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6. Zion Hill
Written and performed by Albert Ayler
From the album Love Cry (Impulse, USA 1968)
00.00: A message from Albert Ayler
From The Revelation of Saint John The Divine, 14:7-10:
‘14:7 Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgement is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.
14:8 And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.
14:9 And the third angel followed him, saying with a loud voice, if any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand,
14:10 The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb.’ [1]
00.01: On Zion Hill [a]
‘Also known as Mount Sion, the Upper City, the Southwestern Hill ‘Zion’ became applied to the section of Jerusalem where the fortress stood, and after Solomon’s Temple was built there, it came to refer to the temple grounds and the temple itself. Today ‘Zion’ is often used metaphorically, to symbolise Jerusalem and the Promised Land to come, in which God dwells among his chosen people.’ [2]
Mount Zion. Jerusalem Pedia, The Free Jerusalem Encyclopaedia. http://www.jerusalempedia.com/mount_Zion.html
00.02: On Zion Hill [b]
‘Zion Hill Baptist Church of Bladenboro, North Carolina.
The church Sanctuary is located two miles North of the town of Bladenboro. It sits beside the highways NC 131 and NC 410 at the intersection of Zion Hill Church Road. This has been the meeting place for the Church since it was organized in the year 1885.
The Church community took shape from the then existing public school district of which a one-room schoolhouse was the centre. The organisation of the Church came out of a need for a worship place closer by. The residents of the community, most of whom were of the Baptist denomination, were undergoing hardships to attend the services of their respective churches. The mode of travel was walking and by horse-drawn conveyances. The roads were rough and hazardous to travel.
When Mrs. Elizabeth Ann (Davis) Butler offered a one-acre lot of land, upon which a church house could be erected, the Baptists organized themselves. They chose the name ‘Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church’. The new Church chose a building site to be adjacent to the schoolhouse and began soliciting materials to build a church house. The building project was a community effort, as the Church members and well-wishers donated labour, timber, beasts of burden, the use of sawmills and such supplies needed for the church house. The house was quickly built and dried in time suitable for the Church to begin holding its Worship services.
There is not known to be a record of a roll of the Charter Members; however, the records of the Cape Fear Association of Baptist Churches show that Zion Hill Church had forty-one members by October 1, 1886.’ [3]
Zion Hill Baptist Church of Bladenboro. http://www.zionhillbaptist.net
00.03: On Zion Hill [c]
‘Zion Hill Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia.
About Us
Church History
Formed by a group of eight former slaves in a brush arbor, Zion Hill Baptist Church was formed in 1872 under the pastorship of the Reverend Robert Grant. Shortly, following a 10 week revival that resulted in significant growth of the church, Rev. Grant resigned and was followed by the Reverends Jesse Davis, Cyprus Wilkins, and Crawford Holmes.
During these early years Zion Hill continued to grow in membership, influence and challenges. Reverend W. W. Floyd became pastor during a time of division in the membership but God brought the flock back together and Pastor Floyd led the church in erecting a wooden house in which to worship. Following the home-going of Reverend Floyd, the church experienced continued growth, requiring the construction of another church edifice, led by Reverend C. H. Robinson.
Reverends J. T. Johnson and L. M. Terrill led Zion Hill through the Great Depression, followed by Reverend Larry H. Williams, who led Zion Hill in securing the church’s present location. Reverend Williams retired as pastor of Zion Hill in 1992.
In January of 1994, Zion Hill received the Reverend Doctor Aaron L. Parker as its tenth pastor. Reverend Parker’s God-filled sermons and divine visions, along with the church’s uplifted spirit, are resulting in rapid membership growth, innovative spiritual programmes and timely community outreach ministries. The youth ministry has become a vibrant and integral part of the church’s mission, new spiritual programs are in progress and the church family is pressing ever-forward towards its mission.
