Albert Ayler was born July 13, 1936, in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in the suburb of Shaker Heights. His father, Edward Ayler, was a semiprofessional saxophonist and violinist who taught Albert alto saxophone and played duets with him in church, exposing him early to both swing and bebop records. Classmates at John Adams High School, from which he graduated in 1954, nicknamed him "Little Bird" for his command of Charlie Parker's vocabulary. At sixteen he was already playing R&B-style tenor with blues harmonica player Little Walter. He served in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1959, switching from alto to tenor saxophone in the regiment band; stationed in France, he played alongside future composer Harold Budd and was exposed firsthand to the martial band music whose melodies would later surface throughout his own compositions.

After his discharge Ayler settled in Sweden, leading Swedish and Danish radio ensembles through 1962-63 and, by his own account, jamming unpaid with Cecil Taylor's group over that winter, though no recording of that pairing survives. His earliest surviving recordings as a leader come from this period: a trio date cut October 25, 1962, in Stockholm (later issued as Something Different!!!!!!), and a standards session recorded January 14, 1963, in Copenhagen with bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (My Name Is Albert Ayler), both still closer to bebop than to what followed.

Ayler moved to New York in 1963 and, on February 24, 1964, cut two entirely different albums at Atlantic Studios in a single day with the same core trio of Henry Grimes (bass) and Sunny Murray (drums): Spirits (reissued as Witches & Devils), his first freely improvised New York date, and, with pianist Call Cobbs added, Goin' Home (later reissued as Swing Low Sweet Spiritual), a set of hymns and spirituals played with unusual directness. That June 14 he taped a live trio set at the Cellar Café with bassist Gary Peacock and Murray, released more than a decade later as Prophecy; three weeks after that, on July 10, 1964, the same trio recorded Spiritual Unity for the fledgling ESP-Disk label, the album now regarded as his definitive breakthrough. A week after that session he took part in New York Eye and Ear Control, the soundtrack to Michael Snow's experimental film, a collective date billed jointly to Ayler, trumpeter Don Cherry, alto saxophonist John Tchicai, trombonist Roswell Rudd, Peacock, and Murray. That fall he toured Europe with Cherry, recording the quartet date Ghosts (also issued as Vibrations) in Copenhagen on September 14, 1964, home to the earliest recording of "Ghosts," the folk-like theme that became his signature.

Through 1965 Ayler expanded his working band to include his younger brother, trumpeter Donald Ayler, and altoist Charles Tyler, documented on the one-sided live LP Bells (Town Hall, May 1, 1965) and the quintet date Spirits Rejoice (Judson Hall, September 23, 1965). In 1966, at John Coltrane's urging, Ayler signed to Impulse! Records, Coltrane's own label, and that December recorded the concert material issued as In Greenwich Village, plus a February 1967 studio track, "For John Coltrane," on which Ayler switched to alto. When Coltrane died that July, Ayler performed at his funeral at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Manhattan alongside Ornette Coleman. Love Cry, recorded that August with Donald, Call Cobbs, Alan Silva, and Milford Graves, was the last studio album to feature the two brothers together before Donald suffered a nervous breakdown later that year.

Ayler's final years brought a deliberate, controversial change in direction, driven partly by his relationship with singer and lyricist Mary Parks (also known as Mary Maria) and partly by producer Bob Thiele's push for commercial material. New Grass (1969) added a horn section, backing singers, and drummer Bernard Purdie's funk-inflected beat; Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe (recorded 1969, released 1970) pushed further into rock and gospel, featuring guitarist Henry Vestine of Canned Heat and drummer Muhammad Ali, the younger brother of drummer Rashied Ali. Both records drew sharp criticism from listeners who wanted a return to the ESP-Disk-era sound, and Ayler's 1969 open letter to the magazine The Cricket describing apocalyptic spiritual visions reflected a musician under increasing personal strain despite his by-then substantial critical reputation; he remained poor for essentially his entire career.

In July 1970 Ayler traveled to France to perform at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence with Cobbs, bassist Steve Tintweiss, drummer Allen Blairman, and Parks; the two resulting live albums, released as Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, Volume 1 and Volume 2, turned out to be his final recorded performances. He disappeared in New York on November 5, 1970, and his body was recovered from the East River at the foot of the Congress Street Pier in Brooklyn on November 25. His death was widely reported as a probable suicide, though the exact circumstances have never been fully established. He was 34.

Ayler discarded the harmonic vocabulary of bebop almost entirely, building his music instead from deliberately simple, folk-like material: children's songs, New Orleans-style marches, and Protestant hymns, all delivered through a huge, cracked, vocalized tone and a wide, pathos-heavy vibrato that critics likened to a human voice or a shout. His improvisations pushed into the saxophone's extreme upper and lower registers, relying on overblowing, microtonal bends, and screaming multiphonics rather than conventional swing rhythm, dismantling melody and harmony to explore the raw physical sound of the horn. John Coltrane championed him directly, signing him to Impulse! and crediting Ayler with reaching "an area that it seems I hadn't got to"; Coltrane's own final recordings with drummer Rashied Ali, including Meditations and the posthumously issued Stellar Regions, absorbed some of that influence. Ayler's reception in his own lifetime was sharply divided between critics and fans who heard a genuinely new spiritual language in jazz and others baffled or hostile toward it, especially once his late-1960s turn toward funk and rock arrangements split even his admirers. He placed himself and his two closest saxophone contemporaries in explicitly spiritual terms, reportedly describing the three as "Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost" - a line Pharoah Sanders himself repeated for the rest of his life. Ayler's influence proved much longer-lived than his commercial fortunes: saxophonists including Charles Gayle, Peter Brötzmann, David S. Ware, and Ken Vandermark all built directly on his vocabulary, and his "wild sound," in the words of one later assessment, anticipated elements of noise and hardcore rock decades before those genres existed.