Albert Ayler recorded his first album in 1962 and his last in 1970. His records were issued by a number of small, independent labels, several of which are no longer in existence. His only association with a major label, Impulse, produced 6 albums which varied vastly in quality. After his death a number of new records were released, mostly live concert recordings.

One of my main reasons for constructing this site was to make some sense of Albert Ayler’s discography. Even the records released during his lifetime often appeared under different titles as the rights to the material drifted round the world. Since his death and with the advent of the CD, the situation has become even more confused.

The discography assigns a page to each recording, except in cases where it seemed sensible to group albums from the same source together. Of course there are some inconsistencies in this approach (for example with the appearance in 2005 of the first Fondation Maeght concert on the ESP label it seemed right to give it a separate page, whereas the original Italian bootleg of the same material had previously been an addition on the Nuits de la Fondation Maeght page) but hopefully my decisions will not be too confusing. Albums appear in the order in which they were recorded, rather than released, apart from the Revenant box set which (since it includes both the first and last known recordings) I've placed in the final spot. Occasionally I have dipped my toe in the murky waters of the mistitling of tracks, but in the main I've just listed what's on the sleeve, since I value my sanity.

The Complete List page gives the main details of every Ayler album released so far and is available to download as a zipped text file. There is also a page for the Unreleased Recordings - largely decimated in 2004 by the Revenant box set - and a What's Available page, which is just meant as a rough guide to what's currently in the catalogue.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who has helped me to construct this discography, particularly Clive Buttle and George Scala, and of course Jeff Schwartz, whose biography of Ayler provided my original template. If you spot any omissions or can provide pictures of missing sleeves, please let me know.

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