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My Name is Albert Ayler

My Name is Albert Ayler

(My Name is Albert Ayler), Kasper Collin / ŠVÉ, 2005
original version / English & Czech subtitles, 79 min

Acclaimed by Jazz Times as "one of the most starkly beautiful and moving documentaries ever made about a jazz musician" and one of the most rewarding documentaries on free jazz and its inherent dynamic to appear in years. With his roots in the cry of the blues and the shout of gospel, a post-Coltrane sensibility and a deeply felt sense of spirituality, Ayler can almost stand as an emblematic figure of the entire movement. A product of the R&B road bands of the 1950s, Ayler relocated to Europe and developed a hard, unforgiving tone on the alto saxophone and a radical take on the traditional spiritual, neither of which was ever properly understood in his lifetime. Collin's film approximates this intensity, alternating beauty with sadness.