In 2006, Dr. Parker and Zion Hill embarked as a family on ‘The Rock Project,’ a $20 million building programme to relocate Zion Hill to a 40 acre site in South Fulton County. This expansion of facilities will support the continued growth of Zion Hill, but more importantly, will permit the expansion of services that this congregation can provide to God’s people. ‘Living to Love and Loving to Serve!’’ [4]
Zion Hill Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia. http://www.zionhill.org
00.04: On Zion Hill [d]
‘Since 1967, Israel has appropriated 35 percent of the land in East Jerusalem in order to build 50,000 apartments for Jews; at the same time, not a single new neighbourhood has been built for the Palestinians, despite the fact that their population in East Jerusalem has nearly quadrupled. During all those years, only 600 apartments were built with government support in the existing Palestinian neighbourhoods. The Palestinians’ natural growth rate in the city means that 1,500 new apartments are needed every year.
According to Seidemann, most of the lands still in Palestinian possession cannot be built upon due to bureaucratic delays heaped on by Israel. The construction potential within the Palestinian neighbourhoods has been practically exhausted. Even Palestinians who live in an area for which there is an approved master plan end up so frustrated by the legal, economic and bureaucratic obstacles that they eventually resort to the risk of building without a license. East Jerusalem is the only place in Israel where a unit from the Interior Ministry, rather than the local authority, operates for the purpose of enforcing building laws (vis-a-vis the Palestinians, that is). Thus, even when the municipality freezes the house demolitions, they are still carried out by order of the Interior Ministry.
Archaeological takeover
In addition to staking their claim in the residential neighbourhoods in and around the Old City, the organisations Elad and Ateret Cohanim have begun taking over the numerous archaeological sites scattered throughout the area. The City of David national park lies south of the Old City. ‘Today, 70 percent of the hill in the City of David is in Jewish hands, and the idea is to acquire buildings on the Mount Zion hill next to it, in order to create a continuum with the Jewish Quarter,’ Elad founder Barry said in a recent interview.’ [5]
The Very Eye of the Storm, by Akiva Eldar, Haaretz.com, 10 April 2009.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1076058.html
00.05: On Zion Hill [e]
‘My opening paragraph begins in the Blue Mountains, a range that overlooks the capital of Kingston, and home of the world famous coffee of the same name. Travelling the narrow, braided, washed out road towards Newcastle, along cliffs as steep and nerve-wracking as the best of them, my destination is the Temple Mount Zion Hill, an informal Rastafarian settlement.
[…]
It’s a slog up the slopes, and the thunderstorms of hurricane season are threatening. Mount Zion could technically be called a squatter camp, paying no taxes, having been set up without permission. From its ramshackle wooden shacks, you can see a famous resort, the sprawl of Kingston, and a nearby military base. A sign indicates I am on the right track to the Emperor Haile Selassie School of Vision, Bible Study, Prophecies and Sabbath Worship. Hundreds of people, including foreigners, have been baptised here, welcomed into the brethren of the Rastafari. I am greeted by Dermot Fagan, the dreadlocked priest and leader of the village. When he worked as a repairman in Miami, he tells me how clients used to expect a white Irish guy, not a black Rasta. A real Buffalo Soldier, Dermot finished up at the army, and found himself having a conversation with a Rasta in New York City. With the intensity and facial appearance of Samuel L Jackson, he pulls out a King James Bible, and directs me to the passages that converted him into the religion. The messiah is black, as it reads in Song of Solomon, 1:5-6 ‘I am black, and comely, oh ye daughters of Jerusalem.’ In Jeremiah 8:21, God’s colour is revealed, ‘For the hurt of my people I am hurt, I am black… ‘ and in Revelation 1:14 ‘the hair of his head like pure wool…’ – feel my hair, says Dermot, his dreads, indeed, as thick as wool. It is a cornerstone of our brilliance as reasoning beings, and our desire to interpret proof for our convictions, that the Bible can say just about anything to anybody. If a group of people feel it justifies constant marijuana smoking and the belief in an Ethiopian messiah, then all the power to them. Certainly an afternoon of conversation with Dermot is an afternoon of thoughtful and enthusiastic debate. This particular village, he tells me, has been set up specifically as a mission to prepare for the coming of the Beast. In a dream, the Emperor, King of Kings appeared to Dermot and gave him the task of setting up a refuge off the grid, away from our impending doom – a doom with a remarkably technological twist.’ [6]
The Other Side of the Brochure in Jamaica, by Robin Esrock, Travel Writer.
