Albert Ayler是美国爵士的巨擘之一,也是具有争议性的人物。听过他的萨克斯风（次中音/中音）演奏后,余音袅绕不绝而耳。1936年Albert Ayler生于美国俄亥俄州的克利夫兰,父亲爱德华会演奏小提琴与次中音萨克斯风,有几分像似德克斯特戈登。Albert幼年时父亲鼓励他投入音乐,教导他学习中音萨克斯風,后来在当地音乐学校念书,接着就读约翰亚当斯高中,当时阿尔贝学会吹奏双簧管。25岁的Albert Ayler开始发展出自由爵士风格,生涩难懂的音乐自然找不到任何表演的工作机会, 1962年初他返回欧洲移居瑞典,首次录制唱片,之后开始了其音乐生涯。虽然Albert Ayler已离去,但重要的是流传下来的音乐。

Albert Ayler (July 13, 1936 – November 25, 1970) was an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist, singer and composer.

Ayler was among the most primal of the free jazz musicians of the 1960s; critic John Litweiler wrote that "never before or since has there been such naked aggression in jazz" He possessed a deep blistering tone—achieved by using the stiff plastic Fibrecane no. 4 reeds on his tenor saxophone—and used a broad, pathos-filled vibrato.

His trio and quartet records of 1964, like Spiritual Unity and The Hilversum Session, show him advancing the improvisational notions of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman into abstract realms where timbre, not harmony and melody, is the music's backbone. His ecstatic music of 1965 and 1966, like "Spirits Rejoice" and "Truth Is Marching In" has been compared by critics to the sound of a brass band, and involved simple, march-like themes which alternated with wild group improvisations and were regarded as retrieving jazz's pre-Louis Armstrong roots.