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 recorded Spiritual Unity, the first jazz release on ESP-Disk. The hosts explain the mechanics: no piano, a focus on timbre, stiff Fibracane number four reeds, overblowing, multiphonics and microtones. Coltrane became mentor, confidant and financial supporter, got him signed to Impulse in 1966, and requested that Ayler play at his 1967 funeral. What followed was the label-pressured 1968 album New Grass with vocals and lyrics by Mary Maria Parks, the alienation of every audience, guilt over brother Donald’s 1967 breakdown, apocalyptic visions and an open letter to The Cricket, walking New York in a fur coat and Vaseline in summer heat, a brief 1970 return to France, and his body found in the East River on November 25, 1970, at age 34, presumed a suicide.

• Gospel vibrato, R and B honking and military marches fused into one overwhelming language
• Why removing the piano freed Ayler to explore the physical texture of sound
• The Coltrane relationship, the Impulse signing and the funeral performance
• New Grass as sellout or spiritual evolution, and why it alienated everyone
• How a misunderstood outcast became a blueprint for experimental rock, noise and hardcore punk