When the saxophonist Albert Ayler arrived in New York in 1963, after years of obscurity abroad, he revolutionized the avant-garde jazz scene almost immediately, drastically altering notions of what noises qualified as music. He was not the first to exploit the saxophone’s capacity for nontraditional sonorities—squeaks, shrieks, bleats, whinnies, growls, and multiphonics (the playing of two or more notes at once) had long been used for exclamatory effect, especially in rhythm and blues—but he was the first to create a robust, coherent musical language from them alone. As he put it, he “escape[d] from notes to sounds.”
“For some he was a prophet, for others a charlatan,” Peter Niklas Wilson writes in Spirits Rejoice!: Albert Ayler and His Message, which was first published in German in 1996. Wilson, who died in 2003, lamented that “Ayler has been denied…timeless classic status, which avant-gardists like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman finally achieved.” The recent translation into English of Spirits Rejoice! and the publication of Richard Koloda’s Holy Ghost, the first book-length English-language biography of Ayler—along with the positive reception of Revelations, a recording released last spring of two complete concerts from July 1970, just months before Ayler killed himself—may indicate that he has finally secured the renown Wilson desired for him.1
Defining Ayler’s place in the history of music, however, remains difficult. The folksy melodic introductions and interludes with which he framed his radical improvisations sounded little like the usual cerebral abstractions of progressive jazz. Driven by religious visions and a desire to communicate a message of “spiritual unity” to audiences, he changed his style nearly every year, shedding bandmates like unfashionable clothes; his late, largely unsuccessful attempts at R&B and psychedelic rock continue to baffle critics. Although he inspired younger saxophonists of both lyrical and noisemaking persuasions, his influence may have been greatest among rock guitarists—especially Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine, Thurston Moore, and Marc Ribot—who were drawn to his mix of Romantic sentimentality and experimental grunginess.
Ayler exemplified the thrilling possibilities of an idiosyncratic style freed from tradition: he made the sort of music William Blake might have heard in his dreams. Whether it strikes listeners as invigorating or cacophonous, many will agree with a musician who heard Ayler for the first time nearly sixty years ago: “I’ve never been as shocked by anyone as by Albert—just an electrifying experience.”