Ayler’s screams score a negative theology travelling in reverse.
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A certain type of Nietzschean gesture (closer to a certain post-war France than to Nietzsche) marked by the fact that there is nothing to transcend to.  That the abyss, viewed from the perspective standing over the void of the grave (six feet as infinite depth), is only that: abyss.  That truth lies not in what is always in excess of the abyss but rather, truth as the abysmal itself -  it is at the edge of this chasm of the grave that Ayler might hear the words of Silenus.  Coltrane’s grave then, would be the void at the limit of any language which, powerless to speak, can only scream.  Screams that echo the void of the abysmal encounter of the grave and it is terror itself which with a gravity unbound, pulls the instrument away from the mouth, pulls music to face its finitude.  In this moment Apollo gives way to Dionysus, form opens to frenzy.  Only an act of pure artistic will returns Ayler from this void.
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And Into Silence…  Why screams?  Why not silence?  It doesn’t matter; the effect would be the same.  The rapport of music to silence is indefinable, a multiplicity of differing relations with no centre and thus, only time to distinguish them (Ayler’s acknowledgement of this in his playing is perhaps unrivalled).  Silence would be no more felicitous to this event than screams, nor will the difference between the two ever be found definitively.  Felicity would consist in jettisoning the two approaches very sketchily (and with the weight of a heavy pen) outlined above.  Two approaches that seem to continue to structure most contemporary understanding of music (we evade the question of formalism for the time being).  Only in abandoning the solitary, heroic, and transcendent will a free space for music open before us. 

-Pee. Rek.