http://www.moderngonzo.com/reports/the-other-side-of-the-brochure-in-jamaica
00.06: On Zion Hill [f]
‘Venus is covered by a thick layer of clouds that extends between 45 and 70 km above the surface. These rapidly-moving clouds are mainly composed of micron-sized droplets of sulphuric acid and other aerosols (fine solid or liquid droplets suspended in a gas), the origin of which is unknown.
Earlier missions have shown that the clouds resemble Earth’s light fogs, but their thickness creates an impenetrable veil.’ [7]
New Details on Venusian Clouds Revealed. physorg.com 30 May 2008.
http://www.physorg.com/news131373926.html
00.07: On Zion Hill [g]
‘Observations by the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission have provided strong new evidence that the solar wind has stripped away significant quantities of water from Earth’s twin planet. The data also shed new light on the transfer of trace gases in the Venusian atmosphere and wind patterns. The results will be presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany, today.
The SPICAV and VIRTIS instruments carried by the spacecraft have been used to measure concentrations of water vapour in the Venusian atmosphere at altitudes ranging from the lowest 10 km up to 110 km, high above the cloud tops. Studies led by scientists from Belgium and Russia have found that the ratio of heavy water, which contains the isotope deuterium instead of hydrogen, to normal water is nearly twice as high above the clouds compared to its value in the lower atmosphere.
‘Water vapour is a very rare species in the Venusian atmosphere: if it were in liquid form now, it would cover the surface of Venus with just a few centimetres of water. However, we believe Venus once had large volumes of water that have since escaped into space or stripped away by the solar wind. These results from Venus Express demonstrate that the heavier water containing deuterium has not been able to escape Venus’s gravity as easily as normal H2O. This enrichment of heavy water provides strong evidence that water loss is occurring in the upper atmosphere and that Venus was probably more humid and Earth-like in the distant past,’ said Dr Emmanuel Marcq of the LATMOS laboratory in France.’ [8]
Venus Express Adds Evidence for Atmospheric Water Loss on Earth’s Twin, September 16, 2009, Physorg.com. Source: Europlanet.
http://www.physorg.com/news172307964.html
00.08: On Zion Hill [h]
‘In a night vision I saw a very dark sky and I looked up and saw a large star falling as fast as it could move. Brothers and Sisters you see there is only Heaven and Earth. There are no other planets. The planet that they call Venus is Zion Hill, the home of God Almighty. That’s why it is written he created the Heaven and Earth, the Sea and the Fountains of Waters and all the things therein.’ [9]
To Mr Jones – I had a Vision, by Albert Ayler, The Cricket – Black Music in Evolution, 1969, http://www.chimurengalibrary.co.za/periodicals.php?id=28
00.09: Albert Ayler in the Promised Land
If Albert Ayler told you he was born in the Promised Land, he would not necessarily have been without reason.
Ohio was, you will recall, one of the destinations of the underground railroad, the secret, shifting system of escape routes from slavery in the South to freedom in the North in the mid nineteenth century, during which period minister Charles Colcock Jones, author of The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (1842), noted with disdain that slaves were on the whole loath to spend Sundays in religious observance, preferring to skip church for such selfish pursuits as going fishing, getting drunk, and avoiding white people in general and their owners in particular, such as was possible.
We think it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume the slaves spent a few of these hard won scraps of free time planning their way out of the South, where Jones propagated the Gospel and the right of slave owners to their property, away from the likes of Jones, off to the North, maybe to Ohio. Albert Ayler was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1936.
