The Life and Times of Arthur Doyle

Punk, weirdo, jazz man, blues scrapper, session man, Arthur Doyle is all of these things all at once and he lives on the very fringes of the musical landscape because of it. When he sings he calls back in time to all the ancestors gone before him. His horn releases a white heat that crumbles the foundations of our thoughts of what horn music could be or should be. When he plays the flute he invokes placid futures, the future the ancestors were working toward finally coming to pass.

Doyle is hardly alone in his position as a marginal figure in American music. In an art form known for its many trials and tribulations, he hasn’t made his situation any easier by slashing and burning a singular path through music’s outskirts. The fact that he has done so, however, is what makes his music so unique. Performing in a style he calls “free jazz soul,” Doyle combines the liberation of the avant-garde, the chiaroscuro grit of gospel and r&b and the pure scalding energy of the punk ethos.

The second of five children, Arthur Doyle was born in Birmingham, AL, on June 26, 1944. He attended college at Tennessee State University to study music education. There he quickly built a reputation in the Nashville music scene playing with trumpeters Louis Smith and Walter Miller (Sun Ra’s hornsman on Space is the Place) and touring with Gladys Knight before she and the Pips got famous. He also began to understand himself politically through his time there with SNCC chairman H. Rap Brown.

After graduating from Tennessee State University, Doyle went first to Detroit in trumpeter Charles Moore’s big band, but soon realised he wasn’t going to find what he wanted there. “Everybody was dressed like pimps with straight hair and driving Cadillacs. I didn’t fit in..”. Returning to Nashville he hooked up with Johnny Jones and the King Casuals, an r’n’b act that allowed him to tour as far as Boston, where he began playing in a sextet led by Frank Washington. Finally arriving in New York in 1967, he soon found himself on the precipice of a new era in his sound. He soon fell in with the free singing Leon Thomas and Sun Ra’s trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah. It was in these initial moments in New York that he also met and played with Milford Graves for the first time.

“A friend of mine named Leroy Wilson was walking down the street in Harlem and ran into Milford Graves. Milford was set up there with Amiri Baraka and those cats, and looking for musicians to play the free jazz, so he gave Leroy his number and I called him up. He didn’t really like what I was doing, because I was still playing be-bop. He wanted somebody like Albert Ayler, who I didn’t know at the time. I played with Milford, Arthur Williams, Hugh Glover and Joe Rigby, and I started working on my own particular style. Free Jazz Soul.” Doyle was still essentially a bop player with a soul music pedigree, nevertheless he quickly acclimated to the more radical environment surrounding the city’s bustling loft scene, in particular The Brook on W. 17th St. The saxophonist also began sitting in on dates with Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Declining a job offer with the latter outfit, Doyle instead joined a small combo led by Noah Howard, performing on the sessions that produced The Black Ark in 1969. At 25 years old Doyle had already assembled a resume noting some of the great musicians in all corners of 20th century American pop music. The aura of complete freedom that Doyle developed in his sound, similar to that of Albert Ayler, came from his ability to channel multiple musical energies and layer them upon one another simultaneously. It is through this intense period of study and growth that Arthur moved from a session and tour player toward the beginnings of being a frontman. Just as he was at the peak of his form between Howard’s Black Ark and Milford Graves’ Babi Music a dark cloud loomed large over the Manhattan loft scene of which Doyle was a significant part in the late 60s and early 70s.

The combination of the jazz vanguard’s undermining of the new sound and large scale spying operations perpetrated by the FBI on musicians involved in the African American self determination movement caused Doyle to completely vanished from the scene from 1972-1974. He would not appear on an album again until 1976 when he played on Graves’ Babi Music which also featured Hugh Glover. It was during this time that he began to have significant stress related nervous episodes. The following year, he led a quintet of his own in a performance at The Brook. The results were documented on his landmark first recording as a bandleader, Alabama Feeling.

Amongst the crowd that night was an admiring guitarist named Rudolph Grey. The pair met that evening and soon devised plans for an outfit of their own. Debuting at Max’s Kansas City as the Blue Humans, they proceeded to play a series of New York dates with drummer Beaver Harris. Doyle abandoned the project shortly after, the increasingly bleak situation for free jazz players in the states convincing him to move to Paris in 1982. Not long after his arrival, however, the saxophonist was arrested on false charges of double rape, spending the next five years in prison.

“They framed me up with two American girls and another fella. A lot was spoken at my trial about my first nervous breakdown. It was a set-up job, to drive me insane. It was hard for my mother when I was in jail, with the CIA, FBI and the government harassing her and the whole family. But she dealt with it best she could. Girls finally broke down and said it was no rape..” Horn-less for most of his stint, Doyle wrote prolifically nonetheless. He penned a memoir which was stolen from his cell during one of his many moves from prison to prison. He also produced a massive 300-piece tome of original songs called The Songbook. Once released, Doyle returned to Endicott, New York to live with one of his brothers and took a job as a clerk at Social Services. There he recorded More Alabama Feeling on a boombox in his apartment after a client recognized him at work and they got to talking about the first Alabama Feeling. It was on More Alabama Feeling that his earlier experiments with vocal intonations and reed singing came to light for the first time. “I learned to sing. I had the time. The words for the songs came from everywhere, headlines from the newspapers, my personal experiences with women and men, my time with Milford Graves, my memories of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Mohammed Ali, Amiri Baraka, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, the things they said they were going to change, the things that haven’t changed that much.. After three years they gave me a horn…That was readaptation, they said, getting me ready to be released. I felt bitter towards the United States government, not so much the French administration. They were very good to me, worked everything out and got me out of jail.”