Albert Ayler played a sound so abrasive that fellow musicians refused to share a stage with him and club audiences walked out, yet John Coltrane called him a prophet and said he had heard himself playing like Ayler in a dream. This episode traces the discipline behind the chaos: born in Cleveland in 1936 and raised in Shaker Heights, he was trained on alto saxophone by his father, played church duets, mastered bebop so completely that local players nicknamed him Little Bird, toured with Little Walter at 16, and absorbed the stomping tempos of military marching bands after joining the army in 1958 and switching to tenor in France.

Rejected by the Los Angeles and Cleveland scenes, Ayler went into exile in Scandinavia in 1962, connected with Cecil Taylor, and returned to New York in 1963. In 1964 his trio with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray rec ...