Albert Ayler (born July 13th, 1936 in Cleveland Heights, Ohio – New York City, 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 an…
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