you make me happy when skies are gray

Song(s): Truth is marching in, Our Prayer
Artist: Albert Ayler
Album: Live in Greenwich Village: The Complete Impulse Recordings

I went to MayDay on sunday. It starts with a parade of massive, colorful puppets that goes into Powderhorn Park and then the elements of the parade are used in a pageant of spring, rebirth and hope for a better, more whole world. The 2 times I've gone, its one of the better public fests I've been to and has moments of great creativity and theater.

For me, the moment of the festival was the end of the "Story" part of the parade (the parade is divided into 2 sections, the story which has puppets that will be used for the pageant and then the free speach zone, where various organizations can walk behind and make people aware of their causes). I was watching the parade from near the intersection of Lake and Bloomington, a normally busy intersection made even more chaotic by construction on Lake street. The band laid down in the middle of the intersection and starts playing "You are my Sunshine". (Sort of like thi photo [if the photo doesn't appear try here] but with contruction cones, tore up concrete and cars.)

The visual image was striking: bodies in red in the middle of the upheaval of city living; their position was both one of exhaustion and vulnerablilty, and defiance and civil disobediance. "Sunshine" started out as an unfocused series of tones, almost as a dirge, or like these songs from the Albert Ayler: Live in Greenwich Village set. (For a moment before the music found its focus, I was really excited because I thought they were playing "Our Prayer").

It was perfectly fitting in ways I'm still trying to unpack. Mayday is about freedom and its form is one of wonder and intuition. The puppets and parade are made with great skill but they are not of the academy. Ayler's free jazz from these sets is "out there" but is always grounded in simple structures - marches ("Truth...") and chorales ("Our Prayer"). Unlike a lot of other free jazz, it doesn't feel like the product of jazz's (then) 50 year history of slowly severing its ties to songs, instead the music comes from the opposite direction grounded in an almost primative sense of music as raw sound and expression. The tone of the players in these recordings is brash and raw, almost amateurish, but it has a seeking and questioning quality to it, just as the fest's joy of possiblity is tempered by an awareness that we aren't there yet. I'm not sure this was the intention of the beginning but few other things could have summed up the hurt, hope, desire, freedom, joy, creativity, engery and curiousity of modern life that the fest (and Albert Ayler) at its best captures.