E-Mail This Article to a Friend A tale of two saints Albert Ayler and Lenny Bruce get boxed BY JON GARELICK

Saint is a tough gig. But when you’re an artist who dies young and misunderstood — unappreciated, broke — that can be your posthumous luck, good or bad. What you represent tends to overshadow what you did. Such is the stuff legends are made of.

The jazz-saxophonist Albert Ayler was born in Cleveland in 1936; his body was found floating in New York’s East River in November 1970. The comedian Lenny Bruce was born Leonard Alfred Schneider on Long Island in 1925 and died of a morphine overdose in Los Angeles in August 1966. Both men were influential, trailblazers, visionaries. And they knew it. Long before Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Ayler spoke about "the message" his music delivered. The message wasn’t about social transformation; it was musical and spiritual. A new nine-CD box set from Revenant, Albert Ayler: Holy Ghost, draws its title from a statement attributed to Ayler: "Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost." Lenny — represented by the new Shout! Factory six-CD compilation Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware — is quoted in the box’s booklet: "I’m not a comedian. I’m Lenny Bruce."

Although he was younger than the practitioners of the first wave of "free" jazz — Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor — Ayler was equally influential. It’s difficult to imagine Coltrane’s form-busting late work — from Ascension on — without Ayler. When you hear tenor-saxophonists "overblowing" in extended passages of altissimo, that’s usually Ayler coming to you via Coltrane — the holy ghost, as it were, through the father. Ayler favored New Orleans–style marches and folk-song forms, hymns, simple melodic structures as opposed to beboppish complex harmonic patterns. There’s some debate in the 208-page hardcover book included with Holy Ghost as to whether Ayler could play chord changes. The bassist Gary Peacock, who played on some of Ayler’s best recordings, says he just didn’t care about them.

What Ayler did care about was energy, "vibrations," spirit. His upper-register workouts were endurance tests — physical as much as musical, for player and audience. The musicians quoted in Holy Ghost talk about his stamina, his volume, his shredding vibrato, his preference for hard plastic reeds as opposed to cane, metal mouthpieces rather than plastic, all meant to enhance projection rather than abet nuanced articulation.

Plenty of performances included in Holy Ghost give a good idea of the physical presence of Ayler’s sound. On a live recording from 1968 (from disc five), Ayler is playing with Pharoah Sanders’s band — a medley of Sanders’s hard-boppish blues "Venus" with the more spacious, modal "Upper and Lower Egypt." Sanders’s tonal warmth and scale-based patterns make his themes and solos immediately accessible to a post-Coltrane audience, even when he breaks into Ayler-like vibrato-laden split tones and shrieks. Ghost book annotator Ben Young gives a good play-by-play analysis here, sorting out Sanders from Ayler as well as an unidentified alto player and a third, unidentified tenor. Ayler’s solo begins at around the 13-minute mark. Working the vampish "Egypt" theme, he projects in a high, hard, whistle-like altissimo and sustains it. Young rightly calls this a "parody" of the theme. Sanders’s "out" excursions are raspy, throaty, wind-driven. Ayler’s are unbroken streams that seem to pour directly from his solar plexis. What’s more, as Young points out, Sanders’s upper-register exclamations serve as orgasmic, extended climaxes to solo statements; for Ayler, those passages, like "Egypt," were the solo statements, sometimes fully fashioned melodies, delivered with peerless control. Other saxophonists might go into the stratosphere for expressionist effects, but Ayler lived up there.

Despite its opulence, the Ghost box is not a starters’ kit. For the sake of their pocketbooks, if nothing else, Ayler novices are recommended to search out his individual recordings on ESP-Disk, especially Spiritual Unity, with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray. ("I remember when I was in Paris, I listened to that daily. Daily," emphasizes Steve Lacy in the notes.) There’s also the beautiful double-disc set from Impulse Live in Greenwich Village, which benefits from superior recording quality and an almost chamber-jazz decorum, especially in the use of strings (cellist Joel Freedman and violinist Michel Samson).