00.10: The migration of forms part one: nonsense
Albert Ayler’s Zion Hill puts us in mind of a conversation between Ayler’s friend Marion Brown and journalist Robert Palmer on the subject of jazz and the African American church, a conversation that brought us back to The Religious Instruction of the Negroes (see page 100 on this website). Charles Colcock Jones believed slaves should be divested of their indigenous belief systems and be converted into Christianity. However, he did not think slaves should be emancipated:
‘The preaching of the Gospel for the salvation of the souls of men is one thing; the changes in their civil relations in this present life, effected by the influence of its spirit and its principles, is another. The former is the office of the ministry– the latter, the office of Divine Providence. I am not ashamed of the Gospel in respect to the former; I am not afraid to trust God in respect to the latter.
The first objection is this. If we suffer our Negroes to be instructed the tendency will be to change the civil relations of society as now constituted. To which let it be replied that we separate entirely their religious and their civil condition, and contend that the one may be attended to without interfering with the other.’ [10]
Jones was also an advocate of Sabbath Schools whose function it was to teach slaves the Gospel through scripture, sermons, and texts such as The Catechism to be used by the teachers in the religious instruction of persons of colour, etc., Short Catechism, for the use of coloured members on trial of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in South Carolina, and, regarding ‘specimens of the kind of sacred poetry which the Negro children and youth readily learn’, the songs of Isaac Watts, through which slaves would be ‘induced to lay aside the extravagant and nonsensical chants, and catches and hallelujah songs of their own composing.’ [11]
00.11: The migration of forms part two: listening to Albert Ayler with Marion Brown
Marion Brown was a luminary of the 1960s jazz avant-garde. An alto saxophonist and an ethnomusicologist, he performed with Archie Shepp, Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra, and was featured on John Coltrane’s groundbreaking album Ascension. Brown also led his own quartet, recording for ESP, Impulse, and ECM. This is from an interview with Brown conducted by Robert Palmer, which you can find on the liner notes to Ayler’s posthumous release The Dedication Series/Vol. VII: The Village Concerts (Impulse 1978):
‘It was 1974, [Brown] was teaching in Maine, and we were sitting in his living room, looking out at a sunny, late winter afternoon. There was a record on, ‘The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson’, by a Church of God in Christ altoist who plays only hymns and spirituals, phrases something like Junior Walker, and has a striking Ayler like sound. ‘You know’, Marion said, ‘he does sound like Albert. But I think you’ll find that the spirituality of the music during the sixties wasn’t something exotic. It was coming directly out of the church, especially the holiness church. I know there was a whole tradition of saxophones in the church, and I don’t know if Albert had been part of that but what he was doing sure was related to that.’ [12]
Brown’s detection of traces of the Holiness church in Ayler’s music gives us the impression that Charles Colcock Jones mistook the slaves act of casting aside their own songs for an act of casting their voices into the future through the form, content, and context of hymnody, transformed through the secret, coded forms of engagement with sound and song invented in the world before and during slavery. Codes whose job it was to force into the white world perceptions and ideas, older than the slave trade, about the relationship between music, time, space, the body and the senses; ideas which were given new forms, new expressions, new knowledges, by the slaves descendants, who would transform, by way of seduction and infection, the sonic space-time continuum of the white world.
The Fire Baptised Holiness Church was founded in 1898. You’ll recall we mentioned the Church on page 64’s song, I’m Bound For The Promised Land, with reference to its influence on gospel pioneer Sallie Martin, and its belief ‘that the Pentecostal baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire is obtainable by a definite act of appropriating faith on the part of the wholly sanctified believer, and that the initial evidence of the reception of this experience is speaking with other tongues as the spirit gives utterance.’ [13]
00.12: The migration of forms part three: listening to Albert Ayler with Robert Palmer
When Robert Palmer listened to Albert Ayler he seems to have experienced Ayler as a medium, a channel through which other tongues, distinctively African voices, made themselves present. In Ayler’s music Palmer heard the music of the Toma people of Guinea.
