No jazz artist has been as polarizing as Albert Ayler. Listeners either revere him as a prophet or dismiss him as a charlatan. To some, his music is a divine revelation; to others, an indecipherable ...

“Who cares what you say about people, anyway?” shrugged Marlene Dietrich’s world-weary hostess, Tanya, over the fresh corpse of rogue cop Hank Quinlan at the end of Orson Welles’s 1958 B-movie ...

“The words heretic, charlatan, genius, and visionary were all used to describe him,” Koloda writes, capturing the tightrope Ayler walked between brilliance and breakdown. Some believed he was mentally ...

“Revenant Records tends to focus its energies on artists that we’re passionate about, but whose story is somewhat elusive. Charley Patton. Dock Boggs. Charlie Feathers. Captain Beefheart. Harry Smith.

This 1964 New York City recording, now remastered and released on the Ezzthetics label, captures Albert Ayler with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray at a crucial juncture in the saxophonist's development.