What’s on Ghost for the Ayler fan in addition to seven discs of rarities, alternate takes, and previously unreleased material is two discs of interview material, on which he sounds sweet, manic, melancholy, and painfully sincere. Some material, such as his fabled performance at John Coltrane’s funeral, or a wild and woolly performance with his brother Donald’s band, is of more historical than musical interest. But a 23-minute performance with Cecil Taylor’s band (with Peacock, Murray, and alto-saxophonist Jimmy Lyons) is a revelation; Ayler’s gestural rhythmic patterns are the perfect complement to Lyons’s Bird-like classicism and of a piece with Taylor’s overall conception. Young calls this "the first recording from anywhere in the jazz spectrum of a long-form improvisation with no overt synchronization — of time, structural harmony, or song" — the beginning, in other words, of free jazz. There’s some beautiful work with Cherry (Ayler’s preferred trumpeter before bringing in his brother Donald), and more with the Ayler/Peacock/Murray trio, in which one hears that Ayler was as sensitive to ensemble delicacy — the weblike cymbal work of Murray, the touch and tone of Peacock’s melodic embellishments — as to sonic juggernauts. The box also includes facsimiles of family photos, a chapbook by poet Paul Haines, a handbill from the New York jazz bar Slug’s, and an envelope of dried, pressed flowers — Albert’s earthly relics.

WHEREAS AYLER DURING HIS LIFETIME was known among jazz fans, Lenny Bruce by the time he died had become a minor international celebrity. His big break came when he tied for first place in an Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts radio-show competition in 1948. (The performance is included on the Shout! set). By the end of his career, he’d appeared on Steve Allen’s Tonight Show, sold out Carnegie Hall, made headlines for obscenity busts, and been refused admittance to Great Britain as an "undesirable alien." It’s difficult to disagree with the contentions of most of his hagiographers that Lenny was hounded to death by the cops. It didn’t help that — in his mania — Lenny’s performances devolved into legal briefs and the reading of court transcripts. Posthumously, Lenny has become the poster boy for artistic free speech, and there’s virtually no comedian since Richard Pryor who hasn’t thanked him for paving the way.

What Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware reminds us is that Lenny Bruce was actually funny — much funnier than the kind of bits that got him busted or gained him notoriety. Some of these pieces now survive (on Let the Buyer Beware and his Fantasy recordings) as historical documents — early performance art. "Are There Any Niggers Here Tonight?" and "How To Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties" pre-date Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Quentin Tarantino, and Randall Kennedy by a couple of decades, but some 40 years later, these pieces are little more than toothless preaching. Equally flat are pieces like "Religions, Inc." and "Christ and Moses," in which Lenny "exposes" the hypocrisy of religious crusaders and moralists.

What’s still fresh and funny on Buyer Beware is Lenny’s Jewish hipster flow, the spritz of his spiels, and the intimacy of his delivery. It’s difficult to think of any current stand-up comic who possesses his willingness to break form and engage in back-and-forth banter with an audience, who’d risk departing from the set-up-and-delivery of laughs for spontaneous free-association. To judge from the pieces here, most of which hadn’t been released before, that’s where the "danger" came from in Lenny’s performances — never being able to predict what he’d do or say next. He jumps on a pompous audience member for smoking a cigar ("What the fuck is it? Why is it that you live up to the image, man?") and goes off on a riff about Johnny Mathis getting hassled by a redneck in a Las Vegas bar for supposedly "offending" a white waitress.

Lenny was the first hipster comic. In an era of nervous schlemiels like Bob Newhart and Shelley Berman, a brainiac like Mort Sahl, or even his friend Jonathan Winters, Lenny’s finger-snapping punctuations along with the rhetorical flourish of his constant "Dig!" and Yiddish interjections ("emmis!") set him apart. He sees the world in terms of his Jewish childhood (his Aunt Mema is a constant reference) and show business. His take on the typical Warner Bros. prison movie, "Father Flotsky’s Triumph," encompasses his feelings about race, sexuality, and, of course, authority. His one side-splitting bit here is the classic "The Palladium," in which a mediocre comedian gets his wish to play a "class" room, London’s Palladium Theatre — and bombs.

Of course, it’s still shocking to hear Lenny casually and "appropriately" use the word "cocksucker" and realize, "This is what got him busted?" Or to hear him challenge the "lie" that Jackie Kennedy was "going for help" as she climbed over the back of the limo. Buyer Beware producer Hal Willner points out that Mel Gibson makes comedy like Lenny’s more pertinent than ever. Jon Stewart, Lewis Black, and the rest of the crew on The Daily Show can take care of The Passion of the Christ just fine, thank you, but compared with Lenny Bruce, they really are just nice Jewish boys.