At John Coltrane's funeral service in 1967, Donald Ayler stood on a balcony beside his saxophonist brother and played a spine-chilling lament. Wildly flagging his trumpet valves and swaying backwards and forwards, he seemed to scream through the instrument. Forty years later, that music still has the power to stun and dismay.
Ayler, who has died from a heart attack aged 65, was the younger brother of Albert Ayler, one of the most charismatic musicians in jazz. If it was his fate to be perpetually in the shadow of the music's last great innovator, he made his contribution through jagged and unsettling trumpet work, heard on their recordings for Impulse and the radical ESP label, and with a statement that is a stepping stone to appreciating free jazz. "Try to move your imagination towards the sound," he advised critic Nat Hentoff. "Follow the sound, the pitches, the colours".
More news: Red Lobster Crab Alfredo RecipeDonald started out as a saxophonist, but choosing another instrument was inevitable.