Charles Tyler's "Eastern Man Alone" Reissued

Charles Tyler's Eastern Man Alone (ESP 1059) was first released in 1967 and perhaps could not be said to have caused a sensation. That was a year where so much was going on musically that some things did not get all the attention they deserved.

Now it's out again on CD and to return to it again after so many years is to hear it with all the intervening music in between as a new context. Fact is the instrumentation was unusual at the time. Tyler on alto plus David Baker on cello and the two acoustic basses of Kent Brinkley and Brent McKesson.

Tyler began his career in the limelight as a member of Albert Ayler's group and by 1967 he was taking some steps away from the speaking-in-tongues frenetic solo style he initially adopted. Eastern Man moves toward a chamber jazz. The three strings and sax combination allows for a more intimate sound, with the strings playing foil to Charles's stringent alto. The melody heads still have an Ayleresque down-home folkishness to them, but Charles' solos tend to bounce off the ceiling a little less.

It was a rather different offering to the typical "new thing" sides that preceded it. But the music is still on the outside track.

It bears hearing again. There is much to like in the interactions of the quartet. It innovated and it turns out that similar instrumentations became quite ordinary in later years. There are moments where intonation is non-standard, but that gives the music some rawness and guarantees that those who are looking for a slicker veneer will not take to it. Perhaps that explains it's relative neglect over the years.

Listening again now, though, I find that there was much that was prophetic. The music has a conviction to it. Listen a few times and you'll no doubt see what I mean.

Charles Tyler's First Recording, 1966

After a significant association with Albert Ayler's band in 1965, where he was present on Ayler's magnificently raucous Bells, Charles Tyler put together a group of his own and entered the studios for ESP Disk in February 1966.

ESP has just reissued that album, simply titled Charles Tyler Ensemble, and though I haven't listened to it in years, the music jumped out of my speakers with a renewed freshness and intensity.

Tyler was then strictly on alto sax (he later also played baritone) and his playing at the time in part reflected Ayler's influence, notably in his sometime use of exaggerated vibrato and a heightened "speaking in tongues" quality of improvisation. The band had an unusual lineup of the great Henry Grimes on bass, Joel Friedman on cello, Charles Moffett on orchestral bells, a young Ronald Jackson on drums and of course Tyler himself.

They romp through four very spirited pieces with energy and determination. This is the free jazz playing of the first wave of players to follow in Ornette Coleman's wake, and the music often has a raw power, a brashness, a kind of unabashed vitalism that later incarnations of the music sometimes put to the side in favor of increased virtuosity and more sophisticated group interactions. The "pure," undiluted burst of free expression contained on this first Tyler recording breathes anew in the context of the world of 2009.

This may not make my top ten list of new thing jazz recordings from that first round of ESP releases. It does have staying power, though. Charles Tyler was to have a long, on-again off-again career before he passed from this earth in 1992. Nowhere did he sound more vital than here, in 1966.