Palmer may have heard the music of the Toma on Musique Toma, (Disque Vogue, France 1972) recorded by anthropological filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, author of the documentary The Sacred Forest (1952) and the book, The Sacred Forest. The Fetishist and Magic Rites of the Toma (1954) about which online bookshop bspgallery.com write ‘The authors were allowed to watch and film secret fetishist ceremonies, after initiation to the community, but general hostility led to an eventual suspension of their studies. The author lived among the Toma of French Guinea in order to attempt to observe their ceremonies, something no white man had ever been previously allowed to do.’ [14]
By the time Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau was being initiated into the Toma community, their music may well have become part of African American sonic culture. American slave owners were purchasing people from Guinea in clandestine transactions with the British as late as 1812. Guinea was the source of between ten and twelve percent of slaves brought to America in that decade at least. Enslaved Guineans were among the most immediate African ancestors of the slaves about whose conversion Charles Colcock Jones agonised while writing The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States in the 1830s. Perhaps the meaning and context, the sense of their music, received as ‘nonsense’ by Jones, has at least one of its origins in the forests of Guinea.
Palmer heard other African voices in Ayler’s music. He heard the voices of the Dan people of the Ivory Coast and Liberia, and in their voices he heard the voice of African American singing evangelist, Blind Willie Johnson, in whose voice Palmer heard Albert Ayler…
00.13: Music and Cosmology: Blind Willie Johnson
Born Joseph William Johnson in 1897, Blind Willie Johnson earned his living as a street singer. He enjoyed a few years of success as a recording artist, recording thirty songs for Columbia between 1927 and 1930, some of which outsold the major African American artists of the day. By the time of his death in 1949 Johnson had faded into obscurity: he had not recorded for nineteen years.
Blind Willie Johnson returned to the public ear in 1977, when astronomer Carl Sagan featured his song, the almost wordless Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground, on a disc of images, sounds, messages and music from planet Earth, compiled for aliens in the very distant future and installed on the Voyager spacecraft. This is from NASA’s website:
‘Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2-a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. […] It will be forty thousand years before Voyager 1 and 2 make a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, ‘The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilisations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.’ [15]
We’ve read that Sagan chose Johnson’s song because it ‘concerns a situation he faced many times, nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.’ [16] We also found some fascinating insights into the song in a post by y2Karl on the metafilter website:
‘The song was a hymn of the Passion of Christ. Consider the second verse:
‘Father, remove this bitter cup,
If such Thy sacred will;
If not, content to drink it up
Thy pleasure I fulfil.’
The song recalls Christ at his weakest, most dark and doubting moment and then recounts his suffering. It comes as no surprise then, that the song would resonate with those born into slavery. Consider what Ludwig Feuerbach wrote about the Passion: ‘The Passion of Christ, however, represents not only moral, voluntary suffering, the suffering of love, the power of sacrificing self for the good of others; it represents also suffering as such, suffering in so far as it is an expression of possibility in general. The Christian religion is so little superhuman that it even sanctions human weakness. The heathen philosopher, on hearing tidings of the death of his child exclaims: ‘I knew that he was mortal.’ Christ, on the contrary – at least in the Bible - sheds tears over the death of Lazarus, a death which he nevertheless knew to be only an apparent one. While Socrates empties the cup of poison with unshaken soul, Christ exclaims, ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.’ Christ is in this respect the self-confession of human sensibility. In opposition to the heathen, and in particular the stoical principle, with its rigorous energy of will and self-sustainedness, the Christian involves the consciousness of his own sensitiveness and susceptibility in the consciousness of God; he finds it, if only it be no sinful weakness, not denied, not condemned in God.’
