Albert Ayler (born July 13th, 1936 in Cleveland Heights, Ohio – November 1970) 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 on his tenor saxophone—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, is the music's backbone.
Genre(s):
Jazz
