The cover of Bells appears almost weightless. A purple form blooms across a field of white, somewhere between diluted ink, smoke, a flower and a body photographed while dissolving. Small green lettering passes through it like digital information projected onto something organic. Nothing in the image announces the violence contained inside. Yet the cover is not misleading. It depicts the instant after impact, when force has already changed into color and the sharp boundary of an object has become a cloud.
The album contains only one Albert Ayler composition, played twice. “Bells (Quintet)” lasts seventeen minutes and forty-one seconds; “Bells (Trio)” follows for another fourteen minutes and sixteen seconds. This repetition is not redundancy. Otomo Yoshihide approaches the composition as an object that reveals different internal structures depending upon how much electricity, mass and human presence are passed through it. The quintet and trio do not offer competing definitive versions. They demonstrate that a composition can remain itself while almost everything audible around its identity changes.
Ayler’s original Bells was recorded at New York’s Town Hall on May 1, 1965. The first ESP-Disk edition was one of the strangest physical objects in free jazz: a transparent, single-sided record with music pressed onto only one face and no groove on the reverse. The empty side was not merely unused space. It made the recording feel like an interruption, a transmission issued before the rest of its container could be completed. Bernard Stollman reportedly released it without waiting for more material, as though the urgency of Ayler’s performance had overruled the ordinary requirement that an album possess two sides.
Forty-five years later, Otomo’s record contains two versions. This may not have been stated as its literal concept, but the correlation is irresistible: ONJT+ symbolically fills the missing reverse of Ayler’s one-sided object. The original offered one extended performance and an expanse of silence. Otomo answers with a second reflection, then places both onto a compact disc with no visible side at all. The history of recorded media becomes part of the interpretation. Vinyl’s physical absence is answered through digital duplication, but the duplication produces difference rather than a copy.
The release date adds another hidden mechanism. Bells appeared on November 25, 2010, exactly forty years after Ayler’s body was found in New York’s East River. The album had been recorded several months earlier, on August 5, so the date of publication was not accidental studio chronology. Doubtmusic explicitly presented it as a fortieth-anniversary project and described Otomo’s intention as reviving the birth and death of free jazz through contemporary sound. The title consequently changes meaning. These are not only the bells inside Ayler’s composition. They are memorial bells rung forty years after the musician disappeared into the water.
Ayler’s “Bells” is itself not one fixed tune but a flowing sequence involving the themes known as “Holy Ghost,” “No Name” and “Bells.” Its melodies come from the peculiar territory Ayler made his own: hymns, marches, bugle calls, folk songs and melodies simple enough to be remembered by a child. He placed these almost innocent figures beside collective improvisation capable of sounding ecstatic, wounded or terrifying. The result was never abstraction for its own sake. Ayler’s music repeatedly creates something familiar enough to love, then subjects it to forces that threaten to pull it apart.
Otomo understands that the simple melody is not a weakness to be modernized away. It is the composition’s spiritual center. The theme appears pastoral and almost communal, but around it the ensemble generates a density that can feel closer to a collapsing electrical station than a conventional jazz group. The melody does not conquer the noise, and the noise does not erase the melody. Each makes the other more emotionally legible. Beauty acquires danger because of what surrounds it; violence becomes bearable because a small tune keeps surviving inside.
The core New Jazz Trio consists of Otomo on electric guitar, Hiroaki Mizutani on bass, and Yasuhiro Yoshigaki on drums and percussion. The “+” adds Sachiko M’s sine waves and Jim O’Rourke’s EMS synthesizer to the quintet version. That plus sign is almost comically modest. It looks like a minor mathematical addition, but the two guests change the atmosphere’s basic chemistry. Sachiko M can reduce electronic music to a nearly pure frequency, while O’Rourke’s EMS synthesizer introduces a more unstable analog vocabulary of pulses, bends and synthetic cries. Between them, electronics become both surgical instrument and weather.
This is where the light, digital impression created by the artwork proves partially correct. Bells is electronic, but it does not express the frictionless perfection often associated with digital technology. Sachiko M’s sine wave can seem immaculate, a tone stripped of biography and almost every identifying feature. Placed beside Otomo’s guitar, Mizutani’s bass and Yoshigaki’s physical percussion, that purity becomes uncanny. It is less the sound of the future arriving than a laboratory frequency entering a human ritual and discovering that the ritual cannot be sterilized.