Harry Lewman, who himself has recorded his own version for twelve string guitar - there have been a bluegrass and jazz versions of it as well - has a part of the puzzle:
‘Thomas Haweis was an English physician and clergyman who wrote this song and hundreds of other hymns. Its original title was ‘Gethsemane’ and was published in a book of hymns dated 1792. It is among the many hymns that were taught to American Negro slaves in the 1800s by British missionaries.’ [17]
00.14: The migration of forms part four: listening to Albert Ayler with John Coltrane
When John Coltrane listened to Albert Ayler, to the albums Ghosts and Spiritual Unity (both on ESP, 1964), he heard a kindred spirit, and he heard the future – his future. Ayler had gone somewhere, some place in sound, and had discovered something that Coltrane was also searching for, an idea about sound, an idea for a kind of devotional music that would not so much find its expression but would become an expression in Coltrane’s epic Ascension. Here is an excerpt from historian Valerie Wilmer’s essay, Spiritual Unity, featured in her book As Serious As Your Life:
‘The relationship between the two men was a very special one. They talked to each other constantly by telephone and by telegram and Coltrane was heavily influenced by the younger man. One of his last wishes was that Ayler and Ornette Coleman, the other important influence on his career, should play at his funeral. […] Coltrane was influential in securing Ayler a contract with Impulse Records but this took place after Ayler had sent him copies of Ghosts and Spiritual Unity. Soon after this, Coltrane recorded Ascension. He called Ayler and told him, ‘I recorded an album and found that I was playing just like you.’ Albert’s reply: ‘No man, don’t you see, you were playing like yourself. You were just feeling what I feel and were just crying out for spiritual unity.’’ [18]
Thinking about what Brown, Palmer, and Coltrane heard when they listened to Albert Ayler, and thinking about Zion Hill, Ayler’s music strikes us as evidence that the descendants of slaves and former slaves used the Christian hymnodic forms, intended to guarantee them a life beyond death and to maintain their condition as slaves, as a means of extending a concern with freedom beyond the promised lands of the north. Freedom to look inward, to allow music’s memory of itself, written in the body, to reveal itself as currents of air. Freedom to have the time to develop the inclination to look up at the sky, above the clouds, into the stars, and think about freedom; after recording Ascension, Coltrane created a body of devotional, space themed albums: Cosmic Music, released in 1966, featured the composition Rev. Martin Luther King. Ayler wrote of seeing UFOs and with Zion Hill relocated the sacred zone of Judaism from the geographical landscape of Jerusalem and the textual space of the Old Testament, to outer space.
00.15: On Zion Hill [i]
‘April 8, 2010
NASA-Funded Research Suggests Venus is Geologically Alive
WASHINGTON — For the first time, scientists have detected clear signs of recent lava flows on the surface of Venus.
The observations reveal that volcanoes on Venus appeared to erupt between a few hundred years to 2.5 million years ago. This suggests the planet may still be geologically active, making Venus one of the few worlds in our solar system that has been volcanically active within the last 3 million years.
Scientists call Venus Earth’s sister planet because of similarities in size, mass, density and volume. Scientists deduce that both planets shared a common origin, forming at the same time about 4.5 billion years ago. Venus also is the planet on which the runaway greenhouse effect was discovered. The planet is cloaked in a much less friendly atmosphere than Earth. It is composed chiefly of carbon dioxide, which generates a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead and a surface pressure 90 times greater than that on Earth.’ [19]
The music of Ayler, Coltrane, (and Sun Ra) represented a concerted attempt at accelerating the expansion of jazz grounded in an engagement, the first of its kind in 20th century popular music, with the cosmos as a visionary space, a space of astronomical inquiry, and apocalyptic omens, a space of matter, memory, and myth.
00.16: On Zion Hill [j]
‘At certain times of the year, Venus is the first planet or star that can be seen in the western sky in the evening. At other times, it is the last planet or star that can be seen in the eastern sky in the morning. When Venus is near its brightest point, it can be seen in daylight.
Ancient astronomers called the object that appeared in the morning Phosphorus, and the object that appeared in the evening Hesperus. Later, they realised these objects were the same planet. They named Venus in honour of the Roman goddess of love and beauty.’ [20]
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/venus_worldbook.html
00.17: the beginning of time, the end of time
We think that what Albert Ayler wanted us to hear, among all of the above and as a form for all of the above, was the sound of the beginning of time – in music, which in Jazz took place in New Orleans. He wanted us to hear the beginning of jazz and the sound of the music as it had been first played, in New Orleans in small groups, collectively improvising, everything happening at once.
Ayler’s idea of the value of music was that it is the healing force of the universe – at whose beginning, the big bang theory tells us, everything happened all at once.
