There is incessant philosophical contestation between musicians, those that insist on structure, technicality and capability versus those that disregard convention and exude music as a matter of being. While music never lacks convention, a form in itself socially bound, it is important to make the above dichotomous distinction. The latter are individuals who are often considered artists, flouting both the ennui and inhumanity imposed by modernity and the unintended limits placed by music and those engaged in its perpetuation. In other words, artists often comprehend convention and subtlely scream for identity within a mass that refuses to acknowledge itself.

While Albert Ayler was not much for subtlety, preferring to batter the listener with his interpretation of reality; his saxophone’s tonal wails seem an extension of his disorientation within such confining structure. To the foreign ear, Ayler’s funereal discomfiting marching band shrieks are capable of arousing sentiments of discomfort, even contempt. In fact, most purists usually talk about the purveyors of free jazz, as if they stole their art in a midnight raid. Yet art is never singularly owned. And here is another example of the societal bounds placed upon music, by its narrators, the critics, the journalists, the documentarians. Music never just is, it is shaped, its artist’s importance alternately conflated or diminished, genres created in hindsight, and its quality and cool contested. To use sociologist Rogers Brubaker’s terminology, it is coded and symbolically manifested. In hip hop there is constant debate about its cultural roots, a debate shaped by artists, like KRS-One and Nas, and films, including Style Wars and Wild Style, insisting on a single cultural essence, a debate in itself important yet inherently confining. History, in this sense becomes a layered narrative, wherein the griot’s discourse provides the symbols for the artist’s ‘authentic’ identity.

My Name is Albert Ayler resides within this realm of convention and comprehension. It also is an example of the process of reinterpretation that music passes through. The title is telling in itself. It is most assuredly a film about confines, about a man bound infinitely by his surroundings, by constraints of dominant race, even by the medium through which he attempted to speak. Despite his caterwauls, his incantations, he has largely remained silent, silenced by both critics and fans. He seemingly sought recognition at every instance and it is here that Ayler is not alone. Again by engaging in art that is consumed publicly, artists immediately clamor for recognition. Some did seem to recognize and appreciate Mr. Ayler: Coltrane, Sunny Murray, European audiences, even some at Impulse. Despite his acclaim in certain circles, he never received, in life, what he most truly desired, love from a populace that trenchantly rejected him. Yet the film produces the most bittersweet of ironies. In death, as sold out screenings at ICA in London confirm, Ayler has become an icon; his character iconoclastic and his music, as proto-punk as anything on Black Monk Time or Fun House, alive with urgency and creativity.

Narrated by Ayler himself through adeptly spliced interviews, the theatre transforms into a sepulcher, Ayler’s reedy voice directing his own funeral. In fact, death is a pervasive theme of the film. Suicide is presented as a philosophical rejection of societal absurdity and poverty, wherein Ayler, despite his claims of alien inspiration, is the sane subject of an insane reality. One of the most jarring scenes is of John Coltrane’s funeral, a noticeably distraught Ayler providing the harrowing, discordant eulogy. Horrified and disturbed faces are shown gazing reproachingly in Ayler’s direction. Yet the sounds emanating from Ayler’s horn, though incomprehensible and disfigured, exude love.

This is also a film about madness. Scenes of Donald Ayler’s obvious psychosis are juxtaposed upon the alien backdrop of Cleveland, Ohio. Scenes of Albert’s father rummaging through the graveyard unable to find his son’s grave precede interviews with visibly shaken former friends revisiting the obvious impact of Mr. Ayler’s presence. Albert’s father is a man riddled with grief, displaying a weariness that has finally succumbed to the repression of his son’s death, Donald’s illness, and his wife’s paralysis. Then there is Albert’s madness, a madness in personal relationships, personified by his awkward relationship with his brother Donald, and a madness in music. Mr. Ayler should have occupied a large proportion of Irwin Chusid’s, Songs in the Key of Z, since he was a man living without, manifesting free jazz in total isolation in Sweden, unaware of the form’s parallel invention by Ornette Coleman.

Yet everything in the film is not purely dour and thematic. It is also a warm portrayal of a group of human beings indomitably affected by Albert Ayler. Former drummer, Sunny Murray is a welcome presence throughout the film, breathing life and humor into the bleak subject. Bassist Gary Peacock is a sardonic character speaking with clarity of Albert’s madness. In the end, though, the film casts an uncomfortable shadow as suicide is made sensible. And even more disconcerting, as the credits litter the screen, it feels as if Albert Ayler never existed.