Ayler grew up in Cleveland playing in church and in rhythm and blues bands, and that foundation never left him. When he arrived at free jazz, he didn't arrive through bebop the way most of his peers did. He came in sideways, through military service in Europe and long nights playing with musicians in Scandinavia who had no stake in New York conventions. By the time he recorded Spiritual Unity (1964) for ESP-Disk in a single afternoon session with Gary Peacock on bass and Sunny Murray on drums, he had something nobody else had — a vocabulary built from nursery rhymes and revival meetings rather than chord substitutions.

Spiritual Unity (1964) is the place to start, and it's genuinely strange in the best way. Murray plays the drums like weather, not like time — there's no backbeat to grab onto, just pressure and release. Peacock is somewhere between anchoring the thing and dissolving into it. And Ayler is out front playing these huge, lurching melodies that feel both ancient and completely alien. The tune "Ghosts" comes back on that record in two versions, and listening to them back to back tells you everything about how Ayler thought: the theme is almost childlike, but what he does with it is ferocious.

His older brother Donald Ayler played trumpet alongside him on several records, and that relationship mattered. Albums like Bells (1965) and Spirits Rejoice (1965) have a processional quality — they actually do sound like bands marching down a street, but a street in some city that doesn't quite exist. John Coltrane was paying close attention. The two men were close in Coltrane's final years, and Coltrane's late work, especially Ascension (1966), shows that Ayler had gotten under his skin in a serious way.

The late records are where things get complicated for a lot of Ayler listeners. His albums for Impulse! in the late 1960s introduced electric instruments, rock grooves, and sung vocals — his then-partner Mary Parks wrote and sang on several tracks. New Grass (1969) landed like a provocation, and plenty of people at the time thought he had lost the plot. Looking back, it reads more like genuine restlessness than commercial sellout, though the results are uneven. He was chasing something, not settling.

Ayler's body was found in the East River in November 1970. The circumstances were never fully explained, and the mystery has attached itself to the music in ways that aren't always fair to what he actually left behind. The better approach is to go back to those early ESP records and hear a musician who genuinely didn't sound like anyone else — not because he was trying to be difficult, but because he was being completely honest about where his music came from.