"Help! [Arthur Doyle] has collapsed! I was trotting along [today] and suddenly it started raining and snowing!"
My little paraphrase of Frank O'Hara's "Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed]" rings true, yes. The great Arthur Doyle has passed away at the wise ol' age of 69.
The free-form aficionado may have passed, but he maintains a legacy far beyond those 69 years. His entrance into the jazz world may be more or less undocumented and sparse in recording, as well as much of his later career, which is still hardly accessible via electronic or digital means.
However, as my generation scratches the surface and unearths old treasures from music history, Arthur Doyle is a name that can be found in most of the record piles right outside any Brooklyn doorstep.
One of his earliest recordings, The Black Ark (1969), under alto saxophonist Noah Howard's leadership, ushered him onto the scene, yet subtly so. Though the time between his first and second recordings may not have garnered too much popular attention, his 1978 debut of Alabama Feeling is highly regarded and much sought after in terms of a physical copy.
His untamed feel, his immovable and stubborn stance on performance as a whole made him a prototypical player for the free-form underground.
"There's something viscerally thrilling about a player so explosive that it seems like microphones and recording equipment can barely contain him," writes Phil Freeman at Burning Ambulance.
And Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore cites Doyle's cut on his '77 record as one of the Top Ten Greatest from the Jazz Underground. He is even name checked on Youth's "Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream."
Though an abridged history on a long-suffering jazz player ceases to exist yet, when it does, Arthur Doyle will maintain an enigmatic quality. While locating copies of his music becomes all the more rare as physical mediums are becoming more obsolete, his name will always be etched in the vanguard of free music.
Here, then, is a teaser for the documentary detailing the mercurial life of Arthur Doyle by Rob Peterson.
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