Albert Ayler’s body was retrieved from the East River in Brooklyn on the 25th of November, 1970, a few months after his 34th birthday. The saxophonist grew up in Cleveland, left to find work as a musician playing in restaurants in Sweden in 1962, and returned to New York, changed and inspired, to take the American avant-garde jazz of the period further from its roots than anyone thought it could, or perhaps should, go. Ayler played at John Coltrane’s funeral, as if the baton were being handed on, but his mysterious death means we’ll never know exactly how he might have developed. For many, the apparent, uncompromising aggression of the raucous free jazz movement dubbed The New Thing encapsulated black anger. But Ayler’s music resisted definition, suggesting euphoric celebration and revolutionary fervor in equal measure.

Ayler’s obituary in the jazz magazine Downbeat struggled to categorise the saxophonist. Was the music he made – a mix of nursery rhyme melodies, military bugle blasts, raging spirituals, funereal dirges, and unrelenting improvisations of the harshest quality – really jazz at all? Faced with confusion, and often outright hostility, in his lifetime, Ayler claimed that history would be his judge. “One day the people will understand,” was his oft-repeated mantra. This year’s London Jazz Festival features two Ayler related performances, – a concert of his music by the guitarist Marc Ribot and Ayler’s bassist Henry Grimes, and a free afternoon show by the American saxophonist and Ayler-fan Caroline Kraabel. This is preceded by a screening of new documentary, My Name Is Albert Ayler, by the young Swedish director Kasper Collin. Does this flurry of officially sanctioned South Bank approval mean that the people do now, finally, understand Albert Ayler?

Collin’s film premiered at the ICA earlier this year. It’s a haunting mesh of old cine footage, paint-stripping live performances, and reflective interviews with surviving friends and family. A strange shot, of a semi-naked Ayler, starting silently into the camera, threads through the film, as if the subject is daring you to dismiss him. “I didn’t want to speculate about things to much,” explains the director, “I wanted to leave it up to the audience to decide.” Consequently, Collin avoids commentary and frames Ayler’s life with impressionistic images. On his first visit to Sweden we see footage of the midnight sun that fascinated him. His closing months in Brooklyn see him again obsessed by the sun, staring into it across the East River. And when Collin goes to Cleveland to meet relatives, his brother and collaborator the trumpeter Donald Ayler, and his sprightly father Edward, they get lost in a cemetery whilst looking for his grave. “The film was produced over a long time. I knew about Albert Ayler seeing the sun in Sweden maybe two years into the project. The film was a process. It wasn’t really scripted. I built it around recordings of Albert Ayler’s own voice. The contrast between his music and his soft, gentle voice was fantastic, because it is not the voice you are expecting.”

For Collin, Sweden is crucial to Ayler’s career. “Scandinavia was important for the development of American free-jazz and avant-garde music,” he suggests. “Albert Ayler felt more relaxed in Sweden. Probably there were some people here who believed in him. It helped him get confident, even If not everyone in Sweden like what he was doing. One big event was in the spring of 1962, when the jazz club The Golden Circle opened, and the had really great acts like Cecil Taylor and Sunny Murray.” Sunny Murray played drums with Ayler throughout the 60’s. A bear of a man whose memories of Ayler often trailed off into happy, helpless laughter, he toured here last month fronting a trio including two British musicians, the saxophonist Tony Bevan and the double bass player John Edwards. At the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, London, the response to their opening set, and the demographic diversity of the crowd, would have convinced Ayler that the people did, finally, understand. Does it seem strange to Sunny Murray that the saxophonist should leave his native land, only to discover the kindred spirits of the American avant-garde in far from home in Sweden.

“No not really,” he says, sat at the side of the stage, rolling a cigarette, “I haven’t figured out yet how me and Cecil Taylor ended up in Sweden, but I first met Albert when he came over to the club, wearing a very handsome cap, dressed very nice in his leather suit. He said he had been playing there in Sweden since he left the army. He said he had been playing his music alone in the forest by himself. Said he had been doing that a year. He asked if he could play with us. Back then Cecil was rather… not shy but… he just wasn’t outgoing at the time. It was such a weight having to carry The New Thing. Anyway, Cecil said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” So me and Jimmy Lyons, we said ‘Yeah, go home and get your horn.” So he split and he came back with this beautiful new sax, and that’s always a good sign, so we told him wait until we give him a signal,. Now, he hasn’t met Cecil yet see, and so then in the middle of the gig we said ‘come up’ and it was beautiful. Albert was like a magic streak of light in the air. So Cecil said to Albert “we’re going to Denmark, you can hang with the band if you want”.

“Albert was always saying ‘one day people will understand.’ He was right about that,” concludes Collin. “He would have been very glad that his music is more appreciated by a younger audience, coming to it from alternative rock. It’s not a real jazz thing anymore.”

The Ayler related gigs in the LJF are:
Friday 10 November: Marc Ribot’s Spiritual Unity, which features bassist Henry Grimes who played with Ayler, at the QEH, 7.30pm

Saturday 11 November: There’s a free afternoon gig inspired by Ayler by US saxophonist Caroline Kraabel at 4pm in QEH Front Room venue, after the film screening on the same day (where Grimes will be in conversation with journo Kevin Le Genre beforehand) at 2pm.