Ayler’s idea about time – outside of music, was that it was drawing to an end. Simultaneously, his music is formally, conceptually, voiced by the beginning of sonic time, and voices the end of time as narrated in the Bible, the end of heaven and earth and hell: Here is Ayler, writing in The Cricket in 1969:
‘I saw in a vision the new Earth built by God coming out of Heaven. Years ago they called it New Jerusalem. It was a solid foundation built by God himself. It is not like the foundation we have now where men seek to kill each other’s spirit.
The vision I had of Jesus coming again, it was at night again; large clouds forming in the east and something said to me this is the way Jesus is coming. The Son of God would be coming in his father’s name, God Almighty. So be ready when that time comes, because it could happen in the wink of an eye. Remember he said you know not the minute or the hour, so let’s be obedient children to God’s laws. We live in darkness now; God Almighty is the God of lights. You see there are mighty angels from Heaven and they are very large. Bright as the sun. Another way to describe it is like the colour of lightning magnified ten times. So you’d better get ready for the bright lights that will appear in the sky. It has been written on the wall of the universe by God Almighty for me to see and give you this message. So don’t transgress any of God’s Laws. The time is at hand. Make up leaflets and pass out to all people Revelation 14, verse 7 to 10.’ [21]
Sources
[1] The Revelation of Saint John The Divine, Chapter14, verse 7 to 10, The Holy Bible, King James Version, HarperCollins London 1957
[2] Mount Zion. Jerusalem Pedia, The Free Jerusalem Encyclopaedia
http://www.jerusalempedia.com/mount_Zion.html
[3] Zion Hill Baptist Church of Bladenboro
http://www.zionhillbaptist.net
[4] Zion Hill Baptist Church http://www.zionhill.org
[5] The very eye of the storm, by Akiva Eldar, Haaretz.com, 10 April 2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1076058.html
[6] The Other Side of the Brochure in Jamaica, by Robin Esrock, Travel Writer
http://www.moderngonzo.com/reports/the-other-side-of-the-brochure-in-jamaica
[7] New details on Venusian clouds revealed. physorg.com 30 May 2008
http://www.physorg.com/news131373926.html
[8] Venus Express adds evidence for atmospheric water loss on Earth’s Twin, September 16, 2009 Physorg.com. Source; Europlanet
http://www.physorg.com/news172307964.html
[9] To Mr Jones – I had a vision, by Albert Ayler, The Cricket – Black Music in Evolution, 1969
http://www.chimurengalibrary.co.za/periodicals.php?id=28
[10] The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, by Charles Colcock Jones, Savannah: Published by Thomas Purse, 1842. Call number LC2751 .J7 (Rare Book Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/jones/jones.html
[11] Jones
[12] Albert Ayler: The Dedication Series/Vol. VII: The Village Concerts (Impulse/abc, 1978): liner notes by Robert Palmer
[13] The Fire Baptised Holiness Church
http://www.fbhchurch.org
[14] BSP Gallery Bookshop old and rare books
www.bspgallery.com.au/
[15] Yoyager. The Interstellar Mission. Golden Record
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html
[16] The Music of the Voyager Interstellar Record, by Stephanie Nelson and Larry Polansky, Journal of Applied Communication Research, November 1993. Quoted in en.wikipedia.org/…/Dark_Was_the_Night,_Cold_Was_the_Ground
[17] Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground, by Blind Willie Johnson, posted by y2karl, 15 September 2005
http://www.metafilter.com/45137/Dark-Was-The-NightCold-Was-The-Ground-by-Blind-Willie-Johnson
[18] Spiritual Unity, from As Serious As Your Life, Valerie Wilmer (1977, Alison & Busby)
[19] NASA-Funded Research Suggests Venus is Geologically Alive. RELEASE: M10-081, NASA April 8, 2010
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/apr/HQ_10-081_Venus_Volcanoes.html
[20] http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/venus_worldbook.html
[21] To Mr Jones – I had a vision, by Albert Ayler, The Cricket – Black Music in Evolution, 1969
http://www.chimurengalibrary.co.za/periodicals.php?id=28
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