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Albert Ayler (July 13, 1936 - November 1970) was a jazz saxophonist.
Tenorman Albert Ayler was the most primal of the free jazz musicians of the 1960s. He possessed a deep blistering tone--achieved by using the stiffest plastic reeds he could find--and a broad, pathos-filled vibrato that came right out of church music. His trio and quartet records of 1964, like Spiritual Unity and The Hilversum Sessions, show him advancing the improvisational notions of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman into abstract realms where timbre, not harmony and melody, are the backbone. His ecstatic music of 1965 and 1966, like "Spirits Rejoice" and "Truth is Marching In" adopted the sound of a Salvation Army band, and involved simple, march-like themes which alternated with wild group improvisations and took jazz back to its pre-Armstrong roots.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio Ayler was first taught alto saxophone by his father Edward with whom he played duets in church. He later studied at the Academy of Music in Cleveland with jazz saxophonist Benny Miller. As a teen Ayler become such a proficient jazz player that he was known around Cleveland as "Little Bird." In 1952, at the age of 16, Ayler began playing bar-walking, honking tenor with blues harmonica player Little Walter, spending two summer vacations with Walter's band. After graduating Ayler joined the army where he jammed with other enlisted musicians like tenor man Stanley Turrentine and where he also played in the regement band. In 1959 he was stationed in France where he was exposed to the martial music that would be a core influence on his later work.
After his discharge Ayler kicked around Los Angeles and Cleveland trying to find work but his increasingly iconoclastic playing, which had moved away from traditional harmony, was not welcome among bop traditionalists, so he relocated to Sweden in 1962 where his recording career began, leading Scandanavian groups on radio sessions and jamming as an unpaid member of Cecil Taylor's band in the winter of 1962-1963.
He returned to the US and settled in New York assembling an influential trio with double bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, recording his breakthrough album Spiritual Unity, for the ESP label. He toured Europe with the trio augemented with trumpeter Don Cherry.
Ayler's trio was innovative. Murray rarely if ever laid down a pulse, and Ayler's solos were downright pentecostal. But the trio was still recognizably in the jazz tradition. Ayler's next series of groups, with trumpet playing brother Donald, were a radical departure. Beginning with the album Spirits Rejoice and continuing with records like Bells and The Village Concerts, Ayler turned to performances that were chains of martial themes alternating with overblowing and multiphonic group solos, a wild and unique sound that took jazz back to its pre-Armstrong roots.
During this period Ayler was signed to Impulse records at the urging of John Coltrane who was the label's star attraction. But even on Impulse Ayler's radically different music never found a sizable audience.
But something happened in 1967 that remains unclear. Ayler's brother Donald had what he termed a breakdown and Albert reported having a strange vision in a letter to a black, East Village literary magazine--that he had seen a strange object in the sky and come to believe that he and his brother "had the right seal of God almighty in our forehead."
For the next two and half years Ayler turned to recording rock music with utopian hippie lyrics provided by his live-in girlfriend Mary Maria Parks. The records for Impulse, like Music Is The Healing Force of the World and New Grass remains widely reviled by Ayler fans.
In July of 1970 Ayler did return to the free jazz idiom for a group of shows in France but the band he was able to assemble was amateurish and not nearly of the caliber of his earlier groups.
Ayler disappeared on November 5, 1970, and he was found dead in New York City's East River on November 25, a presumed suicide. Later Parks would say that Albert has been depressed and guilty, blaming himself for his brother's problems.
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