312 pages, paperback, with 8-page photo insert. 150 x 215mm.  The first extended biography of Albert Ayler ever published in English, and it took twenty years to build. Part life story, part case file, and long overdue. Richard Koloda is a musicologist and a practising lawyer, and both trades show on every page. He was a long-time friend of Donald Ayler, Albert's trumpet-playing younger brother; a consultant on Revenant Records' ten-CD retrospective Holy Ghost: Rare And Unissued Recordings (1962-70); a contributor to Kasper Collin's film My Name Is Albert Ayler. Crucially, he began interviewing the surviving witnesses while there were still witnesses to interview. Family, sidemen, club owners, critics, the men who were in the room. Almost none of that testimony existed on the record before this book.

Ayler's sound remains one of the strangest physical events in recorded music. A vibrato so wide it seems to buckle the note from inside. A body of tone that reaches the ear before the pitch does, closer to a brass band heard through a wall, or to a whole congregation singing at full lung, than to anything the tenor saxophone had previously been asked to do. And the themes themselves were almost provocatively plain: nursery tunes, gospel cadences, parade-ground marches, La Marseillaise. Melodies a child could whistle, set alight. Spiritual Unity, cut for ESP-Disk in July 1964 with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray, runs under half an hour and redrew the map.

Koloda follows the whole arc. A Cleveland childhood learning alto beside his father in church. Teenage summers on the road in Little Walter's band, where they called him Little Bird. Army service that carried him to France. The Scandinavian years of 1962-63, sitting in with Cecil Taylor in Copenhagen, playing standards to bewildered audiences. New York, ESP-Disk, the 1964 European tour with Don Cherry. The 1966 quintet with Donald and violinist Michel Samson, arguably the most volcanic band he ever led. The Impulse years. The eulogy he played at John Coltrane's funeral. The rhythm-and-blues swerve of New Grass that cost him much of his audience. The last concerts at the Fondation Maeght in July 1970. Throughout, Koloda quotes the contemporary reviews at length, hostile ones included, so you feel exactly how contested this music was as it happened.

Then the ending, which has swallowed everything else for fifty years. Ayler disappeared in early November 1970 and was found in the East River three weeks later, aged thirty-four. Around that fact grew a fog of invention: bodies tied to jukeboxes, mob debts, government plots. Koloda takes those stories apart one at a time, with dates, documents and named sources, and returns the story to something far sadder and far more ordinary - poverty, critical hostility, isolation, and the slow collapse of the brother he had put on the bandstand. The point of the book is not the river. The point is that clearing the mythology away finally lets the work stand where it belongs.

What stands there is enormous. Coltrane heard it and turned. Patti Smith and Lou Reed heard it. So did Peter Brötzmann, David S. Ware, Charles Gayle, Mats Gustafsson, John Zorn, Sonny Sharrock, Marc Ribot. Read alongside Val Wilmer's As Serious As Your Life, this is now the essential shelf for anyone trying to understand what happened to American music in the 1960s and who paid for it.

Starred review in Booklist, praised by The Wire, Downbeat and John Szwed, shortlisted for the Jazz Journalists Association book award. Definitive is a word to use sparingly. Here it fits. Get it.