Charles Tyler
Eastern Man Alone
Album · Jazz · 1967 · ESP Disk'
An unjustly overlooked figure in the development of free jazz, Charles Tyler is best known as a sideman to the legendary Albert Ayler. Tyler had blown alto on Ayler’s Bells and Spirits Rejoice and had already cut a solo disc for ESP Records by the time he hooked up with cellist David Baker to cut Eastern Man Alone in the spring of 1967. There are elements of Tyler’s work with Ayler here; for one, Tyler's braying, insistent tone is similar to Ayler’s. And like Ayler, Tyler adapts simple folk melodies into grand fanfares that he proceeds to tear apart from the inside with atonality and dissonance. But there the similarities end; Tyler doesn’t trade in Ayler’s grandiose spirituality. If Ayler blew annunciations fit for the coming of a new messiah, Tyler announced the coming of more quotidian things, like the A train, the dope man, or Saturday night. This earthiness makes Eastern Man Alone a nice grimy counterpoint to Ayler. Along with the simultaneously reissued On the Watch by Sonny Simmons, it's one of the better early ESP jazz titles.
Eastern Man Alone
Charles Tyler
An unjustly overlooked figure in the development of free jazz, Charles Tyler is best known as a sideman to the legendary Albert Ayler. Tyler had blown alto on Ayler’s Bells and Spirits Rejoice and had already cut a solo disc for ESP Records by the time he hooked up with cellist David Baker to cut Eastern Man Alone in the spring of 1967. There are elements of Tyler’s work with Ayler here; for one, Tyler's braying, insistent tone is similar to Ayler’s. And like Ayler, Tyler adapts simple folk melodies into grand fanfares that he proceeds to tear apart from the inside with atonality and dissonance. But there the similarities end; Tyler doesn’t trade in Ayler’s grandiose spirituality. If Ayler blew annunciations fit for the coming of a new messiah, Tyler announced the coming of more quotidian things, like the A train, the dope man, or Saturday night. This earthiness makes Eastern Man Alone a nice grimy counterpoint to Ayler. Along with the simultaneously reissued On the Watch by Sonny Simmons, it's one of the better early ESP jazz titles.
