Albert Ayler pushed the tenor saxophone into raw, vocal-like shrieks and folk-simple hymn melodies, arriving at a sound so far outside conventional harmony that even fellow avant-gardists needed time to catch up. Working New York's free-jazz scene alongside Don Cherry, Gary Peacock, and Sunny Murray in the mid-1960s, his 1964 album Spiritual Unity — anchored by “Ghosts” — became a touchstone for the next wave of searching, spiritually charged saxophonists, Pharoah Sanders among them. Ayler summed up his own place in that lineage: “Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost.”

the sound in question

1964

GhostsAlbert Ayler