During his short, but volatile lifetime, free jazz pioneer Albert Ayler (1936-1970) never quite managed to fully convince the critics and purists that he was not just (to partly quote a Frank Zappa album title) ‘making a jazz noise here’, but was in fact blowing the real thing. Despite being championed by John Coltrane – who urged Bob Thiele to sign him to his Impulse! label, – Ayler’s music had always been classified as difficult.

It took John Fahey’s career overview CD box set Holy Ghost (released on his Revenant label in 2004) to remind the world of Ayler’s genius, but since then his music has been allowed to once more drift into obscurity – with only Norwegian label Ezz-Thetics and Jack White’s Third Man Records showing any recent Ayler reissue activity. So perhaps now is the time to reassess this under-exposed period in his turbulent career, namely the concert recordings he made during his three-day residency at artist Aimé Maeght’s Fondation Maeght festival that was held at Saint-Paul De Vence, France in 1970 under the curatorship of French music critic Daniel Caux. Released the following year as two memorial albums on Chantal D’Arcy’s Shandar imprint, these excerpts were (along with a further 2013 selection from ESP-Disk titled Live On The Riviera) the only available recordings of what were to be the saxophonist’s final performances.

Unlike those earlier releases, the 29 tracks that make up this impressive box set feature all the known recordings from this final series of concerts. Ably backed by fellow musicians Call Cobbs, Steve Tintweiss and Allen Blairman – and throughout by his wife Mary Maria Parks, whose audible presence (as compere, vocalist and accompanying soprano saxophonist) is as much a part of the proceedings as Ayler’s performance, the mood of the music veers from free jazz pulpit pounding and effervescent tune building, to roaring gusts of unfettered joy and boiling breath onslaughts. Featuring live renditions of pieces from his later Love Cry and Music Is The Healing Force Of The Universe albums, together with selections from earlier works such as Ghosts and Spirits Rejoice (both from 1965), these concerts are an immersion into Ayler’s various playing styles and an insight into his creative and personal belief system. The set also showcases the diversity of Ayler’s playing and where he was planning to take it – where gospel, soul, blues, New Orleans marching band music, early jazz, traditional African, calypso (and even playground song) shapes were dissected and rearranged to encompass a singular history of black music told through the medium of free jazz. Sonically reactivated and respectfully assembled here, Ayler’s last bow is indeed a revelation.