The radical tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler (1936-1970) was the most extreme of all the major avantgarde jazz musicians of the free jazz era. His atonal shrieks and cries made even the furthest-out music of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane sound conservative. John Tynan accused Coltrane and Eric Dolphy of playing “anti-jazz,” but the term applies much more readily to Ayler, whose playing could even be called “anti-music.” Ayler’s work was bereft of any conventional definition of pitch and meter. His methodology seemed to trash the entire history of jazz – even all of music, Western or otherwise – that had come before, and to start completely from scratch.

Free jazz historian John Litweiller, in “The Freedom Principle,” his 1984 history of the movement, wrote this: “Before Ayler musicians accepted that music was founded in rhythm and scales. No, said Ayler, music begins with sound itself, and from there you create what relationships you can without the baggage of theory.” In an interview on the new nine-CD box set dedicated to his work, “Holy Ghost” (Revenant RVN 213), Ayler speaks of practicing scales faster and faster until he reached the point that he was able to incorporate all the notes of a scale into one single sound. That’s a concise description of Ayler’s approach: He was trying to play every sound ever made by man or even by nature – all at once.

Elsewhere on “Holy Ghost” – the most comprehensive retrospective of Ayler’s career we can reasonably expect – Ayler describes his own playing as “energy music.” He contrasts this with the music of Coltrane and his disciples, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, which he characterizes as “space bebop.” But the new box set and, particular, its two discs of interviews, serve to ground Ayler in the actual, re-connecting Ayler once again to the traditions that he worked so hard to sever himself from. Listening to Ayler’s music itself, it’s hard to imagine him fitting into any kind of larger picture, but “Holy Ghost” places him in a very specific historical context.

Inside the box we find, in addition to the nine CDs (and one 10-minute bonus disc), a pocket-sized portrait of the 12-year-old Ayler playing his alto saxophone (printed in its original form as a snapshot you could stick in your wallet) a reproduction of a radical African-American arts journal from 1969, with writings by Amiri Baraka and Ayler, miniature prints of posters, ads, and even of a hand-written note from Ayler. There’s also a pressed artificial flower, a reference to David Murray’s dedicatory piece, “Flowers for Albert.”

John Coltrane’s few writings were concerned with spiritual matters, and in public Mr. Coleman generally expounds upon philosophy of art and life. Ayler, on the other hand, speaks on these recordings in an incredibly down-to-earth manner about his band, his career, his gigs, his tunes, and his influences. (Though some of his statements are a little bizarre, such as his suggestion that both Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra copied ideas from him.) Ayler in one interview says he refuses to think of his music as being “ahead of its time” (“I’d be lying to myself” he says). Yet the story this box set tells is an important piece of jazz history, a suggestion of how we will come to see Ayler and his colleagues in the context of the wider history of jazz.

The major thing that allies Ayler with any kind of improvised musical tradition is his choice of a saxophone as his instrument and his backdrop of trumpet, bass, and drums. At first listen, his music sounds like pure chaos, the unrestricted outpourings of a complete and utter musical primitive. Yet it’s clear Ayler was no primitive but someone who knew exactly what he was doing, who was firmly in command of every minute nuance of his shrieks and geshrays. His mature timbre comes closest in sound to the tone Sonny Rollins was using during his own avant-garde phase.

In fact, the 208-page (and full-color) hardcover book in the box tells us Ayler arrived at his music after a long evolution in which he immersed himself in virtually every type of music associated with the saxophone. He listened to Benny Goodman on the radio as a toddler. He and his father played saxophone duets on religious music in their native Cleveland. He was fascinated by blues-based saxophone honkers and shouters like Illinois Jacquet. He even toured with chitlins-circuit star Little Walter.

Ayler also played bop and standards. “Holy Ghost” opens in 1962 with three cuts of Ayler playing jazz standards with the quintet of Swedish guitarist Herbert Katz; his tone echoes both Rollins (especially on the latter’s “Sonnymoon For Two”) and Coltrane. Here, Ayler adheres to the traditional trajectory of starting “inside” with a straight tone and recognizable melody, then getting gradually further and further “outside” of the melody and changes. And “Holy Ghost” closes with two items even odder, earlier and rarer in the Ayler canon – Private Ayler playing in the sax section with an Army band in France in 1960 on Jack Lawrence’s “Tenderly” and Les Brown’s “Leap Frog.”

On much of his mature music, Ayler had his ensembles play like the most rudimentary Salvation Army band imaginable, and he showed a predilection for the spiritual and the supernatural: “Ghosts,” “Witches and Devils,” “Spirits Rejoice,” “Saints.” He plays like he’s speaking in tongues, ignoring the conventions of communication between men and expressing himself in a language understood only by God. Yet Ayler conforms to Charles Mingus’s dictum that “Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.”

Free jazz arrived at the end of an evolution. Swing was more complicated than Dixieland, bebop was more abstract and complex than swing. Was free jazz more complicated than modern jazz? Not necessarily – when you finally find the theme in Ayler’s music, it is often the most easily hummable march or basic calypso, themes that sound like “Amazing Grace” or “Goin’ Home.” When he screams out one of his primal love cries, even though he seems to be hitting two notes at once, there’s no mistaking what he’s trying to say.

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All nine-and-a-half CDs in “Holy Ghost” consist of music that has never before been legitimately issued. Yet much of it is listed in the newest edition of Tom Lord’s “Jazz Discography.” I first wrote about the original CDROM edition of this work two years ago, and since then a new version (5.0) has been released. It is a considerable improvement over the original: More than 9,000 sessions have been added (including not only new artists and releases but revisions of many of the more legendarily prolific figures like Benny Goodman). And the interface has been upgraded: Not only can I search for the song title “Spirits” in Ayler’s discography, I can look for any occurrence of the word, as in “Spirits Rejoice” and “Spiritual Unity.” “The Jazz Discography” is an essential reference for any remotely serious jazz collector.