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Film: Documentary My Name Is Albert Ayler (2005)

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Though documentaries about cult musicians are a dime a dozen, Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin's documentary portrait of free-jazz genius Albert Ayler is still cause for celebration. When the Ohio-born tenor saxophonist first emerged in Stockholm in 1962, his wailing, unmoored invocations of spiritual music caught the jazz world off-guard. John Coltrane specifically requested that Ayler play at his funeral, and some of that legendary performance is shown here, along with many other archival pearls. Before his untimely death in 1970, Ayler remarked about his music, "If people don't like it now, they will." As it turns out, that wasn't so much egotism as a simple statement of fact.

– Max Goldberg

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