O’Rourke’s EMS synthesizer adds another historical fold. EMS instruments were products of the early British analog-synthesizer era, associated with patch-pin matrices, unstable behavior and sounds that could slide between controlled tone and malfunction. Thus the quintet does not simply add “modern electronics” to 1960s free jazz. It places Ayler’s melody between several technological generations: electric guitar, analog synthesis, precise sine waves, acoustic bass and percussion. The musicians are not updating an obsolete composition. They are allowing different eras of signal production to argue around something that remains emotionally ancient.
The first version’s five musicians produce a large field in which it can become difficult to tell where one source ends and another begins. Guitar feedback may appear to grow out of the synthesizer; a sine tone can sharpen the edge of a cymbal; bass vibration can make electronic sound seem physical. This confusion is essential. The quintet does not resemble jazz musicians accompanied by effects. It behaves like one overloaded organism whose acoustic bones and electronic nervous system were formed together.
The trio version removes Sachiko M and O’Rourke, but it should not be understood merely as the simpler or more traditional take. Subtraction exposes different dangers. With only guitar, bass and drums, every gesture has more physical consequence. Otomo can no longer disappear so easily into an electronic cloud; the guitar must negotiate directly with Mizutani’s grounding mass and Yoshigaki’s rapidly shifting sense of time. The trio becomes less atmospheric but more bodily, returning free jazz to the problem of three people creating an event without relying on a horn to occupy its center.
There is something audacious about interpreting Ayler’s music without a saxophone. His tenor sound was so personal that a faithful imitation would risk turning spiritual influence into costume. Otomo instead removes the instrument most listeners would consider essential and preserves the deeper structure: memorable melody, collective propulsion, ecstatic overload and the repeated collapse of the border between joy and alarm. He does not attempt to play like Ayler. He constructs conditions under which Ayler’s musical questions can become active again.
The album also marks a contraction within Otomo’s “New Jazz” history. His related groups had appeared as the New Jazz Quintet, Ensemble and Orchestra before arriving at this trio format, which began performing together in 2008. Musical projects are often expected to progress by becoming larger, more elaborate and more heavily arranged. Otomo moved in the other direction, reducing the ensemble until its core relationships were exposed, then using the small “+” to reopen it whenever an additional sound was genuinely required. The name describes a flexible piece of architecture rather than a permanent head count.
Released simultaneously with Lonely Woman, the group’s reworking of Ornette Coleman, Bells forms half of a deliberate historical pair. Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” is frequently treated as a point of birth for free jazz, while Ayler’s death became inseparable from the mythology of the music’s most spiritual and extreme period. Doubtmusic framed the two albums around that arc of birth and death. Yet Otomo’s performances quietly reject the idea that free jazz can be enclosed between those dates. The music survives because each generation is permitted to rebuild its methods rather than simply preserve its monuments.
A bell is an especially fitting object for this process. It produces sound only after being struck, but the richest part of that sound occurs after the moment of contact. The original force disappears while the metal continues radiating its consequences into the surrounding air. Ayler had been gone for forty years when this album appeared, but his musical strike was still traveling. Otomo, Mizutani, Yoshigaki, Sachiko M and O’Rourke do not imitate the original impact. They enter its continuing resonance and alter the shape of the room receiving it.
Satoshi Suzuki’s cover design understands this better than a photograph of actual bells could have. The purple shape has no obvious clapper, tower or metallic surface. It presents resonance without showing the thing that caused it. Its form is soft but not calm, beautiful but visibly unstable. The fluorescent green typography seems almost foreign to the bloom beneath it, just as sine waves and analog synthesis initially seem foreign to Ayler’s folk-like melody. Look longer and the two elements become impossible to separate.
Bells is therefore not as light as its artwork first suggests, nor is the artwork merely disguising an aggressive free-jazz record. Both image and music are concerned with what happens after a form has been struck hard enough to lose its outline. Ayler’s composition becomes guitar, electronics and percussion. A one-sided vinyl relic becomes a two-version digital object. A musician’s death anniversary becomes an occasion for renewed sound. Noise becomes color, memory becomes voltage, and the blank side finally begins to ring.
Review by ChatGPT for Private Release
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