In Paris, 1971, Don Cherry recorded an extemporaneous elegy for his friend Albert Ayler, who had died in New York the previous year. He speaks with the crest of a half-smile in his throat and the candid courage of a child witnessing and translating his past life to a new family who will never quite understand the extent of his longing for what he describes as this light, that is and was Albert Ayler.

Cherry’s innately down to earth mysticism becomes more deliberate in the elegiac register, more like Kaddish or a spark of delayed premonition. He recounts a typical night in their professional life, gigging in Copenhagen, discussing music theory, being one another’s most attentive and enthralled audience. Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and Don Byas are there. There are interludes between scenes and an irresistible suspense threads Cherry’s recollections together as if by loom. He masters the tone of reverence complicated by distress, love so pure it’s disastrous as anything but a sound.

He marvels unabashedly: “And Albert came on. And I remember the first time of me hearing Ornette Coleman. I remember the first time of hearing John Coltrane. All of that I could hear in this sound. To me it was like the word came back. We’ve all heard of the word, in the Bible. At first there was the word, and the word was love.”

What he seems to be describing is the tonal equivalent of what is elsewhere called ‘love at first sight’. It’s love at first tone, at the romance that follows like the only possible syntax for that automatic and mutual affinity. For the duration of the sudden elegy, Don Cherry becomes Albert Ayler, he puts him on. Not like a costume or a mask but like that sacred garment you would wear to ancient ritual, he wears his memories of Ayler like a trance that he steps in and out of in intervals of dirge and awe.

He centres an examination of the dangers of commercialisation for anyone with intentions as pure as Ayler’s were in his nascent days on the scene. He suggests that the need to imitate the version of himself that would sell and help him survive materially, devoured him spiritually by trapping his light in price. He disappears. He’s not the kind of man who should go into the army. It’s not the kind of music that should be mercenary. Cherry shows Ayler mercy and grace in a world that has made a habit of casting him as a doomed enigma. He realises his position is just as precarious except he can contain his own light or sober it, save it from devourers.

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Don Cherry’s speaking voice and Albert Ayler’s speaking voice meet in the tonal territory of harp strings tiptoeing across a vibraphone. Both men play words as delicately as string instruments. They carry inflection past its capacity to indicate a mere mood and toward a way of reshaping the atmosphere using the texture of phonemes upon the open air. They speak in frolic tones and use their entire bodies to enunciate an austere playfulness they carry together in sound and temperament. They are brothers. They are a jazz fraternity of two. The shared gauzy lilt of their speech seems to happen in atemporal unison, as if they are always harmonising, and eternally united even when Ayler leaves and Cherry steps into the solitary bravery of the abandoned. He does not resent his friend for being elsewhere, he begins to duet with his ghost. A part of Albert Ayler survives in Don Cherry as frequency. It’s the frequency of the familiar uncanny, the angelic restraint of prophecy the world isn’t ready to hear in its entirety. Cherry can divide and soften it with cheerful intensity. Both men possess vocal timbres that command the listener to suspend disbelief, a combination of zealotry and calm knowing. They might as well be singing a cappella when they make statements, they run on and past the mundane interrogations of interviewers who record them toward that otherworldly majesty.

They channel elegy ahead of tragedy, ahead of and beyond so-called death. Elegy as love note and mode of noticing and articulating one another as subjects of praise in a culture that disdains sincere mourning. They play together like children in the forest play together, they speak like they share secret untranslatable games. We rarely keep records of our elegies for one another, which should include, as Cherry’s for Ayler includes, when we fell in love with another’s spirits, and when we set them free. The music Cherry makes is a natural progression and adventurousness from this verbal precision to a tonal one of equal magnitude. I hear in him what he describes hearing in Ayler, that light, that reasoning with the creator to give access to the divine to spectators and people who might not believe its detectable in sound until they hear them demonstrate it. Cherry refuses traumatic morning for an ecstatic jazz funeral of one who is many, here. He honours his friend Albert Ayler’s tradition of going into shows and yelling critically toward the bandstand while his peers played: You think it’s about you. It’s not about you! It’s not just about you! Our archive of this elegiac monologue is a miracle leaping into the mundane as a recording. We get to hear a third being come to life in the voice of one loving another. We honour their right to disappear and reappear at will this way, it’s not about us.

Read more essays on Don Cherry in the cover story of The Wire 475. Wire subscribers can also read the entire issue online via the digital library.