Scarboroughtownjazz

03/20/2020

“If you have to ask what Jazz is,
You’ll never know."

Louis Armstrong

03/19/2020

Sometimes it's hard to find the words. All we can do is embrace the thing we love the most. ♥️ Stay healthy and safe, Scarboroughtownjazzradio.com

09/29/2019

Montreal’s Mulit-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter Aliah Guerra visited the studios today and chatted with Misty.

09/22/2019

Healthy lifestyles with M&M on Scarboroughtownjazzradio.com

09/15/2019

07/04/2019

The website is taking shape, check it out.

Scarborough Town Jazz Radio is a 24/7 internet music station based in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. The station promotes and supports the community of Scarborough, Ontario and its environs by reaching out to the community with Jazz news, interviews and community events, as well as the promotion of l...

06/22/2019

There are important jazz musicians who are more talked and read about than actually heard, and one is Albert Ayler. He did not record extensively. He died at 34 in 1970. His music is so radical that it makes Ornette Coleman sound mellifluous. But John Coltrane asked that Ayler play at his funeral, and Don Cherry believed Ayler “carried the gift, the voice, a reflection of God.”

There are people bent on keeping Ayler from fading into the shadows of history. In 2004, the Revenant label released Holy Ghost, a nine-CD box of “rare and unissued recordings” accompanied by a 208-page hardbound book. And now there is a documentary film by 35-year-old Swedish director Kasper Collin, My Name Is Albert Ayler.

When Collin heard Ayler’s music for the first time in the early 1990s, and learned that Ayler had lived in Sweden for nine months in 1962, he went in search of him. Collin has a degree in film from Göteborg University, and his original concept was to make a short documentary about Ayler’s Scandinavian period. “I couldn’t find any written information so I sought out the people who had known Albert in Sweden,” Collin writes in an e-mail. “The fact that they remembered him so clearly, after almost 40 years, increased my fascination with this person. As a filmmaker I am passionately interested in memory. My film is made of different memories.”

Collin’s search for “different memories” eventually led him to the United States, to New York and to Ayler’s hometown of Cleveland, for interviews with his family and friends and lovers and fellow musicians. With support from the Swedish Film Institute and the Swedish national television station, SVT, his film became a 79-minute documentary of Ayler’s life.

It took Collin seven years to research, gather, assemble and edit his material. Because so little archival film footage of Ayler exists, he had to rely on other sources.